My Journey with Breast Cancer
Breast Cancer as a Lens for Embodiment vs Dissociation OR Sex-Based Medicine vs "Gender Affirming Care."
Breast Cancer
Recently, I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. This diagnosis has been emotionally overwhelming and the treatment plan has been physically grueling. Those of you who have followed me on my various social media know that my accounts focus on exposing the lies and manipulations within gender ideology while specifically highlighting issues of safeguarding, instincts, and embodiment. I have purposefully avoided including details about my personal life. I have done this mainly because I believe it is a more effective way to approach the issue but also as a way to protect my privacy. However, my current circumstances are compelling me to take the “personal is political” approach and use my experiences to shed new light on the values and practices of transgenderism. My battle with breast cancer is giving me a fresh lens through which to view transgender propaganda, marketing, and so-called “gender-affirming care.”
Various friends have urged me to write about my breast cancer as a sex-specific medical issue but I have been reluctant to publicly share my fear and heartache over the tumors growing in my breast. I haven’t wanted to talk about how exhausting and uncomfortable it’s been undergoing the various scans, pokes, and prods: the ultrasounds, MRIs, pet scans, bone scans, echocardiograms, biopsies, more biopsies, and the surgery for a chest port. I didn’t want to speak about how sick I was during the first three rounds of chemotherapy and how I dread the three more rounds to come. I haven’t wanted to publicly reveal how it’s felt to have my hair fall out in clumps. I haven’t wanted to open up about any of this, and yet, fighting to save my breast has sparked a new passion in me to make purpose and meaning out of this personal mess.
Mastectomy vs Top Surgery
The surgeon and oncologist have told me I may need to have a mastectomy, a fancy way to say they may have to amputate my breast. The fear, rage, and repulsion this has evoked in me has been overpowering. I am overwhelmed both with fierce love for my body, my breast, and an icy cold panic over the fact that I may lose this part of me, this part which is me, part of the wholeness of me, and I don’t want to lose any of me. And so, researcher that I am, I have seen multiple medical doctors, naturopaths, read books, articles, personal accounts, and anything and everything I can find about how various people have beat their breast cancers. Through all this, I have chosen an approach that includes both traditional and naturopathic medicine. I have honed my diet, exercise, and lifestyle to do all I can to fight this cancer and save my breast if at all possible.
I am fighting fiercely to save my breast. If they have to take it in the end, it will not be because I didn’t do all I could to save it. I am putting in the maximum effort I know how and because of this it strikes me like a slap in the face how cavalier these young girls who get “top-surgery” are with chopping off their breasts as if their breasts are trash, as if they have no value, as if they are not a beloved part of their bodies. The profanity of the image below is revolting and galling. I will speak more on the issues of publicity, marketing, and glamorization in Part 2 of this series.
Embodiment vs Compartmentalization
Confronting the possible loss of my breast is a terrifying experience. In terms of my embodiment, my breast is not just some discreet compartmentalized separate part of me, it is an integral part of what makes me whole. Even though I rationally understand that the mastectomy is being suggested to me for my own health benefit, my instinctual response is to recoil from the idea and reject it outright. Regardless of the potential necessity of this “treatment,” I experience the idea of it as an amputation, a severing, a cutting off of myself from myself. And this is what it literally is. Although I may need it for my own good, this severing is antithetical to the wholistic integrity of my embodiment. I have spoken about the values of embodiment as an antithesis to the dissociative values of trans ideology. With the breast cancer diagnosis, I have suddenly revalued and reexperienced all of my thinking and writing about embodiment in a very personal way. By embodiment, I mean the state of being fully occupied, to be at one with and in integrity with one’s body, sense perceptions, and instincts.
One of the reasons our understanding of embodiment can be so confused is that both rationalism and religious ideologies tend to view the mind and body as separate or the soul and body as separate. But there is no separate or “other” place to experience ourselves outside of our embodiment. Embodiment is the first and only way in which we perceive the world. Every experience we have is mediated through our bodies.
Some of the common phrasings we use when speaking about our bodies can lead to a confused way of how we imagine our experience of embodiment. These common ways of conceptualizing our bodies are an abstraction of our direct sensory perceptions and do not accurately depict the lived reality of our experience. These kinds of abstractions can lead to a dissociative way of thinking about ourselves, our experiences, and our bodies.
We all have a body. We do not “have” a body, because bodies are not objects that we possess. We are embodied.
Born in the wrong body or conversely No child is born in the wrong body. We are not “in” our bodies, because bodies are not suits we take on and off. We are born as our bodies.
I identify as a woman or I identify as a man. Bodies are not things we “identify as,” because bodies are not projections of our inner beliefs. Regardless of any identity concepts we may mentally hold about ourselves, we are always experiencing ourselves as our bodies.
