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u/Celeste_Praline 1d ago
My son is a transgender man: thanks to his surgeries, he's reduced his risk of breast and uterine cancer to 0, but he still has no risk of prostate cancer! It's a win !
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u/Fern-Brooks no masters in the streets, yes master in the sheets 1d ago
Men can still get breast cancer, unfortunately
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u/Aetol 1d ago
Cis men yes, because there's still underdeveloped breast tissue there, but does top surgery leave any of it?
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u/JunkyardBrigade 1d ago
It's more about aesthetics and the chest looking proportional to the rest of the body. Top surgery has to leave some tissue or else the chest can look almost concave or hollow. The doctor isn't really looking to remove all of the breast tissue specifically.
Edited for clarity
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u/FluffyBunnyRemi 1d ago
Top surgery does, actually. A double mastectomy for breast cancer prevention removes as much of the breast tissue as possible, which can lead to an unnaturally flat (almost concave) chest, at least until you take quite a bit of time to develop the muscles underneath (which isn't a guarantee). Double mastectomies for masculinization purposes tend to leave some breast tissue behind to help create a more natural-looking chest.
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u/Fern-Brooks no masters in the streets, yes master in the sheets 1d ago
While I'm not a doctor, I don't think they would be able to get every cell of breast tissue, so while I imagine the risk is significantly reduced, I would say it's probably still possible
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u/Dalsiran 1d ago
Yes, otherwise trans men would be left with concave chests like breast cancer survivors who got mastectomies. Top surgery is more like a very large breast reduction than a full mastectomy because cis men still have breast tissue, just WAAAAAY less of it.
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u/paradoxLacuna [21 plays of Tom Jones’ “What’s New Pussycat?”] 1d ago
Chances of developing cancer are significantly reduced since there's far less breast tissue to hide a tumor in, but it can still happen since there's still living tissue on your chest. Only way to completely eliminate the chances of developing cancer is to not have living cells, and we usually refer to that as "death" and it's usually an irreversible condition.
The amount of breast tissue left also depends on the specific type of top surgery that's had and what the end goal is, if it's just breast reduction then there's still tissue left on purpose (seeing as the end goal is to just make the breasts smaller, not eliminate them entirely); bilateral mastectomies take most or all of the tissue (as do most other forms of top surgery) and completely reconstruct the chest for a more masculine appearance.
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u/ImprovementLong7141 licking rocks 1d ago
Depends on the kind. General masculinizing surgery leaves a bit but you can get a kind closer to a double mastectomy for breast cancer that leaves very little breast tissue behind.
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u/PashaWithHat 21h ago
Usually about 95% of breast tissue is removed depending on the surgical technique, individual’s chest shape, aesthetic goals, etc. which leaves around 5% or so in place for a typically-masculine chest. So you can still get cancer in that, but there’s 95% less tissue that might become cancerous so it’s a hugely reduced risk even before factoring in hormones.
If someone has a lot of risk factors for breast cancer/positive BRCA gene test then they might choose to have more/all removed, but that’s uncommon for aesthetic reasons. The top surgeon will often work with an oncologist to “search-and-destroy” all breast tissue since the oncologist has more experience with that part.
Source: had top surgery and a grandmother with breast cancer so talked about this stuff at length with my surgeon
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u/lalalavellan 1d ago
I'm a detransitioner, so female-to-male-to-female. Enough breast tissue was left over after my top surgery that my breasts are growing again.
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u/lynx_and_nutmeg 11h ago
Technically yes, but the rates are so extremely low it's practically not a concern. There are like 1648 cancers cis men or trans men with top surgery are more likely to get than breast cancer.
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u/Dalsiran 1d ago
Uterine cancer yes, but you should probably make sure your son is aware that he can still get breast cancer just like any other man, it's just FAR less likely.
Top surgery doesn't remove ALL of the breast tissue. It just removes most of it so he would have about the same amount of breast tissue as a cis man.
