(LifeSiteNews) — Editor’s note: Discussion of primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Reader discretion advised.
Decades from now, scholars will surely study the way our entire mainstream media joined with the transgender movement to promote gender dysphoria and the disfiguring and mutilation of young people. Surgeries that involve slicing off healthy breasts and penises and removing testicles are regularly referred to as “life-saving”; puberty blockers are presented as “essential healthcare”; warning bells sounded by physicians and research illustrating devastating long-term effects are written off as transphobic propaganda.
Consider the example of “breast binders.” Breast binders are essentially wraps that flatten the breasts of girls who wish to identify as boys so that they can “present” as male. Binders can cause back pain, shoulder pain, chest pain, shortness of breath, and fractured ribs—especially if used long-term. They can also permanently damage breast tissue and leave breasts looking flat and wrinkled, like deflated balloons. If girls use breast binders as they enter puberty, the results are often irreversible.
But breast binders are all the rage right now, promoted by trans vloggers and YouTube stars as well as activists. The Hartford Courant, a Connecticut newspaper, ran a shameless promo for the transgender accessory under the headline: “A survival tool in Connecticut transgender community, breast binders are in high demand: ‘It is literally life-saving.’” The column, sponsored by a non-profit news group called the Connecticut Health I-Team, stated that breast binders were in such high demand that the Health Care Advocates International in Stratford, a LGBT outfit, was running out of them:
HCAI received 126 binder requests in the first three weeks of January alone, crushing last year’s numbers and temporarily wiping out inventory. The group sent out 190 binders in all of 2021. A quarter of them went to Connecticut youths, with the rest shipped nationwide and beyond.
“The numbers are jumping because there is such a need,” said Tony Ferraiolo, the Youth & Family Program director at HCAI. He began the binder program on his own before working with HCAI because he knew from experience the difference a binder can make in a young person’s life. “When you give a child hope for a better life, they won’t want to take their life. When we give them a binder, they’re walking tall. It is literally life-saving.”
Chest binders compress breasts to give the appearance of a flat chest. For transgender males who were designated female at birth but who identify as male, developed breasts can trigger body dysphoria so debilitating that it can lead to severe depression and worse.
To translate: A trans activist is telling kids that breast binders are necessary to literally save their lives if they struggle with gender dysphoria. To the media-reading public, his message is moral blackmail: Support our distribution of these body-disfiguring breast binders or you want kids to kill themselves. You’re a trans activist, or you have blood on your hands.
The article goes on to cite one teen girl who identifies as a boy named Oliver who, in her role as president of “the school’s Gender Sexuality Alliance,” took it upon herself to spread the good news about free breast binders. “Literally minutes after he [sic] posted about the free binders, requests from classmates landed in [her] in-box,” the column noted. If kids couldn’t get real binders, explained one activist, they will often “fashion their own wrap out of Ace bandages, duct tape, plastic wrap.” As one therapist put it:
Nobody really teaches anybody how to bind. I always think of preschoolers who play dress-up—nobody plays dress-up with a binder, so where are you supposed to learn these things? People learn either from a friend or from the internet.
You’ll notice what she’s doing there—she’s laying the groundwork to defend teaching kids about breast-binders and other trans accessories. Despite that, the same therapist—Janice Stoner of the Center for Gender Medicine and Wellness—admitted that these binders cause real damage:
During Middlesex’s 2019 annual Day of G.I.F.T.S. (Gathering Information for Transgender Services), Stoner discovered that “80 to 90% of people who use binders had a negative effect,” ranging from skin irritation to constricted breathing to pain in the shoulders, chest and rib cage. “There was a whole host of discomforts. Everybody had something.” This troubled Stoner, an occupational therapist whose goal is to “make people independent in their daily life needs. It should not be painful to get dressed, to represent who you are in a comfortable way.”
Instead of recognizing that the problem was the binders themselves rather than the style, she launched a study on the “pulmonary implications” of binding and ways to limit the damage (which likely cannot be completely eliminated.) The same column, incidentally, discusses how the free binders being distributed are a lifeline for children whose parents do not want them to destroy their bodies in such ways. Trans activists are “rescuing” children from their parents, and the children will never be the same. That is why they launch LGBT clubs in schools—so that students can promote these things to their peers without the knowledge of their parents.
Act accordingly. Check to see if these clubs are at your child’s school. If your children are in public schools, pull them out. Look at what your children are watching on the Internet. And above all, hold them close.
