I developed breasts early, much to my horror. An even greater horror was the blue and pink polka dot bra my mother acquired from Arnotts and which I (arch tomboy) had to wear, aged 12, under a white school shirt.
No matter how hard I tried to disguise my breasts, nothing worked. Being short and eventually overweight didn’t help. Friends not “blessed” with a big bust would tell me how much they envied me. I couldn’t – still cannot – fathom why.
Much of my excruciating self-consciousness was naturally about the male gaze. I’d known I wasn’t interested in boys from a very young age but this was the late 1970s, I was a good Catholic girl, and while I knew lesbians were a ‘thing’, they were not a thing I could possibly be.
But I also just did not want any boy or man to look at me at all so I hunched my shoulders and wore baggy jumpers like a woolly shield.
Reflecting on a reflection
When I saw myself in the mirror or, worse, in a photograph, I simply could not relate to what looked like a stranger. The image of myself I carried in my head, in my imagination, never matched the actual reality. And even when I shed a ton of weight after the first big heartbreak of my life, still they persisted.
About 15 years ago, after another break-up, I mooted to a close pal in an email that I was considering breast reduction. She was the friend who’d persuaded me to go for my first-ever official bra fitting, for which I (and my back) remain truly grateful.
But she was alarmed by my email. As a journalist, she’d met her fair share of women who’d had cosmetic treatment that had gone wrong. She bombarded me with excruciating detail about what breast reduction involves, what can go wrong and how long the recovery would be. She pointed out the problem wasn’t my breasts – it was me. Me not accepting the body I live in.
Facing reality
And she was right. My attitude didn’t change overnight, but her forceful message of dealing with things as they are and not as I might want them to be seeped in. My body is indeed me, in all its lumps and too big bumps and too short legs and overactive imagination.
I’ll be honest. I still don’t see what I think of as the “real” me when I look in the mirror. But I’m fine with that now because I know, for me, there is no alternative.
But there is a current alternative and it is a horror show. The current fad – and that is what it is – is for young women (often but not always lesbians) to declare a non-binary or trans identity and to have what is euphemistically called top surgery. It is, in fact, a double mastectomy.
Big corporations like Costa Coffee cynically exploit the trend and promote what is an extreme medical procedure as if it’s like getting your ears pierced.
In the USA, surgeons gleefully celebrate removing perfectly health breasts from perfectly healthy young women who – like me – cannot accept their body but, unlike me, choose the most radical way to alter it.
In the last week or so, the sports media has uncritically acclaimed a non-binary Canadian footballer who denies her sex yet plays on the women’s team and has had her breasts removed as if that somehow proves she’s not one of those pesky women she’s playing with and against.
Escaping an obsession
To me, non-binary/trans is just another way for some girls and women to try and escape the bits they hate about themselves – or the bits they wish others wouldn’t look at.
It’s not as if the female of the species isn’t practised (and aided) in reimagining and redefining herself in physical and not-so-physical ways, from injecting fat into backsides to having ribs removed and the other current fad of having fat sooked out of their face.
Would I leap on to the NB bandwagon if I were a teenage closeted lesbian today? Would I insist I could not only exit my femaleness but slice and dice the obvious bits away?
Maybe yes but probably no if I had friends like the one who made me face up to my unwelcome reality back in 2008 and jolted me out of what could easily have become an overwhelming obsession.
I hope we have reached the tipping point where female hatred of their bodies is no longer indulged and encouraged. Here’s to radical self-acceptance not radical surgery.
Next week I’m going for a mammogram. I’m glad I still can.
Brighton_Jock 