Breast Binding, Genital Tucking, & the Lie of ‘Safe Gender Affirmation’.

Invisible Scars, Lifelong Pain. No Needles, No Surgery—But Still Permanently Damaged by My Gender Transition.

Following Trump’s Executive Order suspending the use of federal funding for “Gender Affirming Care” for young people under the age of 19, interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and transgender surgeries will become less easily accessible to young people. While this Executive Order has the immense potential to spare many youngsters from the harms of the medical interventions outlined in the legislation, our fight to end gender ideology is nowhere near over.

With medical interventions out of reach for many indoctrinated in gender ideology youths, interventions like breast binding and male genital tucking will be the only ones available to sex distressed children and teenagers. Without even a single visit to a gender clinic, tens of thousands of kids who use binders and tucking devices will continue to permanently damage their developing bodies, while sustaining mental health harms that may last a lifetime. 

The harms of social transition, of breast binding and of genital tucking still remain largely unaddressed. These harms receive virtually no media coverage in the culture war because the scars they etch into the minds and bodies of young people aren’t visible to the naked eye. Yet, these are the harms which afflict every single young transitioner, whether they are of the minority who proceed with medical transition, or whether they are of the majority who do not. 

How do I know? In short, because I lived this reality for half of my life. From the ages of 12-24, I identified as transgender after having been exposed to the concept online. My parents had the sense to not affirm the transgender identity I had declared as a 12 year old. Knowing that my brain was not fully developed, my parents put obstacles in my way to decrease the chance I would medicalize before age 25. However this did not stop me from using a binder to flatten my breasts, which enabled me to continue to play cross-sex ‘make believe’ into my 20’s. 

Breast binding made me feel like I was breathing through a straw. Without realizing it, I had changed the way I moved, breathed, stood, walked, and slept in order to accommodate the ‘cage’ my upper body had grown into over the course of a decade.

Though I did not step foot inside a gender clinic, and quit my transition before injecting toxic doses of testosterone or getting my breasts amputated, I am now living with the harms to my body and mind– that the medical establishment is helpless to set right. 

The prolonged breast binding, including with a supposedly ‘safe’ binder, has permanently disfigured my breast tissue, ribs, damaged my posture, and has left me in pain while breathing. I am now unable to wear anything but a high-compression sports bra if I wish to engage in even the lowest-intensity physical activity without experiencing excruciating pain.

Even if Trump’s Executive Orders manage to survive legal challenge, simply banning medical transition for under-19’s will not protect young people from sustaining permanent harms to their minds and bodies, as a result of their adolescent gender questioning:

When puberty blockers are not available to a gender dysphoric girl, she will bind her breasts as soon as breast buds begin to develop using specially designed garments or tape that will flatten her breasts. The boys will tuck their growing genitals to create the appearance of a smooth crotch–a practice that originated from drag queen culture. These shocking, dangerous practices have been promoted not only by online influencers, but by doctors and teachers, if they weren’t already (as there is ‘tucking underwear’ available for small children).

Routinely compressing breast and genital tissue which is not supposed to be compressed does damage to an individual, both psychologically and physically. Just how harmful these interventions are, has not been well-studied in either adults or growing children. Despite the lack of evidence, these ‘gender affirming’ interventions are marketed as not only safe, but as life-saving.

Binding is a far more dangerous and harmful intervention than anyone gives it credit for. Both hospitals and online trans activists promote breast binding as ‘gender affirming care’ with guidelines about how to do it ‘safely’ (without any studies attesting to the assertion that compressing breast tissue, lungs and the rib cage, especially of a growing child can be done safely), these garments can be easily bought online and have been given secretly to children at school. There is no precedent for what a woman should expect after quitting a long-term binding regimen, while still having her breasts. For example, the impact of long-term compression on functions such as breastfeeding is still unknown.

Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), a teaching hospital, advises “people of any gender” (girls) that chest binding can help them “feel more comfortable with the way their chest looks and feels.”

We know that tucking can cause rashes, itching, testicular pain and testicular torsion but we know very little about the extent to which pre-operative tucking can impact postoperative surgical results. We also know very little about the impact of genital tucking on fertility, or on how to help men who emerge from their ‘gender journeys’ with intact genitals, recover from lasting pain they may experience.

The line between the online activism of transgender influencers and the doctor’s office is non-existent. Trans activists tell young people to not use ‘unsafe’ binding and tucking methods, while instructing them in detail about how these easily-obtainable unsafe binding alternatives work. Both activists and doctors are quick to say that binding is safe when done properly. From my experience, this is yet another ‘gender affirming’ lie. No one who encouraged me to bind my breasts at age 12, informed me that even ‘safe’ binding methods would leave me with this level of pain and deformity. No one told me that this damage would be permanent.

Youngsters are further convinced that these practices can be done safely, because doctors have released binding and tucking guidelines which are taken directly from the recommendations of trans activists rather than from any clinical studies. These guides read more as advertisements than as legitimate medical advice. Binding and tucking, according to the guidance, is safe when done with products purchased from ‘approved’ companies, for a maximum of eight hours per day. Because no studies have been done showing why the maximum wear time should be eight hours as opposed to any other arbitrary number, and because these interventions only further entrench someone’s sex-based discomfort, almost no one follows them.