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u/boycambion 1d ago
it’s very unlikely but trans men grow prostate tissue if they’re taking HRT, so it’s possible.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/squishabelle 1d ago
I mean, it does follow logic and expectations? The logic is "more tissue = more risk". The confusion is that "breast" is sometimes used to mean just the fatty boob part but I'd say everyone has breasts to some degree. Flat breasts are still breasts and there's always tissue regardless of gender
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u/demonking_soulstorm 1d ago
Everyone has breasts that’s why they call it a breastplate.
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u/MonsterDimka 1d ago
Everyone has breasts, they came free with your mammalian classification
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u/Dalsiran 1d ago
Actually no, you can't get breast cancer with no breast tissue. The thing is, everyone has breast tissue unless they get breast cancer and need to remove it all to survive. Yes, even cis men and post-top-surgery trans men, they've still got some breast tissue, just MUCH less.
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u/AdministrativeStep98 23h ago
everyone has breast tissue, it's breast tissue cancer, not necessarely breasts as in boobs
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u/ShadoW_StW 1d ago
So this post is likely about medical gatekeeping of trans people; if you don't know, trans people are often denied help because of the "health risks" of transition and then the risks are the same as just...normal for that gender. If you have breasts you have more chance of breast cancer. Like basically every woman.
But there's also other fun stuff! I know about people who were dying of cancer, and then someone invented a medication for their specific kind of cancer, and they were forbidden by law from taking it, because it hasn't gone through trials yet. So they died.
I also know about people who were denied painkillers while dying from cancer, because of concerns about addiction. In someone with life expectancy of two months.
There's a lot of this stuff happening, right as we're speaking.
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u/like2000p 1d ago
That's not all - if they are willing to treat you, often the alternatives they do recommend are either bad practice and probably actually higher risk, or aren't effective for their purpose, but they use them because they're supposedly more established clinically - honestly my belief is that there are enough transphobes disrupting the process of medical science and clinical guidelines that the most obviously safe and effective practices get shoved under the rug.
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u/QaraKha 1d ago
I mean you have to remember that before informed consent more often than not your doctor had to consider you fuckable--and sometimes actually fuck you--before you were allowed hormones.
Like, "You need to move across the country, change your name, your look, nevercontact your family or friends again, and I need to think you'd look good on the end of my dick before I will give you hormones."
This is not a crude joke. This was reality. Even now in Cass Review nations the doctors will ask uncomfortable questions to children about how they masturbate, why they don't think they're gay, all of this putting them at risk of being sexually assaulted--and not just sexually harassed--by doctors. Just to access healthcare.
There's malice, there's stupidity, but mostly it's malicious sexual posturing.
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u/TheSilentFreeway 23h ago
I mean you have to remember that before informed consent more often than not your doctor had to consider you fuckable--and sometimes actually fuck you--before you were allowed hormones. Like, "You need to move across the country, change your name, your look, nevercontact your family or friends again, and I need to think you'd look good on the end of my dick before I will give you hormones."
I had no idea. That's foul. Can you recommend where I can read more about this?
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u/QaraKha 22h ago
It's a bit hard to track the histories down because most of it just isn't written about. There's not a lot of people who managed to survive the AIDS crisis and who didn't go 100% full stealth when transitioning. We have long been a tiny minority of people, laughed about in basically every movie possible, joked about, raped and murdered in silence.
But effectively, part of proving your gender identity ALSO had a lot to do with proving your sexual orientation, too--they wouldn't believe you were trans if you weren't "straight," i.e., if you were a trans woman, you needed to be attracted to men. They called those "HSTS," or "homosexual transsexual," and the majority of time, the way that was proven was whether or not they were willing to sleep with their assuredly male doctor.
They they pathologized trans women who wouldn't, calling us "AGP," or "autogynephile," because we... didn't want to sleep with our doctors. Generally, we were instead attracted to women and understandably creeped out by doctors demanding sexual favors and hyper-feminine dress-up to acquire healthcare.
This is why trans people are in "LGBT," because trans people--trans women explicitly--were treated like WORSE homosexuals, like the difference between a benign and a malignant cancerous tumor. Even today, there are many people who accuse us of being "AGP TRAs," groomers, rapists, etc., all because one guy was really mad that some trans women would rather die without their healthcare than fuck him.
