Humans have been modifying their bodies forever, likely since their dexterity became good enough to enable them to do so. The earliest record of body modification we have is from a Late Pleistocene man who lived in Africa between 12,000 and 20,000 years ago; he filed down his teeth with a sandstone file. Otzi the Iceman, whose mummified body was found in the Alps, had more than 60 tattoos. He lived around 3,300 years ago. The first written record of a body modification that we still practice to this day (you guessed it, circumcision) comes from Genesis, the first book of the Bible, which was probably written as we know it today around 2,500 years ago.
We, as a species, love to cause permanent changes to our bodies. We do it so much that it becomes routine: piercing earlobes, straightening teeth, cutting fallopian tubes. And yet we, as a culture, never fail to be scandalized when we encounter another culture’s displays of body modification. We shudder at bound feet and elongated heads and stretched necks.
Or removed breasts.
Body modification is a marker of group identity. This matters a lot to humans, so much so that they will go through significant physical pain to acquire it. There’s often ritual and storytelling involved, even when the practice is not done for explicitly religious reasons (lots of secular Jews will have their babies circumcised by mohels; getting braces is a rite of passage into teenagehood; we “let” girls have their ears pierced at specific and arbitrary ages).
Openly displaying the markers of group B while surrounded by mostly members of group A is an act of defiance, a low-intensity provocation that activates our hunter-gatherer brain. It says, “Yeah, I’m here, I probably have different goals than you, what are you going to do about it?” Even if, rationally speaking, cis and trans people do not compete for resources in any meaningful way, the hunter-gatherer brain starts getting worked up when members of different groups get too close.
This is why the “mainstream” freaks out when erstwhile starlets like Eliot Page and Liv Hewsom declare a transgender identity and flaunt their surgically-flattened chests: “Enemy within the ranks! And they’re coming for our kids!”
Transgender is today’s sensitive, thoughtful young person’s outcast identity of choice. In another age, such young people might have been Romantics, or Hippies, or Goths. This doesn’t diminish the reality of trans identity any less than Judaism diminishes the reality of Islam. Neither does it diminish the importance and power of the transgender movement, both in terms of what it does for its members, and the impact it has on society at large.
The transgender identity group, like any other group, requires would-be members to sacrifice something in order to prove their earnestness. Becoming a Christian requires baptism; becoming trans may require changing one’s name, pronouns, or appearance, or simply making a public statement deemed controversial and risky: “I am coming out as transgender.” Publicly adopting a group identity is meant to be fraught, as a test of faith, and it’s meant to create distance from non-group members while providing default closeness among the group. Page and Hewson’s elective mastectomies are no different than immersing yourself in the river and emerging born again. You are now different than you were; you’ve gained a new community while leaving your old one behind. You’re choosing to open yourself to suspicion and exclusion based on your group membership because the perceived benefits outweigh the costs.
Both the idealized narratives that Page, Hewson, and their supporters (“allies”) present around their surgeries (“I was depressed/not myself/living a lie, but now I’m living authentically/experience the euphoria of life/everything feels right”), and the outrage and criticism they inspire are as old as time. Elective mastectomies are trials by fire, costly displays of extraordinary devotion to a cause. They’re meant to inspire adulation, or revulsion, depending on group membership. But they’re neither evidence of the dawn of a more enlightened age, nor harbingers of civilizational decline.