Snapchat and Ben Cohen is a marriage made in hell

As you can see, Snapchat’s user base skews younger than most, with 12% girls between the ages of 13 and 17. Nonetheless, yesterday we saw Ben Cohen joining with the Santa Monica company to push unnecessary double mastectomies to that audience.

Today, a young woman who has taken testosterone was eager to share her positive ‘top surgery’ story with Ben, saying “This is a great idea for a series. It's hard to put into words just how amazing I felt after I finally had my top surgery almost 2 years ago. My girlfriend snapped this photo of me which I think perfectly captures how at ease I felt (and still feel)”.

There’s only one problem with this feel-good story. This young woman is obviously deeply troubled.

She appears to have been cutting herself a lot prior to her operation. I doubt Ben will give any thought to whether the scars she’s received by removing her breasts might be the latest manifestation of the same self-destructive urge. Of course, Ben wants to ban doctors from investigating whether co-morbidities might be responsible for this phenomenon that arrived with the Internet: self-harming girls demanding even more harm from frightened and confused doctors and parents.

This is from the Detrans Reddit sub, currently with 27.6 thousand members.

“One thing they don't tell you about a mastectomy, when it's done as a top surgery for trans men it is very common for them to leave mammary gland tissue in order to help shape the chest in a more masculine appearing way. They ask if you ever plan on having children, because if you do get pregnant later on there can be restimulation and growth of the breast tissue due to the hormones. Besides pregnancy, if you stop taking T long term and return to having menstrual cycles, you have the rise and falls of progesterone and estrogen, which means you now have mammary glands/breast tissue that is being effected by these hormones. So you do not have breasts, you are flat chested but you can then have cyclical breast pain, or 3ven fibrocystic breast changes that feel lumpy. So you go to the Dr, confused about this pain in your chest, and the Dr's really don't know, but they tell you for the hundreth time your heart is fine, you are healthy.

I now have cyclical breast pain with every cycle, mainly right before ovulation, like right now. It freaks me out every damn time. And I have fibrocystic breast changes in the very small amount of breast tissue that I have, which can make me panic about breast cancer. I can't get a mammogram, I have to have awkward chest exams where the Dr isn't really sure either. And ultrasounds. The cyclical breast pain makes me panic about my heart because I can't separate what is my breast, chest wall, heart.

So yeah, if you get a mastectomy for a flat shaped "mans" chest and then later stop taking T, you can end up with a bunch of confusing health scares. Every single month I get bad health anxiety because of my breasts that I don't even have anymore.

This is what Ben Cohen is selling to children.

If your kid is on Snapchat, you might want to have a word.