Janice Turner nails it again - girls and their breasts

[JellySaurus]

I had an almost visceral reaction to this article. It resonated so strongly with my experiences as a physically developing teenager, that I started second-guessing myself: am I projecting my emotions into others? But then I realised that, no, my feelings about the way the trans train destroys girls are not projections, not prejudices. They are based on the realities of developing into a woman in a society with a toxic view of what being a woman entails. A lived experience shared with so many other girls. 'Shared'..maybe 'survived' would be more appropriate.

[[https://archive.ph/mWoLx Time to change the world, not girls’ bodies
Rather than a charity that pushes insecure teens towards breast surgery we need a movement celebrating young women]]

Sorry I can’t find the article. Just a comment that anyone who advocates cutting young girls breasts off should be put in jail and the key thrown away

@Cillery the link is in the OP, though not clickable. Here it is again. Takes me to the full article.
archive.ph/mWoLx

It's also shared in the Mermaid thread but here is another share token for it:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fba8aeca-40f3-11ed-b24d-96120f17513d?shareToken=ad6ea308105c0b12ca7072fe8efba5c6

That's a really excellent piece of writing. The combination of those two articles - Lucy with the investigation and Janice with her personal perspective - is so powerful. Janice is so good at laying out what being a teenage girl feels like.

Incidentally, I was reading this list of criteria from a study on girls experiencing chest (sic) dysphoria in a series of tweets from Jesse singal.

I felt every single one of those when I first got breasts. I hated them. Couldn't look at them, developed a stoop (which I still have) in an attempt to hide them.

They are pathologising normal teenage girl development growing up in a porn soaked society which fetishes school girls and breasts.

Thread:

twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1575280120876748807?s=21&t=6wxyVzlNSbxD7Zsl8KwNZw

Yes, @JellySaurus that resonates strongly with me too.

I can remember trying a minimiser bra when I was a teenager, because I was very shy and didn't like the attention that having big breasts brings, but quickly realised how uncomfortable it was.

It makes me sad to think I might have been drawn to being trans if I was a teenager now, given that I was still had a long way to go in growing up and I learnt to be totally happy with my body and womanness.

It is indeed the world that needs to change, and not the breasts.

You shouldn’t wear one during exercise: indeed trans lobby groups advise schools to excuse girls who bind from games.

And this is so sad. If these girls identify as male, then this is taking them further and further away from the kind of freedom men and boys have to participate in physical activities, and closer towards and stereotypically fragile feminine. It's not about identifying as male, at all, is it? It's about running away from being female.

brilliant article

Very insightful. This comment resonated:

Boob jobs and “top surgery” are both responses to the commodification of the female body: the former tries to win the game, the latter permanently opts out

A friend is going through this with her autistic daughter. Two years ago they fought to get their depressed trans-identified* child onto blockers only to see her significantly worsen on them. Her perfectly normal teen body has ballooned on the blockers increasing her shame to the point she no longer leaves the house. Her education has been destroyed. She has regular skin infections from her binder which she sleeps in because they cannot physically make her remove it. My initially very supportive friend has now come to the realisation that the blockers have worsened both her mental health and her dysphoria, but so long as she continues to say the right things at appointments, they cannot make her discontinue them.

*she identifies as 'trans' not as a boy/girl and uses she/they pronouns, I'm not being disrespectful

Its all just more sabotage. Causing the very problems they can then sell you the solution too.

2 things that are vital for physical and mental health and easily and cheaply available or even free. Fresh air/sun and Exercise.

And 2 things advised against. Where will these girls be when their family goes to walk the dog by the lake.. inside online with all the other girls now home alone in their rooms as their families walk dogs or go for a picnic or take their toddlers to the park.

Its intentional. And if a boyfriend or girlfriend encouraged that kind of isolation and reclusivness we'd tell our girls to dump their controlling groomy arses.

Superb article. Janice Turner writes clearly and with hard logic about the abuse perpetrated under the guise of “being kind”.

Very good article.

They are pathologising normal teenage girl development growing up in a porn soaked society which fetishes school girls and breasts

I posted this on another thread but I’m going to self-indulge and repost here.