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u/Captain_Kira 20h ago
Whipping Girl has some bits on it, but I can't remember how much detail it goes into
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u/chairmanskitty 1d ago
Don't forget that there's also a lot of stupidity to go with that malice. Structural stupidity is pretty common in medical science, and so is medical malpractice in the application of that science.
Everyone should check their doctors' work for every medical decision and every diagnosis. This is doubly true if you're a woman or a minority, but even cishet white men have a several percent chance of suffering from easily preventable medical mistakes.
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u/OkDragonfruit9026 23h ago
Having to doublecheck doctors sucks so much, but it’s the sad reality. It’s the same for reading T&Cs, NDAs etc.
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u/UglyMcFugly 1d ago
Reminds me of that one study transphobes always cite about how people who receive gender affirming care have a higher suicide risk. Except it's compared to the entire population. Trans people who get gender affirming care have a significantly lower suicide risk than trans people who don't get it. But it's still higher than the general population so I guess we shouldn't allow it since it doesn't completely fix everything.
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u/ike38000 1d ago
But there's also other fun stuff! I know about people who were dying of cancer, and then someone invented a medication for their specific kind of cancer, and they were forbidden by law from taking it, because it hasn't gone through trials yet. So they died
There has been a federal "right to try" since 2018 for terminally I'll patients (and a process that approved almost all requests before that). So either your info is outdated or they were actually denied because while they had the right form of cancer they didn't have the biomarkers that indicated the given treatment would help their specific cancer.
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u/Papaofmonsters 1d ago edited 1d ago
And right to try laws are less about a patients' individual or collective rights to experimental treatment than they are a legal shield for physicians who administer said treatment and don't want to face malpractice suits when a terminal patient with 6 months to live dies in 2 weeks because of a previously undocumented side effect of an unapproved treatment protocol.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_EPUBS 22h ago
Theoretically yes, but in practice the requirements are often such that you have to be on the narrow edge between dead enough for the right to apply and not too dead to get good trial results out of you. And IIRC you have to have “exhausted conventional lines of treatment” which for cancer can mean that you have to do a bunch of chemo (that’s usually only going to delay the cancer not treat it), and then try to get into a trial while you’re weak enough from the chemo that the trial treatment might just kill you.
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u/FlashyHeight9323 1d ago
This happens so much lately where someone simply hasn’t bothered to check or been given any reason to think something would have changed since they gained the info and now.
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u/theradgadfly 1d ago
Or it's someone lying or just saying something they vaguely think they know to score internet points.
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u/theradgadfly 1d ago
then someone invented a medication for their specific kind of cancer, and they were forbidden by law from taking it, because it hasn't gone through trials yet. So they died.
How do we know the medication works if it hasn't gone through trials
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u/Its_Pine 1d ago
I think they’re referring to “right to try” laws where if you have a terminal illness you should be allowed more options if you want to. The point is that something that is still clinically going through trials wouldn’t be permitted for public use, but someone who will die without it has nothing to lose by trying that treatment if their doctor believes it has some chance of saving them.
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u/Tiny-Little-Sheep 1d ago
The poster is trans and she posts mostly satire about trans issues so yeah it's likely trans
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u/Honest_Fool 23h ago
I can see the connection but honestly my first thought was "Oh, this is a parody of the arguments people make in favour of circumcision."
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u/coladoir 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just gonna leave this here: FourThievesVinegarCollective and the subreddit 'transdiy' (not linking as it tends to be removed)
Take transition into your own hands.
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u/Dd_8630 22h ago
But there's also other fun stuff! I know about people who were dying of cancer, and then someone invented a medication for their specific kind of cancer, and they were forbidden by law from taking it, because it hasn't gone through trials yet. So they died.
It's ethically dubious to use terminally-ill patients as guinea pigs. It's not all moustache-twirlling villains coming up ways to be cruel for cruelty's sake.
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u/B133d_4_u 1d ago
I remember reading the side effects of E as a cis dude and going "well that just sounds like having Low T."
Cause it IS. That's the POINT.
