Glamorization of Breast Amputation & the Marketing Self-Harm

Continued musings and analysis during my battle with breast cancer

Model Casil McArthur left to right: pictured modeling post “top surgery” for photographer Haley Wier, posed with Madonna for Vanity Fair Icon Issue by Luigi and Lango, and appearing as a featured cameo in Miley Cyrus video Mother’s Daughter

The Marketing is Working

In my recent substack essay My Journey with Breast Cancer I spoke about how my personal experience with having stage three breast cancer has given me fresh insights into the transgender propaganda and marketing used to promote “top surgeries” aka double breast amputations. The dichotomy between my own self-preservation desire to keep my body intact and the cavalier nature with which young girls are gleefully hacking off their breasts could hardly be wider. I love, value, and respect my breasts as myself while these girls treat their breasts as disembodied objects and worthless things to be thrown in the trash.

My story was covered by Dana Kennedy with the NY Post. The article focuses on the social contagion aspect of why young girls seem to be racing to get “top surgeries.”

Besides being caught up in social contagion, there are many suppositions about the reasons why young girls are signing up for these surgeries more than any other demographic making up 70% of “gender-confirmation surgeries” as documented by the 2017 Plastic Surgery Report. Is it because of a mental health crisis? Are they legitimately born in the wrong body? Is it a form of social contagion as I speak about in the NY Post article? Regardless of whether any of these are true or false, what cannot be ignored is the overwhelming influence of massive publicity campaigns that glamorize, advertise, and directly market these surgeries to girls. Together, Hollywood, the fashion industry, social media, as well as government, corporate, and institutional “inclusivity” campaigns flood the social commons with highly stylized beauty images that depict these surgeries as fashionable and those who get them as high-status individuals associated with wealth, fame, and luxury lifestyles. The underlying thematic value of this combined textual oeuvre is one I would call: the enviable opulence of a beautiful trendsetter. The secondary theme is one of guilt-free privilege because the offered persona is saturated in the mythology of being a victim of a civil rights war, a revolutionary who breaks the cultural mold, not because of anything they do, however, but because of how they superficially appear.

The advertising images and copy used to sell these surgeries to the girls who are led to believe they are “born in the wrong body” are those of commodification and compartmentalization. Elite plastic surgery clinics market the notion that a human body is just a bunch of fashion separates that can be added to or removed with not only zero consequences but with the special added bonus of becoming your “authentic self.” Dr. Vinod Vij of Clinique Aesthetica refers to gender reassignment surgery as a “courageous decision,” and the clinic’s website says that it is a “profound and transformative experience. It is about finding your authentic self, aligning your body with your identity, and stepping into a new chapter of your life.” But how is it possible to have an identity that is out of alignment with your body? And how does cutting off healthy body parts create authenticity? How is plastic surgery a mental health cure? The plastic surgeons fail to answer these questions. They simply sell-sell-sell, designing their sales pitch using the ideological language and core mantras that align with transgender values, and then they watch the money roll in.

The U.S. sex reassignment surgery market was valued at $2.1 billion dollars in 2022 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.25% from 2023 to 2030. The mastectomy segment held the largest market share of over 20% in revenue in 2022. Total combined female-to-male surgeries dominated the market at nearly 60% of the total revenue.

The marketing is working. And is clear from these figures that young girls are buying what the market is selling.

My activism has always been about defending the sex-based safeguarding provisions of women/girls and protecting children from unnecessary medicalization. Ironically, the model, Casil McArthur (featured in the images above) was at one of the most violent women’s free speech events I’ve ever helped organize. She screamed “Nazi scum” at us, flipped us off, and tried to disrupt our speaking with a whistle and tambourine. From my current vantage point of being a breast cancer patient, my heart strangely goes out to her in a way that it did not while I was at that riotous event. She chose to cut off her healthy breasts and destroy her endocrine system by becoming a lifelong testosterone user, both of which will have long-term health consequences for her. But worse, she is being used by the fashion industry to sell these surgeries and make them appear glamorous and part of an enviable life with celebrity friends.

Casil McArthur behind police barricade in front of City Hall in NYC protesting a women’s free speech event “Let Women Speak,” organized by K. Yang (pictured with mic), Amanda Stuleman(not pictured), and myself (pictured holding pink sign).

Glamour/Publicity*

To "glamour" is to cast a spell, to create an illusion, concealing the true form of something. In this case, the glamour is to hide the painful reality of a double breast amputation. The truth is that a double mastectomy is a painful procedure with a long recovery time. When I tell people that I may have to get a mastectomy as a result of my stage 3 breast cancer they immediately share their sympathy, support, and prayers that I will not have to go down that path. This is a natural response. It is an instinctual response connected to our empathetic wince impulse in response to another’s pain. The empathetic wince impulse is a reflexive involuntary shrinking or backing away from another’s pain. For example, when we see someone fall down, we wince reflexively. Again, this is natural and instinctive. It is natural to avoid pain and move towards that which is nourishing or pleasurable. It is unnatural to seek out painful unnecessary amputations of healthy body parts. To convince someone that such a procedure is desirable takes a very good sales pitch. This is where publicity comes in.

