softtrade:

I feel like I wrote a post maybe abt a few months to half a year ago abt the fact that in both my experience and a lot of people’s I know that binding/tucking regularly can have a sort of shelf life of a set amount of years before it can lead to some bodily issues and you have to like find some other way of addressing the issue (looser clothes, surgery, whatever)

And I guess the issue that I’m coming across now is that I’ve seen a certain set of people who… I guess the word ‘fixate’ might apply here, so they fixate on like the “risks” of (usually exclusively) binding and this has sort of been focused primarily on these risks to “the children” or whatever. I’ve seen a lot of this from a certain sort of ‘radical feminist’ adjacent ideological position and like, I want to note some issues and clarify where I was coming from when I wrote that post.

So! As other people have noted, focusing exclusively on binding here like… illuminates some things. Like, this “for the health of the children” perspective doesn’t get applied the same way to underwire bras, compression bras, ‘push up’ bras, ya know? Further, most of the time people aren’t talking about the unregulated carcinogens that are given to children in the form of makeup. And like, if we are gonna talk about harmful physical situations that could negatively affect children into the future, the focus on something associated w gender nonconformity and transness as opposed to say, the use of laptops and widespread use of cell phones (here I’m talking abt wrist and back damage) is revealing. All of these things are potentially harmful long term, and many of these have a much larger number of people they might potentially cause long term damage to.

When I’ve talked about these sorts of issues with long term binding/tucking, I do not think that the solution is to tell people not to do these things. I mean, I think giving people information so that they might do them in a way that lengthens the amount of time they might be able to do them, or do them safely, some sort of harm reduction – these are the sorts of ideas I have in mind. But the primary issue is that binding/tucking are in many ways responses to the social reception of bodies.

So what I’m saying is that the long term resolution of the problems with these actions is to try to make a society where they are not necessary in order to not get misgendered, where the equivalence of certain body parts and certain genders is no longer pervasive. I find with many of the people who are hand wringing over the effects of binding, that they are also not willing to try to create a social system where bodies and certain body parts are not equivalent or determinative of certain genders.

And of course, that is a (very) long term solution, one that is not going to happen within our lifetimes. So I don’t think we should strand every single person alive in a situation where some sort of future solution is offered for their present issues. So in my mind, the solution to the long term potentially harmful effects of binding or tucking would be to open up access to medical interventions that would make these sorts of practices unnecessary (such as breast reduction, mastectomies, orchiectomies on demand/w informed consent). If we want to keep people from doing things long term that might have harmful consequences, but we also don’t want to strand them w constant social danger (psychologically or physically) then you have to allow people to make decisions w their bodies to avoid these long term consequences! But for the most part, once again, many of the people who are very concerned abt the long term consequences are also opposed to the opening up on medical interventions that would result in people not needing to do these practices, calling them ‘mutilations’ or worrying that young people accessing them thru informed consent shouldn’t be allowed to.

So what I’m basically saying here is that many people who are ‘concerned’ about the health concerns of these practices are not offering any sort of long, medium, or short term solution, rather than brow-beating people for trying to do their best in a shitty society. I just want to make clear that my position on binding/tucking doesn’t follow the same sort of solutions or the same sort of perspective. In many ways, somewhat the opposite. And its hard because talking about these things can become a way for the “concerned” to try to guilt/scare/pressure people out of things they wish people wouldn’t do, w basically no solution other than I guess the secular version of praying it away.