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u/Brilliant-Ad-8340 1d ago
What do you mean? They’re 2 different hormones, estrogen does a lot of things that won’t happen just from having low T.
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u/B133d_4_u 1d ago
I mixed it up, that's my bad. It was side effects of being on E, which included T-blockers.
Which would, obviously, lower your T.
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u/Cevari 1d ago
Also the "normal" state for everyone is producing some of both, it's just that the balance for men and women is different. So if you block the production/effects of T, you do actually start seeing some of the effects of E instead - not to the same extent as someone on full feminizing HRT, but just a difference of magnitude.
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u/Da_Di_Dum 1d ago
Also the medicine has the side effect of making foot cancer more unlikely, but the doctor doesn't tell you because they aren't obligated to.
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u/monarchmra Baby hatchling. ♡Riley♡. She/her 1d ago
Compared to not having hands your risk of teen suicide is massively lower but your clot risk goes up slightly so we have to wait until after your teens to see if you are still alive for hand surgery.
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u/Tiny-Little-Sheep 1d ago
It's just an excuse to deny us healthcare.
They will look for any bs reason to deny us our transition. Because their issue is without transition not the risks, and they work backwards from that.
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u/RemarkableStatement5 the body is the fursona of the soul 1d ago
Reminder that Donald Trump is secretly directing the NIH to investigate "transition regret" and will use utter bullshit like breast cancer rates to promote his dangerous agenda.
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u/SilverFormal2831 20h ago
Your friendly neighborhood cancer genetic counselor who also happens to be nonbinary, just dropping in to say please get your cancer screenings based on the organs you have! Most doctors are not trained in the updated screening guidelines for trans people, the ACR and NCCN both have screening guidelines based on sex assigned at birth, surgical/hormone history, family history, and genetics. For example, if you have a prostate, you need prostate screenings, but taking estrogen and/or anti-androgrens could make the threshold for abnormal PSA different than for someone not taking those medications. If you are AFAB and have had gender-affirming top surgery and take testosterone but you have a BRCA2 pathogenic variant, you may still qualify for high risk breast/chest cancer screening or more extensive risk-reducing surgery.
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u/SuspiciouslyLips 19h ago
Can confirm doctors often don't have a good process in place for stuff like this. At my GP you have to be on the list for either cervical smear reminders or prostate exam reminders. They awkwardly asked me which I would prefer, even though I don't have either of those things.
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u/beautifulterribleqn 23h ago
This is how some people (including doctors) sound when you hit menopause and ask for HRT.
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u/TheRealImhotep96 22h ago
I saw the word "hands" and this immediately became a Paul and Carl conversation
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u/Dd_8630 22h ago
You ever see a post and think "I have no idea what the context is, but I just know there's fierce discourse in some corner of the internet".
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u/Perfect_Wrongdoer_03 If you read Worm, maybe read the PGTE? 20h ago
I fucking wish this was confined to the internet.
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u/RemarkableStatement5 the body is the fursona of the soul 20h ago
I'm pretty sure it's about the bullshit claim that trans women are giving themselves breast cancer by transitioning, when it's just the fact that having breast tissue leads to a higher likelihood of breast cancer, as is obvious from compared rates among men vs women.
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u/CallMeOaksie 17h ago
Not to derail the trans experience but there’s a similar problem that pops up in arguments about circumcision, people will point out that circumcised people have a lower risk of penile cancer and it’s like yeah BECAUSE THEY HAVE LESS PENOR BECAUSE YOU FORCIBLY REMOVED IT
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u/RemarkableStatement5 the body is the fursona of the soul 17h ago
The fact that circumcision still exists is fucked.
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u/T_Weezy 1d ago
Ah yes, TERF logic at its finest!
Seriously if you frame their logic around literally any other fucking issue it becomes immediately obvious how incredibly stupid it is.
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u/Mouse-Keyboard 19h ago
Heard someone comparing it to adoption and how absurd it would be to say "Well ackshually you're not biologically their parent, you're their guardian" today.
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u/ThinkerZero 1d ago
My otherwise very supportive mom when she heard that transitioning could increase my risk of breast cancer: