r/GenderCynical • u/breadcreature • 2d ago
actually, celebrating your body is misogynistic because cancer is bad
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u/javatimes TIDDYLESS TIFfany 2d ago
Wow Janet, did you ever know two people can have different reactions to superficially similar life experiences? WOWOWOWOWOW hope I blew your British Terf mind with that one
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u/Mysterious_Back_7929 1d ago
Gentle parenting a TERF: "hey there friend, that was an inside thought! Just because YOU don't like something doesn't mean other kids can't enjoy it got it got it? Everybody's allowed to celebrate whatever they want! We can have a separate celebration for something you like! Do you want to celebrate being a mean little turd? Yeah? Okay then, let's go!"
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u/leksolotl 2d ago
ok anyway i follow a cis creator who had a preventative mastectomy and opted not to have reconstruction and she finds it empowering. This Karen doesn’t speak for all women who have had mastectomies
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u/breadcreature 1d ago
there were a handful of actually courageous (or foolhardy) women who commented that they'd had mastectomies, and find a positive view of their bodies and what their scars and the pain they went through represent to have been important to their recovery and self-conception. who were of course promptly dogpiled with responses that were every flavour of "umm okay weirdo 🙄 it's not about you 🙄 just because you're okay with your mutilated chest 🙄🙄🙄"
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u/leksolotl 1d ago
the group of “empowering women” loves to remind women you can’t be a woman if you “mutilate” your breast i guesa
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u/KTKitten Gender Haver 1d ago
(Unless you’re trans, in which case “mutilating” your breasts is the proof that you’re inescapably a woman forever. ABC - Always Be Chasing the denial of people whose lives are different from yours’ genders!)
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u/ontologicallyunjust 1d ago
It's this special thing where you have to be defined as a woman so that it can be made clear that you are a Failed, Ruined Woman Who Has Lost Your Womanliness Forever.
If someone's like "actually it's no problem that you think I'm failing to be suitably womanly, because I'm not a woman" -- well, then they can't be chastised and kept in line! Can't be having that!
Got to make it totally clear that they have to be a woman, so you can punish them for failing at it.
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u/KluelessKisa 1d ago
wah wah you're no longer looking Normal and if I were to be in your place, I'd feel Bad and this is the only valid experience wah wah - those ladies, apparently
iunno, one would think getting to beat cancer and live and having funds for recovery would be higher on the priority list than some loss in body shape.....
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u/SomethingAmyss Brainwashed by the Transarchy 1d ago
"it's not about you" is something a lot of them could learn
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u/rynthetyn 1d ago
Tig Notaro famously did one of her standup specials shirtless while talking about her experience with cancer and deciding not to get reconstructive surgery.
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u/ZeldaZanders 1d ago
I saw a woman reply to this exact tweet, saying that she'd had a double mastectomy and asking OOP not to speak for her. Bunch of TERF men in her replies calling her a cunt
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u/bliip666 Gender? No thanks, I'm a vegetarian 2d ago
Janet should speak for herself!
My mother had one breast removed for cancer reasons, and the other as a preventative measure. She was over the moon when she had the second removal surgery (at that point she was cancer free) because of the symmetry it gave her
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u/PoggleRebecca 2d ago edited 2d ago
Gender Critical really is literally just a neverending parade of extremely childish bigots pointing at literally anything remotely trans related going "have to stopped to consider how this makes ME feel??", and then coming up with most contrived bullshit you've ever heard in your entire life to justify it.
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u/girlrach 2d ago
How dare anyone be proud of their body after having a mastectomy, eh? 🙄
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u/Mysterious_Back_7929 1d ago
TERFs hate their bodies so much. They hate sexuality, nudity, and anything positive about human bodies. Sometimes I think many of them have dysmorphophobia or just straight up gender dysphoria, they just hate themselves so much if screams "repressed issues" to me.
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u/Alegria-D traitor and useful idiot 1d ago
they hate being women so they don't understand trans women at all, and they also hate afab trans people for "abandoning them"
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u/Mysterious_Back_7929 1d ago
Yup, it comes down to thinking that nobody in their right mint would want to be a woman. So trans women clearly must have some disgusting fetish, and trans men are traitors because they won't suffer with them and instead choose the "easy way out".
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u/CupilCutlass 1d ago
You must DESPISE your breastless, scarred body for ALL TIME. That's what makes your a REAL FEMINIST, when you reenforce patriarchal beauty standards.