Rather than any of these statements, it is most accurate to describe our relationship with our bodies by saying: We are our bodies. Our bodies are the foundation of all our experiences. There is no "objective place" in which we can think ourselves outside of our bodies. We are always subjectively and particularly situated and engaged with our bodies. Bodies are what we are of. Our bodies are also the “how” in how we experience the world. Our bodies are the form and function of our experiences. We are bound by our embodiment. We are always experiencing ourselves as our bodies. We are never not experiencing our embodiment. There is no separation between “me” and “my body.” I am my body. If you kiss my body, you are kissing me. If you hit my body, you are hitting me.
And if you sever my breast, you are severing me. I do not say this in judgment of the medical necessity of women like myself who may require life-saving mastectomies, or against anyone who may need a lifesaving surgery that requires a body part amputation. I say this to honor the emotional toll of this kind of procedure. It is natural to love and protect our bodies as ourselves. And it is natural to feel fear and pain if we lose a part of ourselves. And it is natural for others to respond in empathy to another’s pain. If a person loses a limb, eye, organ, or even a baby toe because of an accident, disease, or violence this should evoke in others a natural empathetic wince response. Movies depicting war, medical crises, or natural disasters understand exactly this empathetic response. They play on our natural emotional responses to another person’s pain. These empathetic responses are beyond our conscious willing. We do not have to mentally think to ourselves, “that person is hurt, what might it be like to feel that pain?” Rather our response is an instantaneous sensed physical embodiment of their pain.
When breast amputation is sold as “top surgery” as opposed to mastectomy it is a subversion of the natural empathetic wince response. Rather than seeing the procedure as a loss of the whole, it is marketed as “gender-affirming,” by which we should understand that this is ego-affirming. It is a superficial body modification to placate vanity, image, and mental conception of self.
So-called “gender-affirming care” treats human beings as a series of Lego separates that can be taken apart and put back together rather than as an embodied whole.
This cult of gender preaches the ideology of dissociation. But we are fully embodied whole human beings. Our bodies are not just "a part" of our humanity, our bodies ARE our humanity. It is insane to act as if our bodies are inanimate sleeves that hold no meaning for us. Our bodies are how we sense, perceive, and interact with the world.
Our bodies find meaning through experiencing, feeling, and perceiving, wholistically, all at once. Our body is its own field of awareness, knowledge formation, and meaning-making, pre-cognitively. The language used in the ad copy above is the language of dissociation. This language and the mental abstraction it represents cuts humans off from the wholistic language that describes our direct physical sensory experience of the world-at-hand and our situation in it. The very word “nullification” is a cutting off from sensation.
Sensation as Guidance
All animals, including humans, are born with the adaptive tools to survive in the world. The basis of these tools rests in our embodiment, in our ability to respond to the sensations we feel. Sensations are information. Sensations are also feelings, both physical and emotional. To cut ourselves off from sensation is to cut ourselves off from our adaptive capacities. Our embodied sensations and instincts are our primary safeguarding tools. Our sensations are guides leading us towards nourishment/pleasure and away from pain. Trans ideology and “gender-affirming care” is a subversion of the natural pain/pleasure response system. When pain is equated with authenticity this dissociates the subject from being able to be attuned and responsive to their instinctual guidance system.
As I go through this journey to recover my health, I plan to write a number of essays on this topic. Below are some of the issues that I will be exploring. Please subscribe to my substack to stay up to date with my cancer journey as well as my insights into sex-based medicine vs “gender-affirming care.”
*See more pictures below about my activism over the years
Topics to Come
Part 2 - Glamorization of Breast Amputation & Marketing Self-Harm
Part 3 - Gleeful Dissociation & Giddy Post-Op Girls
Part 4 - Surgeons Speak on Mastectomies vs Top Surgeries
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*Still a Warrior for the Cause
Despite battling breast cancer, I am still a warrior for women and girls rights to boundaries around our bodies, privacy in our intimate spaces, fairness in sports, and our right to accurately name our uniquely female experiences as separate and unique from those of boys/men. I am still fighting for free speech, our rights as human beings to accurately name our direct sensory perceptions when it comes to sex. And I am still fighting for safeguarding for all children and to protect them from unnecessary drugs and plastic surgeries that cut them off from their adaptive instinctual tools.
Although I have cancer, please also remember me in some of these images (posted in no particular order):
Let Julie Swim Press Conference, Port Townsend, WA 2022
Let Women Speak, 2022, Tacoma, WA.
My favorite of your images is of you charging that guy moving in on Lierre. You're a badass!! Sending good energy for your healing, but if you do have to lose a body part, it will be ok. I've had to do it twice, despite trying the natural route first. I cried each time, but in the end, it was ok. I'm still here and relatively healthy and that's what matters... <3
So sorry to read about this, Amy. Value your voice so much. Prayers rising.