Google encourages girls to self-harm for Trans Awareness Week

For the benefit of those who have been living in a cave, this week is Trans Awareness Week.

Google decided to mark the occasion with a front page link to a celebration of the harmful cultural practice of breast binding.

The article appeared in some jurisdictions via the "Trans Awareness Week" link at the bottom of their main search page. It said "There is a freedom that comes when your inside and outside align… Chest binders are a critical way for trans and GNC people to affirm who they are, safely."

There is so much to unpack here. First, what happened to Google's motto, and corporate code of conduct, "Don't be evil?" Feeling that was setting too high a bar for themselves, they downgraded it to "Do the right thing." How could any responsible adult think it morally right to encourage young people to cut off healthy body parts or suppress them until they inhibit breathing?

Google may benefit its bottom line by embracing the radical trans extremism which represents a PR offensive on behalf of corporate and philanthropic interests. 'Virtue' signals are cheap, and benefit manufacturers of a range of consumer items from pharmaceuticals, to medical equipment, unconvincing and badly-written books, man-sized high heels and pornography.

"Freedom," the piece claims, comes from cutting off healthy body parts to match an idealized image in the mind. What kind of freedom is that? The freedom to self-harm? The freedom to punish your own body as though it is the source of psychosocial disease?

Such a peculiar definition of freedom benefits corporate and philanthropic interests, while leaving existing power structures undisturbed. Young people are explicitly encouraged, by corporates like Google/Alphabet, to turn their distress in on their own body, rather than look outwards and seek social change. How convenient.

However, if a young person decides they do want to see social change, they are drawn into "progressive" politics which not only celebrates harmful practices such as breast binding, and the transing of lesbian and gay youth, but makes it mandatory. At the same time, they are told that feminists and conservatives who question the trans narrative are evil bigots. They are encouraged to reject their families and embrace their "new glitter family."

How convenient it is that self-harm, with paraphernalia such a breast binders, is sold as rebellious social justice activism. It's not a civil rights movement, it's top-down AstroTurf laid by extremely rich and influential men. Girls who bind are vulnerable. Corporations are taking advantage of that vulnerability to drive trades which will fill their coffers for years to come.

As for "safely," this is a weasel word. There is no safe way to compress breast tissue into the ribs over an extended period of time, while a girl is having the growth spurts of puberty. Just as the harmful cultural practice of corsetry in the Victorian era caused deformity of the ribcage, shortness of breath, fainting, compression of internal organs and immobilization, breast binding causes a similar suite of avoidable health complaints: back pain, breast tissue growing between the ribs, breathlessness, reduced lung growth, and immobilization.

Let's not mince words or be too polite to spare Google's blushes: what we are seeing here is a powerful multinational corporation promoting self-mutilation to vulnerable girls. The ones who exit puberty and "detransition" will not be able to get their breasts back to functioning normally, should they decide they want to become mothers, and attempt to breastfeed. One would imagine that mastitis, a routine risk for mothers with un-damaged breasts, would become even more of an issue. Mastitis is no joke. Once flattened beyond recognition, the temptation to simply have the breasts removed must be overwhelming, in which case breastfeeding is off the table.

A sixteen year old can have no idea about how she will eventually feel about the prospect of motherhood, or how she might feel faced with mastectomy scars when her instincts prompt her to nourish her baby from her own body. The emotional and psychological cost cannot be reckoned with in advance. Crossing into motherhood, everything changes. You have to go there to understand. All older women can do is try to protect their daughters from making irreversible decisions they may come to regret in ways they cannot yet comprehend.

I dread to think what impact lactation changes would have on breast tissue which has been compressed between the ribs. I suspect no research into this will have been done because, well, they're only females, and we are all expected to applaud girls who have their breasts amputated in a vain attempt to escape their sex. We are all expected to deny and minimize what detransitioned young women are telling us. The manifold health implications are simply not factored into public discourse.

Again, we see the invidious conveyor belt of trans "healthcare"—a euphemism for grooming, if ever there was one—at play: it starts with supposedly harmless 'social transitioning' where adults call the child by a name associated with the other sex, and collude in their cross-sex fantasy; once logged in the system, they are hastened towards puberty blockers, then cross-sex hormones, then surgeries to remove healthy body parts, then surgeries to construct functionless simulacra of opposite sex organs, then repeat surgeries to repair the damage caused by the latter. They remain mega-consumers of pharmaceuticals for the rest of their lives.

How convenient for industries in pursuit of growth: our children—our girls, especially—are cash cows for them.

Why is one of the world's most powerful and influential companies selling a harmful cultural practice as liberatory to vulnerable groups—young black and Latino lesbians? Why is the exploitativeness not immediately apparent to the company?

Could it be part of the disease in liberal orthodoxy? Cultural relativism is one reason why once-comfortable liberals, like myself, increasingly reject its tenets. When young girls in the developing world are subject to breast ironing, it is rightly condemned for two obvious reasons: first, the health risk and irreversible harm; second, it is wrong to traumatize girls in the name of protecting them from male violence. Instead, there should be better measures to mitigate and discourage male violence.

The rationale of breast ironing, or flattening, is that, with their secondary sex characteristics obscured, men and boys are less likely to subject the girls to sex-based violence. It is a desperate measure by desperate mothers. In practice, girls are merely being subjected to double harm.

Trans activists posing as healthcare providers also promote the harmful cultural practice of breast binding to girls. Even during a viral pandemic which effects the lungs and causes respiratory failure, their priority was to ensure girls continued to bind their breasts, rather than cast them off, overcome their bodily self-loathing, and breathe freely.

While one would assume that no trained and regulated medical professional would recommend girls continue to bind their breasts while suffering from Coronavirus, Point of Pride recommends taking it off now and then.

"Once you take your binder off, be sure to cough. It helps to loosen your upper body, expand your lungs to their full capacity, and stretches the muscles between your ribs."

This "advice"—which is astonishing, given the severity of respiratory covid symptoms—begs the question of why these adults, supposedly committed to healthcare, recommend girls crush their breasts and restrict their breathing to begin with. Are they sadists? Why is their advice simply not to stop binding, period, and seek mental health support? The only answer which makes sense is that they are grooming girls to accept being sexually objectified, and that they think this is OK, even laudable.

These days, a medical doctor is as likely to sign up for a double mastectomy to relieve their own distress at being female, as to recommend girls ditch their binders for good. One British TV doctor has publicized just such a decision, yet she is considered competent to advise children about taking care of their mental and physical health. One wonders whether a doctor who had undergone other types of cosmetic surgery, e.g. silicone implants and a facelift, would be promoted as a role model for youth, under normal circumstances?

Of course, these are not normal circumstances. We are seeing a brazen power grab by the gender identity lobby, on behalf of corporations which see profit streams in artificial identities, and even in breaking down the female body for parts, a phenomenon which is beyond the scope of this piece.

What better sales representative than a medical doctor who buys into the grim logic of sex-denialism? Give her a national TV pulpit from which to indoctrinate a generation of ROGD, lesbian, autistic and abuse survivor girls.

Needless to say, when medical doctors are encouraging girls to damage their breasts, we have a serious cultural problem which needs to be tackled head-on. Perhaps Trans Awareness Week will bring yet more attention to this trend, and it will start to shrivel on exposure to daylight. Is this turbo-charged corporate misogyny really the best we can hope for, for your daughters?

In the meantime, Google should justify why it is encouraging black lesbian girls to damage their breasts. There is no good reason for doing so, but it would be instructive to hear them try.