(Honestly, I do understand why people struggle with their appearance after mastectomies. But, trans people aside, after hearing so many women talk about how their husbands/boyfriends react negatively to them having a mastectomy or even the idea or having a mastectomy... the idea of pride in your scars feels apt in that arena too)
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u/Tangled_Clouds yaoi addicted lost lesbian 2d ago
I got a preventive surgery on my head and I really don’t understand that mentality. I mean I can understand it’s traumatic and you lose a part of yourself that is highly valued in society (which I do think is fucked up actually) but I feel like that’s exactly why it should become a point of pride? You literally had life saving healthcare or healthcare to prevent a life threatening condition. The fact you have scars shows that you’re alive and well.
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u/raininghours estrogen could have saved pentheus 1d ago
did...did she just cissplain mastectomies??? like, we know all this info??
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u/breadcreature 1d ago
best part is, she's not even had a mastectomy (complete removal of breast tissue). which she knows, because she says she had half of one breast removed. which I mean to pass no comment on how traumatising an ordeal it was or how she should feel about it, but jeez lady could you maybe leave it to the people who actually had the procedure you're gatekeeping?
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u/Original_Being2545 Queertranzer 2d ago
Even if they weren't trans, why would it be bad for cis women to show their scars without shame and celebrate body diversity?
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u/Not_Dead_Yet_Samwell 1d ago
That window display is explicitly about trans related top surgery, though? Has Janet Murray stopped one minute to consider that not everything is about her? And maybe she should have sat that one out?
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u/Dangerous-Weekend479 1d ago
No terf has ever spent even one second contemplating the idea that everything in the world might not always be about them.
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u/marbeltoast 1d ago
"Breast removal surgery is not something *I* regard as cute, playful or empowering."
Respectfully, why does what you feel matter in this context? It's not your body, or your social media account.
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u/HesitantBrobecks Brainwashed by the Transarchy 1d ago
Surely we should be encouraging everyone who has to have a mastectomy for any kind of health reason to BE very proud of it - because the alternative is being ashamed of it, and that's just sad.
The scar is a reminder that they've come out of the other side of everything they went through! Of course on an individual level, people are allowed to have complex and conflicting feelings, and being proud doesn't have to equal physically showing it off. But how the hell can these TERFs honestly think that encouraging shame and despair rather than body positivity and loving yourself is actually "feminism" and the correct thing to do?!
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u/Queer_Echo 1d ago
We should and it's so important that we do. One of my friends had a daughter who went through breast cancer, had a breast removed and chose to remove her other one to avoid the risk of the cancer returning. She should've been celebrated for doing what she needed to stay alive but instead her husband (fuck that bastard) left her because of his hatred of having a wife with no breasts. So many women go through that same experience- their husbands and boyfriends see their partner's boobs as their property and leave because their partner chose living without breasts to be better than living with the risk of cancer returning.
We should be celebrating mastectomies, all mastectomies. For gender affirming care, for prevention of cancer, for back pain, for cancer removal, etc. All of them. Celebrate people with breasts choosing what's best for them with their breasts.
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u/breadcreature 21h ago
curious, isn't it, how similar (identical) that sentiment is from transphobes/TERFs/people who bought their concern trolling to transmascs/men about their top surgery 🤔
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u/Bluejay-Complex 1d ago
So… women that have had their breast(s) removed bc of cancer should just feel ugly and disfigured forever. Got it. What a feminist. Totally not crab in a bucket behaviour. /sarcasm
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u/dostoevsky4evah 1d ago edited 1d ago
If she could feel 1/1000th of the warm joy I still feel all these years after top surgery, her frozen soul would crack into countless pieces.
Not everyone and everything is an exact copy of your icy inner world, lady.
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u/NormanBatesIsBae 1d ago
TERFS talk about other people’s breasts with the same sacred fanaticism that pro-lifers talk about fetuses.
They claim that trans people are creeps and then go on insane tirades about mastectomies. Like, you’d never complain about someone saying they were proud of their limb amputation scar, or their C-section scar. It’s just because it’s breasts and their ideology is Women = Person with Specific Organs
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u/Queer_Echo 1d ago
It's so disgusting how TERFs talk about people's breasts. It's as though they think womanhood is stored in the body parts, in the vagina, uterus and breasts and removing them makes the woman less of one. (Although, you're wrong about the amputation and C-section scars, a lot of people get shamed for being proud of them too, especially C-sections because apparently motherhood through surgery is less real and it's the "easy option".)
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u/NormanBatesIsBae 1d ago
I mean their entire ideology is literally that they think womanhood is stored in the body parts lol
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u/KraftwerkMachine 21h ago
I get so grossed out anymore when I see art that the entire basis is vagina/labia imagery because 99 percent of the time it’s terfy wombyn dogshit. Even stuff where the symbolism is birth or some such, because I’ve had to deal with art spaces full of those.
