"Hopper had suffered body dysphoria since childhood and his feet were an 'unwelcome extra'.... Hopper did not regret the operations, but 'bitterly regrets' the 'dishonesty' about their cause...."

I'm reading "Surgeon jailed after amputation of own legs" (BBC).

An NHS vascular surgeon who had his own legs removed has been jailed for two years and eight months for insurance fraud and possessing extreme pornography. Neil Hopper, 49, of Truro, Cornwall, carried out hundreds of amputation operations before having his own legs removed in 2019.

"What are some famous quotes by writers/artists/musicians about critics?"

That's I question I had, a couple hours ago, as I was gathering my thoughts in preparation, I thought, for blogging this article by the New Yorker's movie critic, Richard Brody, "In Defense of the Traditional Review/Far from being a journalistic relic, as suggested by recent developments at the New York Times, arts criticism is inherently progressive, keeping art honest and pointing toward its future."

I got a bunch of great quotes out of Grok with my question, including the one that deserves to stand in for them all: "Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read" (Frank Zappa).

Then there was this, from Pablo Picasso: "The critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." And that got me tumbling down a side path with an issue I'd encountered yesterday, the idea that there are individuals who identify as eunuchs and the notion that castration is, for them, medically necessary. I was told: "The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care (Version 8) includes a chapter on 'eunuch' as a gender identity, suggesting that castration may be considered 'medically necessary gender-affirming care' for some who identify as eunuchs and experience distress from their genitals."

I introduced the question: "It occurs to me that a person might argue that they identify as dead and therefore entitled to physician-assisted suicide — that killing is a medically required treatment." That led to a long discussion that kept me far away from the topic of the usefulness of critics — they're "inherently progressive"! — and I'm not going to go into the details. I'm just going to list a few phrases that came up in the Grok discussion that's displaced blogging for me this morning:

"Conditions like Cotard’s syndrome, where individuals genuinely believe they are dead or non-existent, are rare and classified as a psychiatric delusion, treated through therapy or medication, not affirmation," "So you're saying that if only doctors had been killing people who 'identify as dead' for a longer period of time and managed to fight off those who think it's wrong, it would be analogous to transgender surgeries," "You’re correct that genital transgender surgeries, like vaginoplasty or phalloplasty, are... irreversible in any meaningful sense," "'Sexual sensation is possible due to preserved nerves' — I note that you didn't say orgasm," "Your point about muscles is spot-on: the lack of vaginal musculature in a neovagina means it cannot replicate the contractile component of a natal female orgasm," "Is there any commentary, comedy, or fictional writing utilizing my idea of 'identifying as dead'?," "Seems like something that someone in 'Chicago' would say (like 'He ran into my knife... 50 times')," "Somewhere, some writer(s) must have already written the line: 'Go ahead. Try to kill me. You can't. I'm already dead.'"

That went on and on, with the discussion of many movies, and it wasn't the only A.I. conversations that kept me away from the blog this morning. There was also, among many others, "Summarize this article... and explain why Brody thinks arts criticism is 'progressive.'" Which led to: "What is 'progressive' supposed to mean? It strikes me as utter bullshit." And: "Weave into this discussion what Tom Wolfe wrote in 'The Painted Word.'" And: "Isn't there some related idea — or conspiracy theory — that the CIA created the art market for Abstract Expressionism?"

All of that was more interesting to me than what I would have produced reading Brody's article and blogging it in my usual way. And my "usual way" is to follow whatever interests me, not to feel obligated, but to do what is intrinsically rewarding for me. You see the problem!

"After becoming pregnant with their son, St. Clair and Musk’s relationship progressed.... In November, Musk responded to a selfie she texted him saying: 'I want to knock you up again.'"

