The “Destroy Your Binder” Video (Transcript)
The original video has been removed from YouTube. The transcript remains below for those interested in the history of the video or the genesis of this blog.
This video is cited in Entwistle, K. (2021), Debate: Reality check – Detransitioner’s testimonies require us to rethink gender dysphoria. Child Adolesc Ment Health, 26: 15-16. https://doi.org/10.1111/camh.12380
Transcript:
Hi, everybody. Um… I’m Kat, and in this video I’m going to discuss my relationship to breast, also known as chest binding.
So… right now, I’m actually wearing my binder. You can see how flat it makes me. It’s not perfect but it’s very easy for me to think it’s much “better” than the alternative. And the alternative is, of course, letting it be visible to myself and others that I have breasts. It’s not just their visibility– that other people can see them– that bothers me, but also being able to feel them, that they have weight, that they hang from my chest, and that they move around in a certain way.
So, I only started binding about a year ago, but before that I wore tight sports bras, and I wore them all the time. When I say “all the time”, I mean it. I didn’t quite shower in them but sometimes I honestly felt like I wanted to. I was one of those people who wore bras to bed. It got to the point where at a very basic sensory level it felt disgusting to feel my breasts against a shirt or without any compression at all. There always had to be another layer between myself and my chest.
I never was able to stomach wearing a normal bra with cups because I didn’t want my breast tissue to be supported in a way that made them perky and round and feminine. I didn’t ever want to make it seem like I endorsed having them or that I wanted to show them off. If they had to be visible then it also had to be visible that I hated them. I actually have a bad hunch to my back now (I don’t know if you can see it) because of slumping to hide my breasts ever since I developed them.
I actually started developing my breasts at 9 years old, and since my puberty was so early, it became a medical affair. I don’t really remember much about it, but I do remember my own mother and a series of doctors staring at my naked chest. My chest was barely different from the year before, except for the hard painful nubs of growing breast tissue beneath the skin. I knew when I started puberty it meant that I was “becoming a woman” and that this meant that it was not only doctors and not only my mother that would stare at me from now on.
People used to ask me when I was young why I was slouching all the time, and whether I hated myself, and whether I hated my body. But nobody actually asks me anymore because I guess it’s just become a part of me now. It is often easier to accept for me that my messed up back is part of me, and the way I hold myself is part of me, and my shame is part of me, than to accept that my breasts are.
I have pain in my back and my neck and my ribs from the way I hold my upper body to hide my breasts. When I was binding regularly I was also in pain from it. My binder is actually an approved commercial binder that many transgender and gender non-conforming people use, and it is supposed to be safe. But it hurt my ribs, and it constricted my breathing. I would get migraine headaches nearly every time I wore it from the compression of my nerves and from breathing too shallow. I can actually feel it starting to build… in my neck right now. At the time I was binding, I thought it was worth doing because it was more worth being in physical pain than being in the mental and emotional pain of recognizing my own body. I thought it was a sign of my own strength that I could bear the pain of binding, and that it was a sign of my resilience that I was using this tool to help me cope with my feelings.
What I now realize is that it was a lot like when I was cutting myself and using that as a tool to manage my intense emotions. Cutting actually helped me in a cruel sort of way; it was the only thing I had to prove to myself that my emotions were serious and that my emotions were real in the face of extreme emotional invalidation. I can see now that binding has a distinct similarity to this, as I felt like I needed to bind, or else my feelings about my body were not real. I couldn’t take the idea that I was more than just a piece of meat with breasts seriously, unless I acted it out on my body, and proved to myself and others that I could be seen as “more than a girl”.
What I believe now is that binding is ultimately a form of self-harm. I have never heard of someone who could do it easily and without some sort of pain or consequence to their body. I recognize that binding is a way for many of us to get through some really tough times, and for those of us living as men, it might be necessary for safety in various social environments. But binding is not safe, especially long term. I ask those of you who still bind to seriously sit with this thought, that binding is a form of self-harm, and just quietly honor your feelings about it.
You know, it took me years– like, five or more years– to get the nerve up to buy a binder. In many ways I was one of the fortunate ones, since I could afford to purchase my own validation instead of borrowing it secondhand. I had envied people with binders for years and years and how they looked, but I was too scared to dive in. When I bought my binder, and it finally arrived, amd I put it on, it was very tight. I could barely see any difference. My breasts just looked smashed and the binder just looked like a stupid bra. But when I put on a t-shirt over my chest, I acutally started laughing. At the time I thought it might be because of joy or elation at finally becoming who I wanted to be. But I don’t know what to make of it now. Maybe I was laughing at… the absurdity of it all
I still struggle with feelings about my breasts every single day. This is especially ever since I gained weight a few years ago. They have become large and obvious in a way that is difficult for me to see as anything but a hindrance to my life. I can’t even say that I… know my cup size because I can’t bear to actually measure my chest… and know what that means. Some days, I imagine my breasts as so revolting that they must be boils full of pus, or full of rotting skin and maggots. I have intrusive thoughts about removing them myself, and these feelings have even gone so far as to make me obsessively study breast anatomy in detail. I still get glimpses of myself in the mirror or my shadow on the wall, and I’m filled with nausea and terror knowing that this is how other people see me, and that I can’t escape this body without paying thousands of dollars to have a doctor with a scalpel perform an invasive, life-altering medical procedure in which my breasts are cut from my body… and destroyed.
I have these feelings, but I’m saying right now that I am not going to bind any more, because I know that it is not healthy for me in body or in spirit. I know these feelings that I have about my body– about my breasts– are not natural to me. I know now that I can work through them without causing physical pain to myself and without seeking to erase my own body. My body is not a canvas on which to re-enact the misogyny and abuse that have hurt me, and I refuse to keep doing this to myself.
I have scissors with me. I am going to cut off my binder so I can never use it to hurt myself again. I am committing myself to honoring and validating my feelings about my breasts and my body from here on out, without having to perform even more suffering on myself. I sincerely hope that you who are watching can do this too. Destroy your binder. I love you all.
You can do it. Goodbye.
