Break the binary, break the body
Since such cosmetic interventions can only imitate the appearance of the opposite sex, that means there’s no end to the procedures patients and their unscrupulous surgeons can pursue. Sure, you’ll never become, but you can always keep trying!
This is where gender dysphoria starts to look a lot like body dysmorphia. Address one “problem area”, and the dysphoria doesn’t resolve: it migrates. Patients and surgeons end up playing a macabre game of whack-a-mole. As dysphoria migrates across the body, new markets for surgical intervention open up. And because surgery will never turn a male into a female or a female into a male, the market for body modification is bottomless.
Plastic surgeons are meant to screen out patients who have impossible expectations for cosmetic interventions. But take away the impossible expectations and transition falls apart.
Some of these surgeries have horrifying complication rates, like phalloplasties. But medical complications can be reframed as opportunities, too. When Vanderbilt University’s Clinic for Transgender Health opened its doors in 2018, one physician pointed out: “Female-to-male bottom surgeries… these are huge money-makers.”
As the number of detransitioners and regretters rise, “gender-affirming” clinicians must improvise to protect their revenue streams. They wax lyrical about “gender journeys” and shift to the slippery language of “embodiment goals”, which can always change. The target of surgical and hormonal interventions becomes whatever a patient desires today. The possibility that a patient’s desires may shift tomorrow — or curdle into regret — is no cause for concern.
Last year two of the US’s leading gender clinicians, Johanna Olson-Kennedy and Jack Turban, contributed “dynamic desires for gender-affirming medical interventions” to the Newspeak dictionary. “Dynamic desires” means medical harm and regret. For Olson-Kennedy, the answer to surgical regret is more surgery. When asked about the possibility of regret and detransition, she mused: “What does that actually mean? Does that mean that someone has additional breast tissue that they would not want at a later point? But they could get that breast tissue removed if they absolutely need to.” Or maybe a patient had her breasts removed but “if you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them”.
This is an alarmingly casual attitude toward major elective surgeries. But it’s also a sign of the times. Everything is loosening and rolling downhill in one direction: toward ever more cosmetic interventions on healthy human bodies in the name of making the outside match the inside — whatever that means.
Do these people have any respect for the functional aspect of a human body? “If you want breasts later in life you can go get them..” what the actual duck?? How’s a baby supposed to use “replaced breasts”? What are you going to feed them, silicone??
I can almost see the temptation to the lizard people conspiracy theory. When you have ‘medical professionals’ talking about human body simulacra like this you have to wonder if they’re actually a real life human being…
I have a politically incorrect comment about cosmetic surgery. I've been watching over the years as it seems to become more ubiquitous with more billboards advertising the latest bubble lips, balloon boobs and wax faces. I also see what looks like wax faces and starched hair in most Hollywood films and tv. Then I watch foreign film and the actors usually look like normal people, with frizzed hair and little to no make-up. Why is making the actors look like wax models seen as desirable? I don't get it. Then there's the fact that many places have a doctor shortage and yet there's this demand for plastic surgeons. I find it terrible that some may have to wait to see a GP while there are doctors out there using all that training to do butt implants. The plastic surgery demand is an indication of decay in our society, imo, and has contributed to the derailment of young people.