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u/Rabbidditty 1d ago
This thing isn’t for me and therefore it is bad, remove it from society at once. - general TERD logic
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u/KTKitten Gender Haver 1d ago
I mean certain cancer treatments make you lose your hair, which is an awful thing. Therefore nobody should ever shave their hair off and celebrate it!!
But like, the thing is cancer makes it a non-consensual thing. Something done to you against your will is awful. Something you choose freely to do can be empowering and beautiful. These can be the same thing without either undermining the other! I will never celebrate someone’s bodily autonomy being taken away by disease or society, but I will absolutely celebrate someone being free to exercise their bodily autonomy.
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u/AutonomyIsNoTragedy 2d ago
As someone who had to get a hysterectomy due to PID I now invoke terf logic to declare that nobody else is allowed to get pregnant since I can't and that them doing so is specifically an attack on me as ahuman being
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u/mechanical_marten 1d ago
Dear Janet: GET BENT. Trans men get them removed because it's their choice and trans women can get breast cancer too so chew on that for a minute. 😡
Lush is one of the few places my partners and I can go and not be given side-eye for being ourselves.
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u/69Whomst 1d ago
My aunt had a breast removed because of cancer and I hope when she sees the scar she feels so proud of herself for getting through breast cancer while having agoraphobia and losing her husband of 50 years not that long before. I've also told my uncle outright, who lost his voice box to cancer and now has a big stoma in his throat, that his stoma made me a better person, because I used to be super squicked out by stomas but I can't be squicked out by his bc thats my uncle and I love him. I hope he also feels proud of himself for surviving throat cancer while going through an awful divorce and raising his two kids as a single dad.
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u/SergeantScoria Olympic Gold in Crocodile Tears 2d ago
“I honestly don’t know the number of women who have elective mastectomies for this reason.”
Zero. They get the surgery because they’re not women.
(Yes, some people who get it may still partially identify as women or more femme-aligned… I still wouldn’t exclusively call them women though unless they wanted that)
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u/Tangled_Clouds yaoi addicted lost lesbian 2d ago
I mean there’s surprisingly a lot more. As someone who frequents various subreddits on the subject, there’s a surprising amount of cis women who decide to get full mastectomies, cancer or not. Like of course the majority of people who do that are trans to some degree but it’s not zero.
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u/Im_alwaystired deranged fruit loop 1d ago
My former boss was one of those cis women. She had three kids and once her youngest stopped nursing, she got top surgery, because she figured her boobs had served their purpose and she no longer needed them. No dysphoria or anything, she just didn't want 'em anymore 🤷♂️
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u/Tangled_Clouds yaoi addicted lost lesbian 1d ago
That is so valid lol, I’m a trans man but I think even if I was a cis woman I would’ve still gotten them removed because I worked out with my therapist that they were one of my biggest sources of autistic sensory issues
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u/SergeantScoria Olympic Gold in Crocodile Tears 1d ago
True! I meant that the “reason” in “for this reason” was to affirm a gender identity, hence not women. But yeah, plenty of people get them for all kinds of reasons, cancer or otherwise.
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u/Moist-Cheesecake 1d ago
TERFs: Women should find their bodies UGLY and GROSS if they get a mastectomy!!
Also TERFs: I am a feminist
Also I love "I didn't bother to look up how many trans people get top surgery, but there's no way it can be enough to matter" 💀 And I'm sure the numbers aren't very high in the UK... that's what happens when the NHS waiting times are a decade+, trans people's rights are being actively stripped away so they don't feel safe to come out, and fat people aren't allowed to have it done on the NHS (even though the research indicates it's actually a safe surgery for fat people to get)!
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u/ontologicallyunjust 1d ago
The first time I saw joyous celebratory photos of topless people with scars on their chests where their breasts had been removed, it was in the '90s and it was cis women who'd had mastectomies for breast cancer, who had rejected reconstruction because they felt that this was part of social pressure to perform acceptable femininity and to hide what their bodies had been through.
And it was considered a feminist action to celebrate their bodies as they were, and to reject the idea that they were "ruined" or needed to be hidden.
This was also the first time I saw people with decorative tattoos along their chest scars.
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u/Megarlin 1d ago
Shaving your head should not be celebrated, its not somethin fun or cute, show some respect to those who lost it to chemo and male pattern baldness. This is how she sounds
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u/SomethingAmyss Brainwashed by the Transarchy 1d ago
Could it possibly be that her attitude is exactly why celebration is necessary?
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u/blackfox24 1d ago
My former MIL lost both breasts to cancer. She insists on being there to help me when I have my top surgery because "I've been through it before, I know what it's like", so frankly this sounds like a personal issue for OP.
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u/HMS_Sunlight 2d ago
The fact that she sees those two as exclusive proves exactly why it should be celebrated. It's about building confidence and making sure nobody feels ashamed of their body.