Transgenderism in pre-colonial times.

[pax_morgana]

I'm in the planning stages of a story that takes place in an Earth analogue world with the main setting being a small nation similar to pre-colonial midwestern America. The majority of the characters are of a native tribal culture, and my protagonist is, for all intents and purposes, a transgender man. His people (an as-of-yet-unnamed tribe,

Comments

[twilight2000]

Extreme Athletics will do this better than binding. The harder the athlete trains, the more the secondary gender traits (particularly breasts, in the case of women) will be suppressed, as a rule (there are exceptions, often leading to an early exit from athletics for those teen girls who continue to grow - top heavy does not an athlete make).

I'm sure there are other ways to handle this - but constant, sustained athleticism will work almost every time. And I'm talking about something like 2-3 hours a day, 4-6 days a week from a young age (at least 7, maybe younger) - look at the female olympic athletes for lots of examples of this.

[the_physicist]

well, you can definitely try to delay puberty, increase T production and decrease normal estrogen production etc that way, but there are health risks involved and you have to keep it up even after puberty to maintain that shape, like you said, lots of working out constantly.

[twilight2000]

Right - because when you stop, you start developing - female athletes have to deal with that reality. So yea, she'd have to keep it up to keep the development down.

[scatteredgray]

Also, risk of osteoporosis from the lowered levels of sex hormones if it goes on for years.

[carlyinrome]

I want to say no, because think of the decades that women wore corsets all the time. (Though that may be an imperfect analogy. My knowledge of nineteenth century underwear is incomplete.) But I don't think the breast binding to foot binding analogy works, either. Foot binding literally changes the shapes of the bones; the bones in the feet are broken and then trained to grow back in the more compact form. Because the shape and size of breasts aren't dependent upon skeletal structure, I can't imagine a way that binding them could change the way they would grow.

[twilight2000]

While some corsets of some periods also reshaped bones (ribs all screwed up in many women), they didn't seem to affect the soft tissue in the same way. And it was always the lower ribs that were reshaped, not the upper ones supporting the bust.

[syntinen_laulu]

But European 18th- and 19th-century corsetry wasn’t designed to eliminate the breasts; just to redistribute them, so to speak. Also, it wasn’t worn at night, and very often not when dressed casually around the house; for example, 18th-century ladies wouldn’t put on fully-boned corsets till they dressed to go out or for dinner, and would breakfast, instruct the cook, and write letters wearing either lighter half-boned or un-boned support wear, or none at all. So whatever effect it had on the breasts really wouldn’t be comparable to full-on 24/7 binding.

[the__ivorytower]

As a kind of weird question, what about... cutting them off? I don't know if the information I've heard is simply anachronism, but I believe there were traditions (attributed to the Amazons) that would cut off one or both breasts because it got in the way of combat. If this information is correct, off they would go, though I can only imagine such would be very painful based on the potential amount of medicine available.

[the_physicist]

was something like valium available maybe? anything anti-anxiety would help a huge amount.

[beccastareyes]

I'd also be concerned about sepsis -- surgery was pretty dicey pre-germ theory and pre-antibiotics. In general, the surgeon had to think that whatever he was trying to fix had a higher risk of mortality than the surgery itself. And breast removal seems like it would be a major surgery.

[nineveh_uk]

Mastectomy could be done pre-anaesthesia and pre-sepsis. The novelist Fanny Burney wrote a detailed letter describing her experience of it (summary at http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=12724 ). But it does require a fair degree of medical technology, and a lucky patient.

[transemacabre]

Google "breast ironing". I saw this on an episode of Taboo. In some parts of Africa, mothers take a heavy piece of wood, heat it in a fire, and then press it to their young daughter's chests over and over. This retards or outright stops development of the breasts. It ain't pretty to look at, though.

[oroburos69]

Maybe a stupid question, but even if breast-binding doesn't make breasts smaller, why can't the character think that it does? They could just have naturally small breasts and attribute it to binding them, true or false.

However, on a related, and sort of horrible note, you may wish to look up breast ironing, which apparently can lead to lack of development for one or both breasts.