This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

A topless woman in mini-skirt, high heels and garish makeup struts down a catwalk. There are crimson crystals representing mastectomy wounds where her breasts should be. She swings a plastic bag, holding what look like the two lumps of bleeding flesh cut from her chest.

This is RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, a spin-off from the long-running franchise featuring men dressing up in parodically feminine fashion. If you subscribe to queer theory, their performance cleverly reveals the way gender norms constrain women. If you don’t, it offers men the opportunity to mock women just as blackface used to allow white people to express their racism.

Alert readers will notice that drag isn’t usually performed by people who need surgery to achieve flat chests. But this is Kade Gottlieb, aka Gottmik, a transman queen — that is, a woman who pretends to be a man who is pretending to be a woman. Her simultaneous rejection of her female sex and performance of feminine gender reveal the way trans ideology naturalises women’s oppression.

Gottlieb was the first woman to perform on RuPaul, pre-mastectomy, in 2019. Her appearance wasn’t even controversial. The clash between gender as artifice (drag) and gender as revealed truth (trans ideology) had already played out two years earlier, after the inclusion of the show’s first transwoman.

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You might think including a man who claims to be really a woman in a competition for men who cosplay women would be the height of transphobia, since it frames the identity he claims is reality as a performance. When asked about this in an interview the following year, RuPaul flannelled. Queens aren’t actually dressing up as women, he said, but rather are “wearing clothes that are hyperfeminine, that represent our culture’s synthetic idea of femininity”.

The transwoman in question, Peppermint, hadn’t yet had surgery and so would have to engage in the same artifice as other queens, he added, such as wearing false breasts and “tucking” (strapping his penis down between his legs).

What, then, about “bioqueens”, the interviewer asked — that is, actual women who ape the male parody? RuPaul wasn’t keen. “Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it,” he replied, “because at its core it’s a social statement and a big f-you to male-dominated culture.”

The condemnation was immediate. “Women should not be defined by what surgeries they have or haven’t had,” said Peppermint. (I doubt he and I agree on much, but we agree on that.) As is customary when LGBT icons fail to keep up with their community’s ever-changing and illogical orthodoxy, RuPaul quickly folded. “I understand and regret the hurt I have caused,” he said in a statement. “The trans community are heroes of our shared LGBTQ movement.” Gottmik appeared on the show for the first time the following year.

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Including both transmen and transwomen in a competition for men who parody women is just the latest example of the trans movement’s hatred of “gatekeeping” — that is, of definitional consistency. Usually it means women lose out, since it is women who most need clear, enforceable boundaries.

Allowing female people into men’s toilets and changing rooms is embarrassing for men; allowing male people into women’s means letting in the group that contains almost all violent and sexual criminals. In sports, transmen are non-competitive in men’s events and so usually choose to stay in the female category — where they are joined by the men who identify as women. Heads trans wins; tails women lose.

Gottmik’s performance showcased her mastectomy, which illustrates something further: that the mutilation of women has become the transgender movement’s main signifier. Ironically, it relies on a quintessentially gendered activity: women expressing the cultural debasement of their sex on their own bodies.

Last year a topless, pregnant transman featured on the cover of Glamour fashion magazine, with a man’s shirt, jacket and tie painted onto her breastless torso. In 2022 New York Magazine featured a transman in Y-fronts, displaying mastectomy scars, scarring on the thigh from which flesh had been flayed to make a fake penis and an absurdly large crotch bulge.

Gottlieb’s twist on naked self-harm is glamorisation: mastectomy sanitised by crystals and irony. “I want people to look at it and be like ‘Wow, that’s so pretty,’” she told Them, an LGBT magazine. “The crystals were a good way for me to make it beautiful because top surgery is a really beautiful experience.”

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The same message was delivered during London Pride last month on a billboard sponsored by the Mayor of London and virtue-signalling corporates, including Tesco. It showed an arty portrait of a breastless woman captioned “They/Them: We are everywhere”.

That the bodily disease cultivated by gender-identity ideology so often settles on women’s breasts is not by chance. They are an easy target for body dysmorphia — severe mental distress caused by fixation on a hated physical feature.

The condition often focuses on body parts with cultural significance: think of Michael Jackson shaving away at his nose in his endless and unachievable quest to excise his blackness. Breasts are even more culturally laden than noses, and they usually develop before girls are mature enough to cope with the male attention they attract. When cutting them off is a potential escape route, women who keep them can be understood as having accepted being leered at, groped and objectified.

Breasts are more trouble than noses, too. The largest body part lacking muscular and skeletal support, they hurt during menstruation and must be strapped down before exercise. But the main reason it’s so easy to convince young women to cut breasts off is that their evolved purposes are about relationships, not the individual. Beyond the function of feeding babies, they display reproductive status: not just the beginning of fertility, but its end.

When I worked as a foreign correspondent in South America a decade ago, I made reporting trips to several aldeias — indigenous settlements. In such a setting, where everyone is topless and there are no bras or contraceptives, breasts communicate women’s reproductive potential and history of childbearing. Women, unlike other primates, have breasts because women, unlike other primates, go through menopause.

I once interviewed a young woman in São Paulo who had stayed with Amazonian tribal peoples in several aldeias for a healthcare project. She told me they would lift her t-shirt to look at and squeeze her breasts to judge whether she had ever had a child.

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We no longer live in small tribal groups where relationships matter more than individuals and the concept of a private life is alien. When we step out of our front door, we are surrounded by strangers, not close relatives who regard our business as theirs. But for tens of thousands of years of prehistory, breasts both fed babies and communicated information to everyone women met. Breasts are the body part that expresses what is unique about female embodiment. They say that whilst men may be able to pretend to be islands, women can’t.

What of breasts in a culture that prizes self-chosen identities and scorns interpersonal connections? They are an obvious target for the marketers of the commercialised trans movement: cut them off and you’ll be rid not just of useless flesh, but other people’s claims on your sovereign self.

Many young women haven’t yet had the life experiences that would enable them to predict the future cost. They may never have undergone an operation. They don’t know that it takes ages to recover, that scar tissue is never the same, that when you’re cut there is always the risk of complications.

It doesn’t help to tell them they may want to breastfeed one day, even if they now think they will never want children. A pregnant woman is, in a very profound sense, no longer an individual, and a breastfeeding woman cannot even sleep without being subject to a tiny tyrant’s whims.

Such intimate entanglements are what many teenage girls and young women are in flight from. Asserting mastery over their future selves is a feature of mastectomy, not a bug. At least anorexia, the way a previous generation rid itself of despised female flesh, was widely understood as self-harm. Mastectomy is sold as liberation.