The Old Pink and Blue Flag, Double Mastectomy Blues
In the early 1970s, a few years before Betty Ford made breast cancer a word that could be spoken in public, my very own mother was diagnosed with this unmentionable disease when I was just a teenager. My mother was 53, and to make matters worse, both my grandmothers had also had the disease. And so I began to feel as though a sword were hanging over my own head, too.
Two years later, I was summoned to the hospital where my mother lay in a coma. I stood in the doorway and listened to her breathe the strange rattle of the not yet dead. I drew closer. The outlines of her body, ravaged by a radical mastectomy and other treatments, were visible under a thin sheet. I saw my mother's once lovely face covered by coarse black stubble from the cross-sex hormones doctors had pumped into her body. It was too much. I ran into the hallway and burst into tears. Then I promised myself I would never let anything remotely like that happen to me.
At 30, I began a busy and stressful program of diagnostic mammograms, needle biopsies, and quarterly visits to a breast cancer surgeon for manual exams. I had no confidence any of this would prevent the disease that held me in its crosshairs.
In the mid-1980s, after one bad scare, I booked an appointment with a medical geneticist. I told her I wanted to have my breasts removed. At that time, genetic testing was still in its infancy, and since my mother was long dead, no genetic tests could be conducted. But the geneticist examined my mother's old medical records and family history. She estimated that since my grandmothers had come down with the disease when they were elderly, and since there were no other cancers in the family, my lifetime risk of breast cancer was 20%. And then, to both my disappointment and relief, the geneticist recommended against the surgery, and I continued to live under the same cloud that always hovered near me.
Several years later, I received devastating news. My latest mammogram revealed there was now a 20% chance I had breast cancer at that very moment. But there was no mass that could be biopsied, just a network of highly suspicious microcalcifications that ran through both breasts. There was no way to determine whether this was cancer or not, so the surgeon told me to wait until I clearly developed the disease. No. I told her I wanted a prophylactic double mastectomy with saline implants. She tried to talk me out of it but then referred me to a plastic surgeon and a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist said my plan was sensible. The plastic surgeon wanted to place enormous D cups inside my small frame at a cost of fifty thousand dollars, none of it covered by insurance. I declined and called a doctor I knew in Costa Rica. He arranged everything for ten thousand dollars. I was still relatively young and healthy, so the surgery went well. It turned out I didn't have breast cancer. I felt so relieved to be done with that endless nightmare. And now I still feel relieved, but I'm distressed by a new nightmare, one that affects our whole society.
What mad world have we entered? Back when I was over forty, I had to jump through a dozen hoops before I was allowed to remove my possibly cancerous time bombs. But today, the gatekeepers have disappeared.
A couple of months ago, I was shocked to learn the troubled, young daughter of an old friend did the unthinkable. She had a double mastectomy. She didn't have breast cancer or even a strong family history of it. She decided she wanted to look like a young gay male. Yes, that was her reason. So she had her breasts removed to go with her testosterone-fueled baritone voice, masculine jawline, and five o'clock shadow. Afterward, she joked about her "top surgery," stating she wished she "had three more pairs of titties to chop off." The other day, I saw her first post-mastectomy photo. She appeared neither female nor male, but a strange combination, the worst of both sexes. It's tragic that this troubled young woman torpedoed her appearance, her fertility, and her current and future health just so she could attempt to do the impossible, turn herself into a man. And who exactly is to blame for spreading this ridiculous and revolting idea to an entire generation of America's girls and young women? The autogynephilic billionaires who fund "trans" activist rights organizations, as described in Jennifer Bilek's 11th Hour Blog.
What mad world have we entered? Back when I was over forty, I had to jump through a dozen hoops before I was allowed to remove my possibly cancerous time bombs. But today, the gatekeepers have disappeared. All across America and other parts of the world, girls as young as twelve with perfectly healthy and functional breasts are encouraged by social media, their teachers, their friends, even their doctors to undergo the same type of mutilating, double mastectomies that just a few years ago were reserved for women with cancer who didn't qualify for breast-conserving lumpectomies or for those women at an extremely high risk of developing breast cancer. Today, doctors and surgeons now tell teen girls and young women the outright lie that if they ever change their mind, they can always get "new breasts." But take it from me, these new breasts of mine, these scarred, misshapen, nipple-less, and capsular contracted, new breasts, ain't nothing like the old.
It's time to restore reason and reality. It's time to put our feet down. It's time to protect girls and young women from this double mastectomy madness.
Today, It doesn't even matter whether you have insurance or not. Any girl or young woman with a cellphone and a good sales pitch can post a brief bio on gofundme.com and soon amass enough money to amputate her breasts. As of January 2022, approximately 40,000 girls and young women were begging on GoFundMe to have "gender-affirming top surgery." What's even crazier, is that many girls and women are reeling in thousands of dollars from friends or even complete strangers in just a few days or a few weeks. The total amount collected over the years for top surgery undoubtedly reaches into the tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars. Who are these semi-anonymous donors, and what motivates them to enable girls and young women to amputate their healthy and functional breasts? There's no way to tell. In any event, GoFundMe and the hundreds of thousands of GoFundMe donors also help fuel the double mastectomy craze.
It's obvious that we must act swiftly to end the senseless mass mutilation of the next generation of girls and young women. We must bring back real gatekeepers to ensure that troubled teenage girls and young women get the psychological care they need. Unless a girl or woman has breast cancer or is considered high risk by genetics or family history, she should not be able to have a double mastectomy any more than she should be able to amputate her arms or legs. Surgeons should not be allowed to remove the healthy and functional breasts of girls or women. In the coming years, surgeons will have more than enough business to try to repair the damage inflicted on tens of thousands of detransitioning girls and women who realize "transitioning" was the biggest mistake of their lives.
It's time to restore reason and reality. It's time to put our feet down. It's time to protect girls and young women from this double mastectomy madness.
~ Anonymous
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