Alternative to "gender affirming care."

[Everythingtastesbetterwithcheese]

I was on a discussion recently in which a poster said she didn't consider the double mastectomy a young woman had gone through in order to transition to a man, as radical surgery, claiming it was only "gender affirming care" and no different to a woman having lip fillers. This made me think the language we are using is minimising the actual brutality of the surgery and it feels like using the word care only has positive connotations when I think a lot of the treatment is negative.
What other term can I use instead of gender affirming care which is more realistic to what it actually is?

Breast amputation.

Blimey. Just blimey.

I bet she's never watched any of those programmes about surgery. As you say, it's brutal and absolutely removed from an injection of Polyfilla. And that's without the difference between a procedure which can change your reproductive and child care possibilities.

It's like saying a henna tattoo is akin to a double leg amputation.

Radical surgical body modifications.

Amputation for mental health reasons, it is so awful it cannot be given a slip of the tongue sound bite, a kind of to gender affirming care.

@ScrollingLeaves Yep thats a good one.

I sometimes watch botched as i am fascinated by this culture we live in where you cannot look normal. As in what you were born with.

it seems logical to me that the plastic surgery industry would see that “gender dysphoria” would be a business opportunity.

As is female/ male insecurities about being less than perfect visually.

I saw a post yesterday about a woman who posted a photo of herself so we could all tell her how young she looked it was obvious she had Botox.

And then today there was a post about Julia Goodyer (Bet lynch) who has dementia and looked very old and frail.

The poster did not put the picture up out of respect, I say to that, what the fuck is wrong with looking old.

Should we hide old people away because they are ugly in this world we live in?

My point is that gender dysphoria in women is not that far away from the ideology of modern beauty.

Fuck it all

Having both of your breasts cut off and destroyed because you don't like the look of them, or indeed their very existence. The euphemism for this savagery is the term "top surgery".

When I was training to be a nurse in the 1980s, I attended a lecture by a well-known plastic surgeon, who was very angry about skin cancer and how people brought it upon themselves by holidaying in hot places, sunbathing and spending their whole time drunk and dehydrated, but who had no feelings at all for people undergoing liposuction, which he referred to as "money for old jam". I think that the language employed in the casual objectification involved when wishing to have bits of yourself removed - or added - in order to make yourself more beautiful or more desirable or happier, creates a vacuum, in which hatred of your body and attachment to unattainable perfection becomes apparently normal. Or perhaps just acceptable. It isn't acceptable. It is not normal. However much you dress it up or down with language, it is mutilation in the name of fashion.

Well said @Bannedontherun.

This has come up on other threads.

That thanks to the much more public acknowledgement of plastic surgery, liposuction etc., but also I think the way in which the Olympics showed people with disabilities with specialy designed limbs for whatever sport, has had a radical change in how people see bodies.

So for those who have accepted as ordinary and "logical" to have body modification, transgender surgery is just part of that outlook. They aren't looking at it through the lens of the issue of "changing" someone's sex.

So within my life time body modification has gone from something if not taboo not talked about, to something that is discussed openly, and even paraded.

I actually find elderly people to have the most beautiful faces - that is, they have character, interest, movement, life, and years written on them. Their beauty isn’t superficial, but it can be seen in every line.

Unnecessary cosmetic surgery

self harm

I've seen links posted on here to adverts for surgery for "your true self", being surgery to change the appearance of sex or become androgynous, and it was a clear parallel to the ads for breast enlargement, facelifts, BBL and all the rest, which I suppose can also be seen as gender affirming.

I agree. And then there are the moments when you suddenly see a flash of what they looked like when they were young.

OP You are not alone. Sadly these discussions have been happening on MN for years. The words ‘top surgery’ or ‘bottom surgery’ hides the brutality of these procedures.

I think it is so important to keep using the surgery’s terminology where possible. But I also describe them, similarly to Scrollingleaves, as extreme body modifications.

Extreme body modifications to fulfill philosophical belief. There is no physical medical necessity. And what other purely cosmetic surgeries on healthy tissue is undertaken for philosophical belief?

Even FFS facial feminisation surgery requires the entire face to be peeled off the skull! All these surgeries are brutal and yet dismissed with euphemism.

I also find it most concerning the number of posters who dismiss these extreme body modifications with a reference to low regret rates. It is based on falsehood.

From what I have seen, some posters and activist influences have compared it to knee replacement. A procedure that people in extreme pain undertake understanding the severe ramifications but do it to be able to have mobility. However, that is also taking a surgery for a physical injury or wear and comparing it to surgeries being done on healthy bodies.