Publicity is the means by which these procedures are subverted from painful to enviable. To be glamorous is to be enviable. Publicity is used to manufacture glamour. Usually, a painful double breast amputation should provoke a wince response, but publicity sells the idea that to have this surgery is to be a person worthy of the envy of others. High fashion magazines show us images of beauty, style, luxury, wealth, celebrity, and the disinterested self-satisfied looks of those who epitomize chic. Glamour is being used to mystify and desensitize. The target audience is mystified by the expensive designer clothing, celebrity photographers, and the luxury lifestyle implicitly implied by the images. And through this mystification, the target audience is desensitized to the actual pain of the procedures. This pain is always hidden and never directly addressed. The painful reality of a double breast amputation is made invisible and only the enviable glamorous state is on display.

Publicity works on our natural instinct for pleasure, but it cannot offer any pleasure or nourishment in the moment. It is a future promise, always delayed. Thus, publicity hijacks our instinct for pleasure through the use of glamour in the form of becoming an object of envy for others. Ultimately, however, what is offered is only a void that must be filled.

Publicity has no authority in and of itself, thus a long-established tactic of publicity is to reference the past in order to lend credibility to the present while evoking the promised future self.

Images from left to right: Madonna, Casil McArthur and others for Vanity Fair Icons Issue, Krow Kian for T magazine cover & insert, Chella Man for Vogue Italia, and Casil McArthur for Vanity Fair Icons Issue.

The images used above reference classic oil paintings of the past, such as de Heem’s Still Life with Lobster, 1600’s, The Last Supper, and 17th-century portraits. The magazine images evoke wealth, status, as well as historical and spiritual authority.

The oil paintings of the past were used to display the wealth and status of the painting owner. Present day publicity that references historic oil paintings is used to sell the idea of status and authority to the future buyer. In the cover copy used by T magazine (center), it reads, “The Future is Ours. And So is the Past.” The women featured in the photographs (who have undergone breast amputations) are depicted as being akin to high status wealthy oil painting owners of the past. They are situated gazing above the bounty of their table. The implication of the images alongside the copy is that the lifestyle of those who have undergone such surgeries belongs to a life of luxury and wealth and that their lifestyle and ideology has implicit cultural-historical value.

This kind of glamorization is used to glorify. Iconic celebrities like Madonna depicted in iconic scenes like The Last Supper are used to lend credibility and endorsement to self-mutilation. Publicity images that reference the past pictorially bind the present pain (double mastectomies) to a historic lineage that does not actually exist. Successive reproduction of these historic cultural symbols in modern publicity constructs a narrative that's so ubiquitous as to be inevitable, irreversible, and most of all, invisible. The pain of breast amputation, which should evoke empathetic wincing, is hidden by glamour and the credibility of a past that never actually existed.

*The concepts of glamour and publicity used in this section are based on the work of John Berger in his book Ways of Seeing.

Subversion of Self-Harm

In this Yves Saint Laurent advertisement, model Chella Man speaks lines glorifying and glamorizing her double mastectomy scars for an elite luxury beauty brand:

“My scars are radiant, they show where I’ve been. I’ve always experienced intense gender dysphoria, my mind didn’t connect with my body. Top surgery allowed me to make my body a home. My scars will always remind me of this liberation… My scars are the things that make me who I am. They’re a privilege to bear. My scars are my signature.”

From the way she is speaking, one might imagine she earned these scars by being a survivor of breast cancer, but instead, she willingly chose to go down a path of self-mutilation. The word scar is repeated over and over in ways that glorify the removal of her healthy breasts. She speaks about privilege, liberation, and radiance. But all this is said as an advertisement for an international high-status beauty brand. When she says her mind didn’t connect with her body, we are meant to accept this without questioning what it could possibly mean. When I hear these words, I hear dissociation. But she chose not to grapple with the dissociation and learn to love her whole self as an embodied being, she avoided grappling with her inner emotional conflict and took a superficial way out through plastic surgery. She speaks of her scars as if she earned them by going through a trial, but they are only the scars of elective plastic surgery, they are cosmetic. The copy and images of the YSL advertisement promise young girls that they too will experience liberation, radiance, and privilege if they buy into “top surgery.”

Advertisements like this champion a subversion of our natural pain/pleasure instincts. It is natural to move towards pleasure/nourishment and away from pain. When we touch a hot pan, it is natural to pull away at the slightest sensation of pain. But the whole underlying value set of transgender ideology is to disguise and subvert pain into something that instead is equated with authenticity. The pain/pleasure instinct is a primary safeguarding instinct. It is important to keep this instinct intact. When this instinct is subverted it is harder to be responsive to our body’s signals and to keep ourselves safe from danger and harm.

Although it is called by the diminutive term “top surgery,” the procedure is painful, and comes with dangers and complications. To choose to do this to healthy body parts is an act of self-harm. As Mary Pipher, PhD says in her bestselling book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, “Self-mutilation can be seen as a concrete interpretation of our culture’s injunction to young women to carve themselves into culturally acceptable pieces.” Self-mutilation is a maladaptive coping strategy for emotional distress. It is a way of both claiming control of the body and dissociating from emotional pain. The disruption of natural pain/pleasure responses through propaganda that attempts to groom girls to glorify dissociation is an act of abuse against young girls.

