NY Times article on binding

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Apologies if already posted and I missed it, but couldn't see it below:

www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/well/transgender-teens-binders.html

That's an excellent article with some thoughtful comments underneath. Thank you OP.

The ending, I thought, was particularly chilling:

'But binder use in teenagers may become a thing of the past. Ms. Staas, the Arizona teacher, said that several members of her group take hormone blockers to prevent developing female sex characteristics.

Those youths, she wrote in an email, “will not develop breast tissue and therefore will not have a need to bind their chests.”'

There's a whole other article there waiting to be written.

Before I read the article, I read about it on Jezebel (jezebel.com/at-the-new-york-times-objectivity-means-quoting-one-tr-1835150495)
Apparently, you can't discuss the danger of something at all without a wide ranging discussion about feelings.

Funnily enough I don't remember an in depth discussion of the benefits of breast implants to some womens mental health during the PIP implant scandal. It was about their health and was reported as a health issue not delving into the reasons women had the surgery for the most part.

I don't understand how can you claim to care about the health of a group if you can't discuss the problems associated with a particular practice objectively.

I came to the article from this thread. Moving comments:

twitter.com/dogcalledbambi/status/1134576499556782081

The comments below the NY Times article certainly suggested a change in thought on the other side of the Atlantic...

“Binding is not benign,” Ms. Jontry said. “It encourages the idea that people’s distress and anger and trauma should be turned inward toward their own bodies instead of outward toward the culture that feels oppressive to them.”
This sums up the problem for me, it seems so obvious, why do so many not get it?

Some really interesting comments under the article - I thought this one was thought-provoking and a perspective I hadn't come across before:

"History is replete with torture and deformation instruments for women, variously labeled as "fashion," "choice," and now, much more bizarrely, as therapeutic devices. Some psychotherapists believe gender dysphoria and transition represent a desire for suicide without death, killing the former person and changing into a new one through changing "gender." This rings true to me as a psychotherapist, and it implies that these individuals need psychotherapy for a long time before medical intervention is considered."

I was so glad to see Brie Jontry quoted. She and 4thWaveNow are fighting the good fight on this side of the Atlantic, trying to protect young people, and until now have gotten very little press coverage.

It is telling, though, that after reams of articles gushing over the trans experience, the first skeptical eye the NYT casts at transition focuses on the transmasculine and not the transfeminine.

As always, it’s possible women are doing gender (aka sex-role stereotype)

Men, not so much.

Doing gender wrong, that should say.

That's a deeply uncomfortable article to read. It keeps presenting things as normal, acceptable, reasonable, then drops in a tiny seed of doubt. But it never expands on that seed of doubt.

a “gender-affirmative care model,” where providers convey that “variations in gender identity and expression are normal aspects of human diversity.”

This makes the affirmative care model seem totally reasonable, no different to watchful waiting.

JellySlice

I can see why you'd say that, but I think it may have hit exactly the right tone. I am not sure I've ever seen an article of that type in a left paper that had comments that were so positive, and not only positive but really suggested it hit on questions that people were really concerned about.

Sometimes its better not to say to much, and let people take the next step themselves.

I agree, I thought for the NYT, it was quite a departure from what they usually write and far more GC-leaning than usual. And the comments were overwhelmingly GC.