Most often turning that healthy body into one requiring on going medical attention in the future.

Plus, there is no where near enough long term follow up data on the regret data for these elective surgical modifications. Instead, we see euphoric social media content. Children see that euphoric social media content. Even the ads with female bodies bearing (and baring) double mastectomy scars in glamour shots.

The reality of dealing with scar tissue is glossed over.

The term Gender Affirming Care is a mantra like phrase now. It does have the positive evocative reaction. Due to the terms affirming and care.

Just like ‘hormone treatment’ is emotively described as therapy. And using HRT when the reality is that HRT generally brings to mind replacing hormones that the body produced or should have produced when working optimally for that person. No male person requires the level of estrogen and progesterone that they euphemistically call HRT. No female person requires their testosterone ‘replaced’ at those levels. That is not replacing. That is complete modification.

With the growing evidence that it can be life shortening too.

All based on a philosophical belief.

The thing is if you've never experienced something you don't know what you've lost.

Being left with a large area of your body that feels numb at best and suffers scar pain is bad enough but the loss of sexual sensation is completely glossed over. A young person wouldn't know that they've completely lost the ability to experience that. I don't know if this is also a risk with breast augmentation?

Then there's foreclosing in the ability to breastfeed etc.

I hate that the definition of "gender affirming care" has become another ridiculous "umbrella term" for a mixture of cosmetic surgery (in the traditional sense), medically-necessary reconstruction surgery and radical mody modification in pursuit of the mystical gender identity.

The purpose, as always with gender ideology, is to twist the language and soften boundaries so it becomes difficult to resist their demands.

But resist it we must. Reconstruction surgery isn't "gender affirming" in the same way thay cosmetic surgery is; it's only "gender affirming" because the trans privileges activists are pretending that it means something different.

Sort of relevant to this topic, in the CASS Review, Recommendation 25 was for the NHS to set up a pathway for detransitioners. It appears they have started asking for input from people who have detransitioned or are considering it.

https://x.com/transgendertrd/status/1907521960818659443?s=46&t=ZX_bLozRqm8etdGICMcAvA

Double mastectomy for no medical reason
Self harm on a huge irreversible scale

Incomparable with lip fillers - nothing is removed

That is an important first step - if this could be publicised more widely.

Just call it an elective double mastectomy and say there's no such thing as gender affirming surgery or medical treatment because the body is physical and gender is imaginary metaphysical.

If someone can be a woman whilst having a penis, it's not necessary to have your breasts removed in order to be a man, is it?

Sex and gender are not the same thing, as these people keep telling us.

Ask your friend why over 90% of trans women keep their male genitalia so they can continue to have heterosexual sex with women, and see no conflict between this and identifying as a woman, but trans men and increasing numbers of "non binary people" feel that they need an elective double mastectomy in order to affirm their gender identity.

What has been interesting is that when we ask male posters who have claimed to have transgender identities about the lack of symmetry and the gender identity movement’s discrimination against female people, they claim that female people should be free to choose what they want.

Even when it is pointed out that the ‘treatments’ are so much more brutal on female bodies. They show in their posting that they understand this but cannot support limiting any treatment because they understand that if that were to happen, if open discussion was to be had, those male people could limit male treatment options. They know. But they need female people to not discuss the reality of their treatments on their bodies.

I remember reading disclosures years ago that female people were told to not discuss their health complications by their supposed support groups.

From mastectomy scars to ovary torsion and atrophy requiring hysterectomy to testosterone impacts. And has anyone seen studies that disprove the correlation between very early onset dementia with early hysterectomy?

I recently read an interview with a transman who had had 'top' but not 'bottom' surgery and was happily sexually partnered. She said that she found the sexual sensations originating in her breasts really unpleasant and wanted rid of them. Not sure what to make of this! But at least she knew what she was going to be missing. So strange.

This is an important point, and belies much of the "trans experience". It's not that women are happier to be men, it's that they are uncomfortable with the sexed parts of their body.

In this sense, gender dysphoria is no different to body integrity disorder, anxiety disorders, anorexia etc. and I've never seen a good reason why it's distingushed as a separate illness with a different "treatment" pathway.

I think that there is this over reliance on the 'trans experience' being an experience of having these extreme body modifications. That people cannot be 'trans' without the sacrifice.

I mean, how many posters do we see posting on MN where they say 'well if they have made such a commitment that they have had the surgery then of course they can enter female single sex spaces'. Like it is some kind of twisted reward for undergoing horrific surgeries. But the people who say that don't seem to understand what they are inadvertently supporting. And they call it 'being kind'.