Another guide from OHSU teaches boys and men how to push their testicles into the inguinal canal (inside of their bodies), and how to tuck their penises between their legs. This is a hospital….

Many trans influencers film their ‘gender journeys’ from the phase of ideation and identity exploration all the way to post-surgery. They commonly joke about wearing their binders for ‘too long’ and having ‘saggy’ breasts, bad posture and concave rib cages. They conceptualize this damage as an unfavorable aesthetic outcome which will become irrelevant when they remove their breasts. Those same trans influencers, post-op will often delight in their no longer needing to do harm to themselves with binding and tucking. The loss of function for a perceived aesthetic benefit, is the goal of this particular pseudoscientific labyrinth which we refer to as ‘gender affirming care’. Damage to healthy body parts is a feature of gender medicine, not a bug.

Now we begin to see the way that the dangers of gender transition unfold, not as a set of discrete interventions which cause harm only when a gender clinic is involved, but as a trajectory which begins to cause harm from the moment an idea is adopted:

Kids embark upon the process of transition, thinking that it’ll resolve their psychological distress. Their ritualistic binding and tucking, which once seemed necessary to alleviate the psychological discomfort they’ve labeled as ‘gender dysphoria’, turns into physical discomfort. The process of modifying the appearance of sex traits through compression becomes inextricably tied to the young person’s embrace of a new, cross-sex identity. The pain that was once psychological, now becomes new, physical pain. All this pain sustained in the pursuit of ‘authenticity’ and ‘happiness’ must then be treated through body part removal.

Because our bodies and brains do not exist separately, the obsessive young person’s fixation on cross-sex embodiment throws them into a nearly intractable feedback loop: their distress becomes their identity, the affirmation of distress turns into more distress as they begin to compare themselves to opposite-sex peers with whom they cannot biologically measure up. Then, they begin to modify their behaviors and bodies in an attempt to become the impossible. What starts as an idea becomes an unending, escalating, obsessive pursuit of ‘feeling better’ which only carries the risk of more severe and permanent damage, the longer one continues on this trajectory.

The notion that banning gender treatments for under 19’s will decrease the magnitude of harm done to those incapable of consent, is based largely on the knowledge that kids who experience pre-pubertal onset gender dysphoria, who are not socially transitioned, are likely to outgrow their dysphoria as they complete puberty. However, the size of this cohort pales in comparison to the size of the adolescent-onset cohort, about whom we know far less.

From my observation, teenagers with adolescent-onset gender dysphoria who are denied access to a gender clinic, rarely ‘age out’ of their gender distress before it takes a life-shattering toll on their psyches and bodies. Their ‘gender journey’ becomes their rebellious path to individuation from their parents, while simultaneously taking up so much brain space that it stunts their development- rendering even the most ‘stable’ and ‘clear-headed’ adolescent unable to plan their future beyond transition. They are so childish in their thinking and yet so close to legal adulthood that they become no more capable of envisioning a life as a healthy, non-conforming member of their sex by the time they are allowed to make their own medical decisions. Time alone doesn’t make these teens more capable of giving consent; it only makes them more desperate.

This reality must be accounted for not only in the United States, but in every country attempting to disentangle its youth from the clutches of gender ideology. As countries like the UK begin to open detrans health clinics, doctors who wish to help patients heal from ‘gender affirming care’ must understand the ways in which every transition-related intervention causes individual harms which only become further complicated by each subsequent intervention, regardless of whether the intervention was bought online and endorsed by medical professionals, whether it was picked up from a pharmacy or performed on an operating table.

Assuming that bans across Europe and Trump’s Executive Orders stick despite legal challenges, we must contend with the fact that we have not solved the problem: we have only addressed a fraction of it. Many of these kids who play around with gender identities won’t medicalize immediately or ever. What they are far more likely to do, is to go down the path I took, and still sustain irreversible psychological and bodily damage. 

Banning medical transition for minors is a good first step towards sanity, but it does not prevent indoctrinated children from being irreversibly harmed. It only delays the young age at which they can legally and medically escalate the harms they have already sustained, into something way worse. 

Every bloody scar started out as an invisible one that was not caught in time. If we want to prevent more bloodshed, we must recognize the harm at its source. We mustn’t become complacent now that doctors are forced to wait a few more years before cutting into healthy young people. 

The fact that young people can do so much damage to themselves based on an idea and with the assistance of compression garments alone, should show us just how dangerous this ideology is. The fact that even the lowest-tech gender transition interventions can permanently alter the life trajectory of a young person should enrage us. The fact that it takes only one click on the internet to permanently derail a young person’s life should infuriate us.    

Until we make binding, tucking and social transition culture war issues, we will forever be struggling to maintain our progress. These distressed young people who’ve been waiting to eat from the Tree of Forbidden Genderfruit will have had years to marinade in this destructive ideology. The day they reach legal adulthood, they will enter the gender clinic and become lobbyists for the necessity of body part removal as a ‘cure’ to the distress they’ve been incubating in their minds and bodies throughout their adolescence. Then, we will be right back to where we started.

Without proper psychological intervention and political de-radicalization, our hard-fought progress will become a distant memory as this scourge continues to consume our youth. Our fight to end gender ideology has not ended, it has only just begun.

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