Many of the girls who choose to go down the path of double-breast amputation are already girls who practice self-harm. This is even promoted in advertising such as this ad for Amsterdam Pride that highlights a young woman with deep and obvious self-harm scars as a spokesperson and model for their “my gender, my pride” campaign. And she is modeling that self-harm is worthy of celebration, something to be proud of, and goes hand in hand with the ideology of gender identity.

I have found multiple images of young girls who practiced self-harm and then chose to undertake an elective double mastectomy. I call this medically endorsed self-harm. It is appalling to me that their therapists and doctors did not take one look at these girls and see the self-harm scars as clear signs of depression, abuse, obsessive thoughts, or other cries for help. Instead of addressing their self-harm behavior as harmful and maladaptive, they reinforced the behavior by allowing them to go down a path of medically endorsed self-harm.

Plastic surgeon Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, famous on TikTok and Instagram for her top surgery catchphrase anthem “yeat the teets,” smiles as she tells girls that their self-harm scars will not prevent them from choosing medically endorsed self-harm with her clinic.

Rather than helping these girls whose self-harm scars are obvious indicators of serious emotional distress, doctors like Gallagher capitalize on these girls’ pain and trauma and sell them superficial cosmetic surgeries as a way to escape their pain and supposedly find “authenticity.” This is a sick reversal of the natural pain/pleasure response where pain is now symbolically linked to egoic image, external objectification, and status. This is a disruption of the natural pain/pleasure response system, which is there to protect us and keep us safe from harm. Disruption of this healthy function is a safeguarding failure. This is a dissociation from our primary instincts, which are the building blocks of healthy bodily autonomy and boundaries. How can these girls ever find these embodied tools while living in a state of self-objectification and dissociation?

Capitalizing on Pain

All of these industries, the beauty industry, the fashion industry, pharma, plastic surgeons are all capitalizing on the emotional pain of these young girls and offering them a false cure in the form of removing their healthy breasts. We have seen this hijacking of the pleasure impulse before during the opioid crisis.

Many times when I speak of embodiment, intuition, and instincts people think I am talking about something new age or “woo,” but really I am talking about extremely practical safeguarding tools that we naturally carry around with us. And the more we take time to understand, maintain, and develop these internal tools the more we can keep ourselves safe from danger.

In the 2023 Netflix limited series Painkiller, Matthew Broderick plays Richard Sackler, the former chairman and president of Purdue Pharma and seller of the opioid Oxycontin. In the speech below, it is clear that billionaire CEOs understand exactly the same thing that I understand to be true, that the pain/pleasure response is primal to humans.

“All of human behavior is essentially comprised of two things: running away from pain and toward pleasure. It is the very essence of what it means to be human, to be alive. But if we place ourselves right there, between pain and pleasure… If we become the gatekeepers for everyone who wants to get away from pain, then we have changed the world.”

Like the Oxycontin CEOs depicted in Painkiller, the CEOs who run fashion magazines, beauty brands, and plastic surgery clinics understand the pain/pleasure function and close in to capitalize on the girls who seek a way out of their emotional distress. Rather than offering a real solution that would help these young women come to understand the root of their dis-ease and come to love and accept themselves and their bodies, what these girls are being offered is a maladaptive coping strategy just as dangerous and unfulfilling as an opioid.

Superficial Solutions

The rise in the number of detransitioners is growing proof that the solutions offered by cosmetic surgery and hormone-disrupting drugs is not a solution to the emotional distress of those who feel the pain of body dissociation. Hopefully, as the lawsuits continue, there will be negative repercussions for plastic surgeons and mental health professionals who have been reckless with the health and wholeness of young women and girls. It has always struck me as odd that anyone ever thought that plastic surgery is a legitimate cure for emotional trauma.

In my journey with cancer, I too have been offered plastic surgery, not in the potentially necessary mastectomy, but in the reconstruction of my breast. It is possible that if I had a lumpectomy my breast would be misshapen because of the location of my tumor. Thus mastectomy has been suggested, not just because of its cancer removing potential, but because reconstruction is easier from a blank canvas, so to speak. Because I have been resistant to the very notion of mastectomy, some of my doctors have thought that the answer is to reassure me about how good a reconstructive surgery can look. I have been advised to look at reconstruction books and have been regaled with stories of how amazing the reconstruction will appear. But I remain resistant. I truly don’t care how my breasts will look. I don’t look at my breasts, I experience them. I feel them, both from the inside and from without. Other people look at my breasts. But I do not care to self-objectify. My goal is to retain as much of my own sensation as possible.

As I go through this battle with cancer, I will continue to fight for the girls who are being captured not just by social contagion but by millions of marketing and publicity dollars directed at drawing them down a path of medically endorsed self-harm. I will continue to expose the ideology of transgenderism and the industries that profit by marketing its claims. I will also continue to share the tools of embodiment, instincts, intuition, and internal authority. Thank you for all who have given me support.