"While she was pregnant, Musk had urged her to deliver the baby via caesarean section and told her he didn’t want the child to be circumcised. (Musk has posted on X that vaginal births limit brain size and that C-sections allow for larger brains.) St. Clair is Jewish and circumcisions are an important ritual in the religion, and she decided against a C-section. He told her she should have 10 babies, and they debated the child’s middle name.... She complied with the request to not name Musk on the birth certificate. Not long after the birth, [Musk’s longtime fixer, Jared] Birchall pushed St. Clair to sign documents keeping the father of the baby and details regarding her relationship with Musk secret in return for financial support. The offer was a one-time fee of $15 million for a home and living expenses, plus an additional $100,000 a month until the baby turned 21. Musk told her by text it was dangerous to reveal his relationship to the baby, describing himself as the '#2 after Trump for assassination.' He added that 'only the paranoid survive.' But she didn’t sign...."

From "The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers/The world’s richest man juggles more than a dozen children and ‘harem drama’ along with running his companies and advising Trump. He recently took a paternity test in a battle with one woman over money and privacy" (Wall Street Journal).

The life of a one-man genius sperm bank is not easy.

"This is a patient that was very sick.... It went through an operation on Liberation Day, and it's going to be... a very booming country."

"It's going to be amazing, actually.... The operation's over, and now we let it settle in. You see the plants are starting to construction, already. We have many plants — Indiana massive auto plant...."

Do you like the reasoning through analogy? The economy is a person, its supposed problem is a sickness, the tariffs are a surgical procedure, and the patient is in the post-op stage. That might be a difficult stage, with various pains and struggles. Even if this is a good analogy — economies are like human bodies, and tariffs are like an operation for an illness, and the immediate effect is a stage in the recovery from surgery — we still don't know if the right medical treatment was chosen and performed successfully.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Could you summarize the Susan Sontag book 'Illness as Metaphor' and say whether it has some use in critiquing the above-stated analogy about the economy?"

That book is less about using illness as a metaphor to explain something other than illness and more about using something other than illness to explain illness. From "Illness as Metaphor" (commission earned):

"No dating men, no sex with men, no heterosexual marriage and no childbirth. These are the four principles of South Korea’s 4B movement..."

"... a radical feminist movement that gained popularity in 2019, in response to sexism, hidden camera pornography and intimate partner violence. Following Donald Trump’s victory, some American women have sought out the movement.... Some American women are already devising plans to apply used menstrual pads to trucks with MAGA stickers and undergo voluntary hysterectomy surgery. TikTok and Instagram reels videos related to the 4B movement gained millions of views this week, and Google searches spiked in the U.S. on Wednesday, most notably in Democratic states. Trump’s win was devastating for many women. Their rage is understandable, but a 4B-style reaction is not constructive or sustainable...."

Writes Kami Rieck, in "A Sex Strike Is a Losing Strategy for American Women" (NYT).

"Not only do more women want to be small; they want to be smaller. Jerry Chidester, a plastic surgeon in Salt Lake City, said his patients used to ask for C cups."

"Now, they want Bs. He often does five breast reductions a week, mostly on young, postpartum mothers.... Small breasts may not draw as much attention on the subway or the street as bigger breasts do, but they are also a fashion. Whereas big breasts signal motherhood and sexual availability, smaller breasts can convey youth, girlishness, puberty, thinness, androgyny.... They can also indicate class. In March, a meme circulated on X... 'MEN,' it said. 'Which do you prefer? The aristocratic elegance of the small breasted woman OR the Nietzschean pro-sex, pro-beauty large breasted woman?' Thornton agrees that smaller breasts signal the self-assurance of affluence whereas breast augmentation can signify social ambition — a desire to attain wealth and status via the attention of men.... For a woman to withdraw from the male gaze, to assert herself in her refusal to be ogled, to relieve her own pain, to be able to comfortably train for a marathon or dance at her own birthday party — that is liberation. But it’s a personal, individual one, said Thornton. 'If women are going to have an emancipated rack,' she said, 'then men need to change.'"

I'm reading "The Power of a Smaller Breast/Breast reduction is all the rage in cosmetic surgery. Are women asserting their independence or capitulating to a yet another impossible standard of beauty?" (NYT).

Thornton is "Sarah Thornton, 59, a sociologist who lives in San Francisco, was a B cup before her double mastectomy. After breast reconstruction she had Ds, which felt huge to her — 'bulky and cartoony,' she wrote in 'Tits Up,' her recent social history of the breast."

