Boobs

Nonbinary: Discussion

Individual desires HRT using feminizing hormones but doesn't want breasts. Gets lots of booing and hissing and claims that it's basically genetics.

Okay, for STARTERS, I used to use this analogy on alternative medicine sites:

Your genes are kind of like a building blueprint but it's crazy to think what gets built is to some particular specification.

It's a bit more like a drawing of a two bedroom house and exactly how it turns out depends on if you are building with Adobe in the American Southwest or with logs on a homestead in the American Northeast.

AND it's extremely challenging to try to STUDY that scientifically. They occasionally have weird one off opportunities to compare outcomes between identical twins separated at birth but it's observational and NOT "We took two identical twins and intentionally fed them differently in this specific way to check blah blah blah hypothesis."

Second, I am pretty freaking sure there's NO studies on engineering the breasts you WANT. That's just not something we scientifically investigate, no.

So my best understanding of life, the universe and everything boob/female body related is:

1. Anorexic women can end up quite flat chested and stop menstruating. 

I always thought this was purely starvation BUT with doing this blog, I have learned cholesterol is a precursor for all sex hormones, so being extremely thin and underfed likely suppresses hormone production.

2. I've read a bit about female soldiers in historical settings where they served in the military by pretending to be male. 

I've thought a lot about it and probably they hid their gender in part by being underfed and working physically hard suppressing breasts and menstruation. Anorexic women don't just eat far too little. They frequently exercise a great deal as well.

It was once pointed out to me the few reports we have of women serving in the military as male almost certainly represents an undercount. People who died on the field of battle may have been left there without burial and no one was checking the gender of their mutilated rotting body.

So anyway I am confident you CAN minimize breasts by being very thin. 

I am NOT recommending that as a method AND I CANNOT say that's possible on HRT because part of the mechanism MAY be suppression of hormone production. This post is solely intended to outline better knowledge than what you hear ad nauseum in the Overton Window.

3. Female bodybuilders typically have fairly small breasts. They also typically have extremely low body fat percentages.

Again, I have no means to say if or how much that's about suppression of hormone production.

4. I've read and heard that women typically gain a cup size with every pregnancy.

5. I've heard people claim seemingly credibly that women having sex very regularly with men get bustier. 

6. I've read that women in traditional subsistence cultures who breastfeed for years are able to space out their children.

I've seen it speculated that this means breastfeeding suppresses ovulation. I have absolutely no reason to believe that is true.

I think it's much more likely that if you are part of a subsistence culture and wearing a baby strapped to you while gathering food, it can take years to gain enough weight to support fertility.

It requires 25,000 stored calories in fat to get pregnant. A little known means to get pregnant without fertility treatments if you are an upper class White American woman who believes you "can never be too rich or too thin" is to gain a mere five pounds.

I was UNDERWEIGHT after having my first child and was breastfeeding and eating a 2000 calorie SNACK every evening while watching a movie and that baby was six months old before I stopped feeling like I was starving to death. So I can well imagine if you work physically hard and have trouble getting enough to eat in a subsistence culture while breastfeeding, it can potentially take a few years before your body decides it can support another pregnancy.

That's an argument again for a fat angle to how female bodies work and fat -- specifically cholesterol -- is a precursor to estrogen. So I again cannot clearly state that it's entirely about calories and not related to hormone production.

I think I've run out of information on boobs but the OP in the link above is looking to suppress balding and to seem a bit younger and have nicer skin.

So those bits of the discussion AGAIN seem to support my hypothesis that being trans is a sex hormone syndrome that impairs immune function and getting the right hormones makes you generally healthier in a way that reads as "youthful and vital."

There may be other ways to achieve those goals and there may not be. If you want those things but not breasts, probably the thing to do is research other options for achieving those pieces of it.

Unless I'm correct that a large part of dysphoria is impaired immune function and a lot of this stuff is really some kind of coded message that "I NEED hormones for my body to baseline FUNCTION properly and be healthy."

BUT, if so, perhaps identifying as non-binary MAY be a coded message that "I somehow need something different from either my AMAB natural hormones or straight up femme HRT."

What exactly that might be, I have absolutely no clue.

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