Whether having breasts is a minor thing to the person who has them depends greatly on the size.
Below a certain size, you can have breast development that’s visible when nude, but easy to hide if you want to. Bras aren’t generally necessary (though they can be an aesthetic preference or helpful for reducing friction when clothes move across the area), and little to no effort or discomfort is required to wear a sports bra or binder and comfortably wear clothing cut for body types without breasts. The current selfies in the post make look to me like the author is almost certainly in this category. Plenty of women, both cis and trans, have less volume of breast tissue than a certain phenotype of obese cis men.
Above a certain size, having breasts can be a major inconvenience, even for people who generally like having them. Bras become mandatory for avoiding pain when moving about in one’s daily life, and rather than cute decorations, they’re expensive feats of structural engineering. Finding any clothing which fits flatteringly can become between difficult and impossible, and major social stigma can be experienced for choosing clothes that the viewer perceives as “too revealing”.
Are you calling it a non-minor thing to you as a reader just learning about Sapphire’s journey, or a non-minor thing to you as someone considering the pros and cons of transition? The former would seem kind of out of line, but the latter seems very understandable to me.
FWIW, breast growth generally proceeds slowly enough that you can stop it by stopping the hormones causing it, if that’s an option for you. (it’s not an option when the hormones show up by default at puberty, so that’s one of the many facets of being human that’s distressing to some teens...)
(Adding to this) My sense is that for thin trans women you will almost certainly not end up with seriously inconveniently-sized breasts unless you get implants. It’s not a guarantee as I do know trans women with pretty huge bazonkas but it’s certainly a strong tendency.
Before I transitioned I was non-overweight and had moderate gynecomastia. It never posed any problems for my ability to present as male or to be attractive to straight women.
Whether it’s a big deal depends on the person, but one objective piece of evidence is male plastic surgery statistics: looking at US plastic surgery statistics for year 2022, surgery for gynecomastia (overdevelopment of breasts) is the most popular surgery for men: 23k surgeries per year total, 50% of total male body surgeries and 30% of total male cosmetic surgeries. So it seems that not having breasts is likely quite important for a man’s body image.
(note that this ignores base rates, with more effort one could maybe compare the ratios of [prevalence vs number of surgeries] for other indications, but that’s very hard to quantify for other surgeries like tummy tuck—what’s the prevalence of needing a tummy tuck?)
The degree to which one would see this as a major downside would be strongly correlated with the factors that cause one to start taking HRT. There is a popular TERF narrative that detransitioners universally realise that everything was a mistake and regret the physical changes. From observation, however, this is rare and, if there’s any concrete concrete identifiable reason for detransition like “I found Jesus Christ”, detransitioners tend to not express significant levels of distress about the fact that they experienced physical changes.
I think the people arguing it’s a minor thing are being nonsensical but I also think this is sufficiently obviously a consequence of HRT which doesn’t go away off it that I’m not convinced it needs to be in the top. I guess it could be nice to have available for people who haven’t even considered taking HRT and therefore don’t know about it, especially since this seems to be the main consequence, but it’s not really its magnitude or relevance for gender explorers that does this.
Seems like this should be in a tl;dr at the top. Not judging but this isn’t a minor thing.
Whether having breasts is a minor thing to the person who has them depends greatly on the size.
Below a certain size, you can have breast development that’s visible when nude, but easy to hide if you want to. Bras aren’t generally necessary (though they can be an aesthetic preference or helpful for reducing friction when clothes move across the area), and little to no effort or discomfort is required to wear a sports bra or binder and comfortably wear clothing cut for body types without breasts. The current selfies in the post make look to me like the author is almost certainly in this category. Plenty of women, both cis and trans, have less volume of breast tissue than a certain phenotype of obese cis men.
Above a certain size, having breasts can be a major inconvenience, even for people who generally like having them. Bras become mandatory for avoiding pain when moving about in one’s daily life, and rather than cute decorations, they’re expensive feats of structural engineering. Finding any clothing which fits flatteringly can become between difficult and impossible, and major social stigma can be experienced for choosing clothes that the viewer perceives as “too revealing”.
Are you calling it a non-minor thing to you as a reader just learning about Sapphire’s journey, or a non-minor thing to you as someone considering the pros and cons of transition? The former would seem kind of out of line, but the latter seems very understandable to me.
FWIW, breast growth generally proceeds slowly enough that you can stop it by stopping the hormones causing it, if that’s an option for you. (it’s not an option when the hormones show up by default at puberty, so that’s one of the many facets of being human that’s distressing to some teens...)
(Adding to this) My sense is that for thin trans women you will almost certainly not end up with seriously inconveniently-sized breasts unless you get implants. It’s not a guarantee as I do know trans women with pretty huge bazonkas but it’s certainly a strong tendency.
Before I transitioned I was non-overweight and had moderate gynecomastia. It never posed any problems for my ability to present as male or to be attractive to straight women.
i think they presented a pretty good argument that it is actually rather minor
Well, I don’t
Whether it’s a big deal depends on the person, but one objective piece of evidence is male plastic surgery statistics: looking at US plastic surgery statistics for year 2022, surgery for gynecomastia (overdevelopment of breasts) is the most popular surgery for men: 23k surgeries per year total, 50% of total male body surgeries and 30% of total male cosmetic surgeries. So it seems that not having breasts is likely quite important for a man’s body image.
(note that this ignores base rates, with more effort one could maybe compare the ratios of [prevalence vs number of surgeries] for other indications, but that’s very hard to quantify for other surgeries like tummy tuck—what’s the prevalence of needing a tummy tuck?)
The degree to which one would see this as a major downside would be strongly correlated with the factors that cause one to start taking HRT. There is a popular TERF narrative that detransitioners universally realise that everything was a mistake and regret the physical changes. From observation, however, this is rare and, if there’s any concrete concrete identifiable reason for detransition like “I found Jesus Christ”, detransitioners tend to not express significant levels of distress about the fact that they experienced physical changes.
I think the people arguing it’s a minor thing are being nonsensical but I also think this is sufficiently obviously a consequence of HRT which doesn’t go away off it that I’m not convinced it needs to be in the top. I guess it could be nice to have available for people who haven’t even considered taking HRT and therefore don’t know about it, especially since this seems to be the main consequence, but it’s not really its magnitude or relevance for gender explorers that does this.