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Time to change the world, not girls’ bodies
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Rather than a charity that pushes insecure teens towards breast surgery we need a movement celebrating young women
Janice Turner
Friday September 30 2022, 9.00pm BST, The Times
Female puberty is like being bundled into a runaway car. Let’s put aside periods, the shock of blood, the tsunami of emotions. Let’s concentrate on a girl of 12 or so, who until now has wandered the world thinking little about her body, suddenly acquiring breasts.
Ownership of these most fetishised organs changes everything. It brings self-doubt: how do I compare with girls in my class? (Or on TikTok or Pornhub.) It attracts a new, wolfish attention: cars slow, boys snigger, adult men stare. It can feel powerful but also terrifying, and those things on your chest, which jiggle during games, prompt smutty jokes, may give you backache or a sense of inadequacy, cannot be escaped.
Of course generations of girls have tried. They wore baggy clothes or became goths, they starved themselves until their chests returned to bone. But now there’s another route, one that is applauded as noble, progressive and brave, although it is irreversible, painful, risky and — if you stand back for one second to think about it — utterly obscene. Girls can get their breasts cut off.
There is a children’s charity that is normalising this right now: one which received £500,000 from the Lottery Fund, has profitable partnerships with Starbucks and Wagamama, and endorsements from Prince Harry and Emma Watson. Mermaids might not insert the scalpel but it sets girls on course to the clinic.
This week — finally — the charity commission announced it will investigate Mermaids’ “approach to safeguarding young people” over its practice of covertly sending out chest binders to girls as young as 13 without parental consent.
A binder is a spandex corset that compresses the breasts along with the ribs and lungs. It’s hard to breathe in a binder: you feel dizzy, get headaches. You shouldn’t wear one during exercise: indeed trans lobby groups advise schools to excuse girls who bind from games. Binders damage developing breast tissue, cause chafing, skin infection, muscle wastage and even fractured ribs. Yet on the Mermaids chat room a parent discusses buying one for her anxious 11-year-old with only breast buds.
Breast ironing, performed in some African countries to make a girl look too young to be married off, is classed as child abuse in Britain and a criminal act. Yet breast binding, which gives a similar androgynous, prepubescent silhouette, is not.
For many girls binding is a passing craze, discovered via friends or YouTube influencers. (It recalls the Victorian tight-lacing fashion where girls competing to have the tiniest waist had to recline on “fainting couches”.) But worn for long periods binders wreck your breasts, so you hate them even more; you tire of feeling breathless, constrained, sweaty in summer. Then LGBT groups promote a road to freedom, not by removing your binder, but your breasts.
In 2019, a serious data breach by Mermaids, for which it was fined £25,000, gave a glimpse into its residential weekends for parents and children. “Huge respect to the guys who showed us (upon request) their top surgery scars,” said one post, “saved a lot of dodgy Google searches.” Girls, who are taught at such camps how to bind, are introduced to those who’ve graduated to double mastectomies — they even pass down their old binders.
In fact you don’t need “dodgy Google searches” to witness this horror. Just search #topsurgery on Instagram and find thousands of short-haired waifs displaying livid lateral scars, their nipples cut off to be sewn or tattooed on later. Some pose with grinning surgeons. One doctor appears with jars of breast tissue in formaldehyde, a rainbow flag Frankenstein. Another in Miami boasts about cutting off 40 pairs of breasts a week or, as she glibly puts it, “deleting the teets”.
Most are in the US, where breast removal is big bucks and bona fide children’s hospitals will — for shame — give mastectomies to 13-year-olds. No minimum age is necessary, says LA paediatrician Dr Johanna Olson-Kennedy because a patient who regrets surgery can “go and get [breasts] later”.
But British girls, who must wait until 18, watch these videos of post-op patients talking of “taking the first proper breath I’ve had for years”. They send greetings cards to congratulate friends on “getting a weight off your chest” or contribute to crowd-funders “to put my tits in the bin by Christmas”. Bare-chested, the breastless lounge in the sun, unhindered by bikini tops or judging eyes. Free, like men.
The narrative that breasts are a burden doesn’t just come from trans campaigners. 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.
Where are the voices in sex education saying entering womanhood can feel like walking through fire, that bodily discomfort is a logical response both to the strange rhythms of biology and daunting expectations? Studies show girls’ confidence, compared with boys, plummets around the age of 12. Rachel Rooney’s book My Body Is Me!, which encouraged young children to delight in their glorious human form, was cancelled as transphobic, yet a teenage version is urgently needed.
(cont)...... (yes he is)...
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