Decades from now, scholars will surely study the way our entire mainstream media joined with the transgender movement to promote gender dysphoria and the disfiguring and mutilation of young people. Surgeries that involve slicing off healthy breasts and penises and removing testicles are regularly referred to as “life-saving”; puberty blockers are presented as “essential healthcare”; warning bells sounded by physicians and research illustrating devastating long-term effects are written off as transphobic propaganda.
Consider the example of “breast binders.” Breast binders are essentially wraps that flatten the breasts of girls who wish to identify as boys so that they can “present” as male. Binders can cause back pain, shoulder pain, chest pain, shortness of breath, and fractured ribs—especially if used long-term. They can also permanently damage breast tissue and leave breasts looking flat and wrinkled, like deflated balloons. If girls use breast binders as they enter puberty, the results are often irreversible.
But breast binders are all the rage right now, promoted by trans vloggers and YouTube stars as well as activists. The Hartford Courant, a Connecticut newspaper, ran a shameless promo for the transgender accessory under the headline: “A survival tool in Connecticut transgender community, breast binders are in high demand: ‘It is literally life-saving.’” The column, sponsored by a non-profit news group called the Connecticut Health I-Team, stated that breast binders were in such high demand that the Health Care Advocates International in Stratford, a LGBT outfit, was running out of them:
HCAI received 126 binder requests in the first three weeks of January alone, crushing last year’s numbers and temporarily wiping out inventory. The group sent out 190 binders in all of 2021. A quarter of them went to Connecticut youths, with the rest shipped nationwide and beyond.
“The numbers are jumping because there is such a need,” said Tony Ferraiolo, the Youth & Family Program director at HCAI. He began the binder program on his own before working with HCAI because he knew from experience the difference a binder can make in a young person’s life. “When you give a child hope for a better life, they won’t want to take their life. When we give them a binder, they’re walking tall. It is literally life-saving.”
Chest binders compress breasts to give the appearance of a flat chest. For transgender males who were designated female at birth but who identify as male, developed breasts can trigger body dysphoria so debilitating that it can lead to severe depression and worse.
To translate: A trans activist is telling kids that breast binders are necessary to literally save their lives if they struggle with gender dysphoria. To the media-reading public, his message is moral blackmail: Support our distribution of these body-disfiguring breast binders or you want kids to kill themselves. You’re a trans activist, or you have blood on your hands.