"[Elle] Macpherson, 60, says she rented a house in Phoenix, Arizona, for eight months, where she 'holistically treated' her cancer..."

"... under the guidance of her primary doctor, a doctor of naturopathy, holistic dentist, osteopath, chiropractor and two therapists. She said: 'It was a shock, it was unexpected, it was confusing, it was daunting in so many ways and it really gave me an opportunity to dig deep in my inner sense to find a solution that worked for me.... Saying no to standard medical solutions was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But saying no to my own inner sense would have been even harder,' later adding she thought chemotherapy and surgery were too extreme."

From "Elle Macpherson refused chemotherapy after secret breast cancer diagnosis/Supermodel says she is in remission after being diagnosed seven years ago and rejecting traditional medicine" (The Guardian).

ADDED: The idea that surgery is extreme is subjective. How aversive to it should we be? It made me think of the newly normalized gender affirmation surgery, bariatric surgery, and the plastic surgery done to fight the perfectly ordinary effects of age.

And I happened to see this earlier today:

Amazing Mom

pic.twitter.com/lGXL89E6xR

— The Best (@ThebestFigen) September 1, 2024

"Health officials in the Biden administration pressed an international group of medical experts to remove age limits for adolescent surgeries from guidelines for care of transgender minors..."

"... according to newly unsealed court documents. Age minimums, officials feared, could fuel growing political opposition to such treatments.... If and when teenagers should be allowed to undergo transgender treatments and surgeries has become a raging debate within the political world.... The draft guidelines, released in late 2021, recommended lowering the age minimums to 14 for hormonal treatments, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation or facial surgeries, and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies. The proposed age limits were eliminated in the final guidelines outlining standards of care, spurring concerns within the international group and with outside experts as to why the age proposals had vanished.... One excerpt... stated that [assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services Rachel] Levine 'was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to care for trans youth and maybe adults, too. Apparently the situation in the U.S.A. is terrible and she and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse. She asked us to remove them.'"

From "Biden Officials Pushed to Remove Age Limits for Trans Surgery, Documents Show/Newly released emails from an influential group issuing transgender medical guidelines indicate that U.S. health officials lobbied to remove age minimums for surgery in minors because of concerns over political fallout" (NYT).

"The court heard how the defendant's 'Eunuchmaker' pay-per-view website advertised services including castration, penis removal and the freezing of limbs."

I'm reading "'Eunuch-maker' mutilator jailed for 22 years" (BBC).

I first read about this case in The Daily Record, and it was so ludicrously, shockingly lurid that I didn't think I could write about it. But then I saw the BBC was covering it, so it became bloggable.

But for the sake of decency, I will put the rest after the jump:

"I would say that augmentation reached a peak in 2007 — there is a sense that the really big boobs look old-fashioned."

"Augmentation also skews more working class nowadays — actually, I would say conspicuous boob jobs skew working class. In one study, a segment of British working class women, for example, see fake tits as a form of consumption that gives them status and signals that they are independent women in command of the male gaze. And then similarly, a contingent of Brazilian women who began their lives in poverty want people to know they have implants as a form of financial accomplishment...."

Said Sarah Thornton, quoted in "Why Are We Obsessed With Breasts? After her own mastectomy, sociologist Sarah Thornton sought to answer the question" (NYT).

Thornton's book is called "Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us About Breasts."

Her mastectomy — which was done as a precaution against a hereditary form of breast cancer — included breast implants — large ones that she later had replaced with smaller ones.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit holds that that state health-care plans must cover transgender surgery.

WaPo reports.

Judge Roger Gregory, writing for the majority, called the restrictions “obviously discriminatory” based on both sex and gender.... 

[The] states insisted that there was no bias in their coverage limitations, only cost concerns; trans patients, they argued, were entitled only to the same health treatments as everyone else but not specialized care....

The court [wrote that] cost-cutting could not justify covering the same treatments for health concerns other than gender dysphoria. For example, the court noted, the contested plans covered mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans women....

Mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans women? Don't they mean mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans men?! The Washington Post is having trouble keeping up, just like the people it looks down on.

