In The Defiant Middle, one of the things I wrote that women in midlife experience is erasure. That sense that you become invisible because you are no longer a viable sexual object in the eyes of heteronormative culture is partly a product of capitalism, which puts the end date of a woman’s viability around the time her ovaries stop working. But mostly, this erasure is just because of sexism. If you cannot make babies, and those babies can’t grow up to work and buy stuff to keep the engine of the economy running, you have no value to capitalism. If you are not young and fuckable, you have no value in a culture that defines youth as life’s apex.
This is why American women in particular become nonexistent in midlife. Our horror of death and aging has caused us to mostly hide the elderly away where we can’t see them, and with “preventative botox” and ten year olds using anti-aging serums happening on social media, this isn’t likely to change. A running joke I have with other women my age is that because we are invisible, we should start a shoplifting gang, stealing diapers and formula and tampons and condoms to give to younger women who can’t afford them. Today, I can walk into any store where ten years ago a salesperson would eagerly follow me around like a magnet and be completely ignored. It’s both liberating and humiliating.
Add on to this the things breast cancer takes from you – breasts, hair, a functioning brain, career goals, travel plans, a normal life expectancy, dignity, sleep, mental health, sexuality, you know, just minor stuff – and it can feel like you are entering into a post-gendered era as well. Right now, I look less like a woman than I do like a cross between a naked Ken Doll with severe chest scarring and a potato. And yet, when I do venture out into the world, even in a mask, hat, and some kind of shapeless hoodie, when someone does blink a few times and realize I’m standing in front of them, they will say something to affirm the fact that I am a woman. I am mostly invisible, but when I do insist on being seen, nobody is questioning my gender identity.
Trans and nonbinary people, however, don’t have this kind of luxury of movement and recognition. Many would love to be as invisible as I sometimes feel, and as easily affirmed as I am in my gender. Nobody is going to be alarmed when I go into a women’s bathroom. Nobody is going to care if I decide to compete in competitive sports. If I shop for prosthetic breasts, it’s fine because cancer took mine away, but a trans woman can be humiliated for doing the same thing. She and I, however, want those prosthetic breasts to give us the same feeling: of affirmation, of putting body and mind into alignment.
When you’re diagnosed with breast cancer, you’re fast tracked into seeing a plastic surgeon, often before you even know how serious your disease is. Reconstruction becomes an immediate conversation because many women feel the loss of their breasts acutely. Sometimes that’s because they’re mothers who’ve nursed, sometimes it’s because they just like their breasts, and sometimes it’s because they’ve been conditioned by our sexist culture that you have to have breasts to feel attractive.
A reconstructed breast is not technically a breast at all; it’s an implant, tissue moved from a flap in the stomach, or a ball of muscle moved from the shoulder to the chest. I opted out of reconstruction because according to every breast cancer patient I talked to, it inevitably seemed to lead to complications and more surgeries down the road, plus it felt like I was walking around with two hand grenades strapped to my chest. Thus I chose this Ken doll look. But somehow, people still look at me and see something called a “woman.”
So why can’t they look at a trans woman and see the same? For that matter, why can’t they look at the scars on the chest of a trans man and understand he had to go through years of medical red tape to align his body with his gender identity? For breast cancer patients, reconstructive surgery is generally fully covered by health insurance. For trans and nonbinary people, they often have to pay out of pocket for gender affirming surgery, get through a battery of mental health tests, and manage their own aftercare (well, I was actually kicked out of the hospital two hours after a double mastectomy, so “aftercare” in American health care is kind of a joke). Up to 50% of trans people will attempt suicide at some point, sometimes because they’re denied the same kind of gender affirming care that breast cancer patients get.
Yes, cancer can kill you, but so can being socially stigmatized, bullied, and discriminated against. The more fiercely people argue against the rights of trans and nonbinary people to live out their gender identities, the more fiercely people who have lost breasts, uteri, ovaries, testicles, or any other physical part of ourselves that is lazily assigned “male” or “female” should absolutely push back against that. We are not our chests. We are not our genitalia. We are so much more than that, unfolding, expanding, transforming and evolving in ways that mimic nature’s own vastly varied means of expressing gender. To erase other people because they don’t fit within our own narrow and restrictive ideas, including erasing people as they age, is just another form of erasing ourselves.
Image via The Breasties, a cancer advocacy group.