How many companies make binders now compared to 20 years ago?

It comes down to this fundamental element of the whole thing: no one on the gender ideology side is remotely concerned as to WHY there are so many more girls these days wanting to bind. Why are so many girls seeking this out? Even if binding wasn’t harmful - and to be clear, it is - the lack of concern from gender ideologists about the fact thousands of girls across the western world are looking into binding shows at best a lack of intellectual curiosity and at worst, a gleeful declaration at the acquisition of more members into its ideology.

It’s sickening to me. Gender ideologists defend binding, facilitate binding, don’t care that so many more girls are binding, and don’t show any inclination to help girls stop binding apart from telling them mastectomy is the answer. They say they care about “trans” kids? Then why not help them not damage themselves? It’s like they want these girls to bind, to demonstrate the validity of the whole narrative.

The reaction to this story says it all. It’s a truly evil ideology.

That article actually brought tears to my eyes. Thank you Janice. Every word is right.

Government (ha, yes, I know) has to start joining the dots between crazes like this and what adults are finally waking up to about the way social media sites are pushing coercive, harmful narratives about the self, mental health issues and the body at vulnerable teenagers.

That poor kid. That really makes me want to cry 😢

How is that remotely a better outcome?

Yes this really struck me too. We already know that so many young women and girls often don't participate in sport and games when they're on their period, this is just taking them even further from that freedom as you say, from feeling comfortable in their bodies.

It's all part of the grooming pattern - isolate children from their families, their communities and their bodies. With no responsible adults to protect them with tough love, with no other community, especially sport and hobbies, you have an isolated child, online and vulnerable to the first predator who comes along.

And yet (adult) women’s professional and amateur team sports culture (though underfunded, underpaid and overlooked relative to mens’ pro and amateur sports) has often been a place where openly lesbian women can flourish.
And regardless of who we fancy- all humans- including women obviously- need to keep ourselves exercised to be healthy. Deterring women and girls from team sports by social pressure is a disgusting thing to do. Yet it’s completely normalised. Making them feel that their bodies are wrong somehow when they exercise, is completely normalised. It’s so fucked up.

What sports can they play as " boys " with cracked ribs and scar tissue from the mastectomy inhibiting the ability to have full mobility in your arms I wonder.

What problem has been solved...

Brilliant writer.

She is a true champion of the cause.

I punch the air after every paragraph.

Puberty is physically tough for a girl: growing breasts hurt, periods hurt. Despite this, many are intrigued by, and even enjoy, their changing bodies. Posing in front of the bedroom mirror, watching how their body moves, discovering themselves in a new way, trying on bikinis and dresses, happily primping and preening. You would be forgiven for thinking that they love their femininity.

But for many girls none of this leaves the bedroom. Outside the bedroom it's all jeans and hoodies, with hair either tied back or hanging forward. Proud, upright carriage replaced by slouchy stoop or tense, small movements.

What triggers this rejection of something they secretly feel good about? Society.

Yes, Jelly. I guess for a lot of girls, you want to be thought of as sexually attractive, but not too attractive. You want attention, but not too much. And that's a really hard line to tread.

And my own experience was that as soon as you do anything or wear anything that remotely displays your womany body, there are men and boys who treat that as an invitation to harass you, as if you're asking for it simply by having the temerity to have big breasts. I definitely spent my teens in very baggy clothes.

That was another thing that struck me about the article - this idea that anyone can just get a boob job, and this will reflect how they feel about their body. If that notion grows it strengthens the mental link some men make between "woman/girl has big breasts" = "she's sexually up for it".

I guess what I'm saying is that a teenage girl can make a choice whether to wear clothes that are more or less "sexy", but the body she has is the body she has, and inhabiting that comfortably does not indicate a choice about how she presents herself to men. I think some men don't get that.

And there we are back to this idea of women's bodies as costumes...

I don't think it's even about their own sense of their sexual attractiveness. I think that before they've had a chance to emotionally grow into their new bodies, they've been subjected to society's prejudices and male gazes. Society may have defined them as sexual beings before they have even begun to have sexual feelings.

Yes, I think you're bang on there, Jelly