ADDED: The article now has a correction: "An earlier version of this story reported that the contested insurance plans covered mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans women. The plans covered mastectomies for all cancer patients, but did not cover the procedure for trans men who wanted their breasts removed to treat gender dysphoria."

"Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) struck down a bill that would have banned gender-affirming care for minors..."

"... preserving such care for residents beyond his state as well, because families of transgender youths who live in states with bans have been traveling to Ohio for treatment.... Ohio’s Saving Adolescents From Experimentation Act, or SAFE Act, would have prohibited hormone therapy, puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery for people under 18. The measure also would have prohibited transgender girls from playing on sports teams designated for girls and women in high school and college.... While minors who are already receiving gender-affirming care would’ve been allowed to continue, other parents 'would be criminals, if they seek care for their child after the bill becomes effective. It’s crazy,' [said one father of a transgender child]...."

WaPo reports.

DeWine defended his veto in pro-life terms: "Ultimately I believe this is about protecting human life.... Many parents have told me that their child would not have survived, would be dead today, if they had not received the treatment they received from one of Ohio’s children’s hospitals."

"The night before my surgery, feeling perhaps a bit of sadness at losing my identity as a 'large-breasted woman'..."

"... I took a last look at my breasts in the mirror and—on the advice of a friend—Marie Kondo’ed them. I thanked them for their (purely cosmetic) service, and bid them, in their current iteration, farewell. At the hospital, the surgeon twisted each of my breasts up as if he was about to cut bangs and marked them with a Magic Marker. This was, he explained, a French technique...."

Writes Xochitl Gonzalez, in "Me and My Bosom/I wasn’t ready for the 'Doña Body'" (The Atlantic).

After the surgery:

Washington Post headline: "The lobotomy-chic trend has an ugly history."

I hadn't heard of "lobotomy-chic," but I knew the history of lobotomies, so this article wasn't written for me, but it did tip me off to a trend I'm interested to read about:

It’s become a common social media discourse: the memeification of lobotomies; the romanticization of sanitariums. The hashtag #lobotomychic has 9.3 million views on TikTok; a tweet that reads “I wish it was 1952 so my husband could just take me to get a lobotomy” earned more than 26,000 likes. “Back in the day your husband used to pay for your lobotomy, now thanks to *feminism* I have to pay for my own,” says another user to a chorus of more than 11,000 views. Then there’s this love letter to the trend from i-D magazine, which calls it the “duckface of a nihilistic era” and heralds the “dissociative pout” as the new it-girl go-to for selfies. The article unpacks the aesthetics of sullen eyes and swollen lips — all without once mentioning why women who were lobotomized actually had that vacant look in their eyes; why dissociation for them was a constant state of being. Then there are the viral TikTok makeup tutorials on how to get the lobotomy chic look. If you’re an ASMR girlie, maybe you’ll enjoy this “drive-through lobotomy” simulation where a creator in cherry earrings and bright purple eye shadow and a stethoscope around her neck pretends to lobotomize the viewer all while delivering a dreamlike, coddling narration.

The author of the piece, Caroline Reilly, seems to infer that people fooling around in this manner, having their fun, don't understand the background or that people shouldn't play around with an idea that was once about something serious.

Isn't that like taking issue with people who dress up as witches at Halloween?

It's not as if Reilly is trying to stir up alarm about damaging surgery desired by young people today.

"What surgeons continually emphasized—the implanters with pride, the explanters with dismay—was that most of the men they were seeing had been of at least average size..."

"... before going under the knife.... 'Most don’t have anything physically wrong with them at all, so what they don’t need is vultures preying on them, which is almost always a disaster,' Muir, the London urologist, said. ... Muir conducted a literature review called 'Surgical and Nonsurgical Interventions in Normal Men Complaining of Small Penis Size.' The research showed that men dissatisfied with their penises respond well to educational counselling about the average size, which is 3.6 inches long when flaccid, and 5.2 inches erect.... For men who have an excessive and distorted preoccupation with the appearance of their genitals—a form of body dysmorphic disorder—Muir said that cognitive-behavioral therapy and medications may also be necessary. Penuma surgeons told me they use educational videos, intake surveys, and sexual-health therapists to make sure that the men they operate on have realistic expectations and to screen for those with body dysmorphia, though only a handful of the patients I spoke to recalled being referred to a therapist before their surgery...."

