Look. I’m going to be honest with you. Adopting that hard anti-plastic surgery stance while trans people’s lives and right to transition is at stake is absolutely horrendous timing. Knock it off.
Plastic surgery saves and rebuilds lives. While anti-aging culture and lookism are both detrimental to society, it’s important to remember that plastic surgery is healthcare.
People in the tags are nottttt getting it. I’m saying you should address the societal influences that lead young women to seek plastic surgery before you seek to villianize the plastics field and/or limit access to healthcare to anyone. Plastic surgery is healthcare.
I am not making this a ‘trans people versus feminists against lookism’ issue. You may require plastic surgery in your lifetime as well. Anyone could. The line of where plastic surgery is frivolous and driven by vanity or necessary for maintaining or creating a greater quality of life is far thinner than you think. That nose job may have been motivated by Eurocentric beauty standards or it may have been motivated by the desire to correct a deviated septum. I am saying that at a time when we are all losing our bodily autonomy and access to medical care at an alarming rate, now is not the time to be writing treatises on why access to certain forms of healthcare is bad.
im a trans man having top surgery this year and if a woman wanting a boob job had to go through all the exhausting loops I have with therapists and psychiatric evaluations for nearly 2 years then I wouldn’t feel better, I’d feel sorry for her. we BOTH should have been able to go to the doctor and said “I want my chest to be different” and to have it be done without a hassle, because we’re adults and we get to chose how our bodies look. a lot of times your self image just can’t be cured with body positivity and good self talk. no one else gets to judge someone for what they do with their body regardless of the reason.
Some people have no idea exactly what plastic surgery entails and it shows
The person who stitches your face back together after a motorcycle wreck? Plastic surgeons
The person who puts skin back on your body after a house fire? Plastic surgeons
The person who evens your tits out after breast cancer so you can have a workable bra Ever Again? Plastic surgeons
Plastic surgery can be purely cosmetic but they worked out a lot of the cosmetic stuff based on what they learned from emergency care
Plastic surgeons work in the ER on everything from reattaching severed body parts to fixing your broken nose - and yes, putting your face back on after an accident is also cosmetic surgery
“Oh obviously I didn’t mean actual medical emergencies” - didn’t you? Dysmorphia isn’t a trans-exclusive condition. Anyone can get it on any part of their body… which, yeah, includes that nose job you want to call frivolous
If the way you try to fight a social issue is by attacking medical care, you’re already in the wrong place; people who do get plastic surgery just for their looks are a symptom of the issue, not the cause
Making it even harder for the people who need plastic surgery to get it isn’t going to do a single damn thing to the propaganda machine that spews out all that lookism you hate
It’s just going to make more people miserable while the machine keeps telling them they’re worthless and ugly
Bodily autonomy is important and yeah, it’s a ridiculous argument to be trying to make when people are already not able to control their own healthcare, but it’s also fundamentally not going to do what you want it to do
The change you want won’t happen by making it so hard for people to change their own personal body that they give up. It happens when the mechanisms that tell people they must change their bodies in certain ways to be human are broken down to nothing and forgotten
This is a hard, complicated systemic change that needs to happen, and saying “plastic surgery bad” is very easy
The question is, what are you trying to do? Something easy, or something that actually makes a difference?