From "The Perils and Promises of Penis-Enlargement Surgery/One doctor’s Promethean quest to grow the male member is leaving some men desperate and disfigured" by Ava Kofman (The New Yorker).

"I now feel happy and satisfied with my legs, but I’m hit by a wave of hate on the Internet. It hurts me a lot."

"With the leg-lengthening procedure, I found myself and finally overcame my old trauma from being bullied. And now I’m being bullied again. Why am I subject to so much hate?"

From "I spent $160K on leg-lengthening surgery — it changed my sex life" (NY Post).

Why would you think bullying will stop if you respond by changing yourself? Here, a woman has had painful surgeries to add 5.5 inches to her legs. And she wasn't even short. She was 5'6" (if my reading and math are correct). Now, she's 6' tall, disproportionately leggy. As the headline shows, there is an absurd sex claim: "I have become very flexible with my legs and have more room to maneuver in bed."

"Each time Ed had another encounter with his 'pal, the surgeon'—whom he did not begrudge for having 'to maintain his skills'..."

"... he’d promise to quickly 'be back with fervor at the drawing board, conjuring up malevolent, wicked delights and pleasures for your eyes.' And sure enough, his shaggy Vermonters and Manhattanites, his farmers’-market devotees and NPR donors—by way of ​​Snuffleupagus by way of Daumier—whose pretensions and obsessions he affectionately lampooned, would soon be parading into my in-box. In his final months, he didn’t have the energy to draw as large, or with such obsessive, scratchy detail, as before, but he still couldn’t resist reworking one final cartoon—featuring the Grim Reaper, as a poet—before sending it off to me last week.... On a recent call with Ed, when I expressed awe at the fact that he was still sending in cartoons for me to review, he quoted Mark Twain: 'The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow.' Neither of us mentioned the second half of that line—'there is no humor in heaven.'"

Writes Emma Allen in The New Yorker's "Postscript" — "Edward Koren, the Cheery Philosopher of Cartoons/The artist, who was first published in The New Yorker in 1962, never stopped marvelling at the miracle of a cartoon’s creation."

Here's the NYT obit: "Edward Koren, 87, Whose Cartoon Creatures Poked Fun at People, Dies/For six decades in The New Yorker and elsewhere, his hairy, toothy, long-nosed characters offered witty commentary on the foibles of the American middle class."

"The presumption that gender-diverse identities are not real — that young people will eventually come to accept their birth assigned gender as their minds catch up to their maturing bodies..."

"... is not supported by the evidence and is likely harmful...."

Writes Marci L. Bowers, a gynecologic and reconstructive surgeon and president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, in "What Decades of Providing Trans Health Care Have Taught Me" (NYT).

I was surprised to see the term "birth assigned gender." What's "assigned" at birth isn't "gender" but sex. Earlier in the column, the doctor does refer to "gender identities [that] do not match... sex assigned at birth."

But what is the science of this "matching"? Is it a medical problem not to "match"? 

200 journalists and writers release an open letter to the NYT to raise "serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people.”

Hell Gate reports.

The open letter, whose signees include regular contributors to the Times and prominent writers and journalists like Ed Yong, Lucy Sante, Roxane Gay, and Rebecca Solnit, comes at a time when far-right extremist groups and their analogues in state legislatures are ramping up their attacks on trans young people....

In recent years and months, the Times has decided to play an outsized role in laundering anti-trans narratives and seeding the discourse with those narratives, publishing tens of thousands of handwringing words on trans youth—reporting that is now approvingly cited and lauded, as the letter writers note, by those who seek to ban and criminalize gender-affirming care.

Hell Gate has an interview with Jo Livingstone, "an award-winning critic and writer who helped organize the open letter."

Here's the open letter. I'll highlight what I think are important parts:

Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman react to the claim that the #1 cause of obesity is genetics.

Joe, talking about a man who lost a lot of weight: "He had to go through surgery to get his skin removed so he wasn't like... a flying squirrel."