Quote from: Deven on January 13, 2013, 11:47:59 PM
Oh, interesting. Didn't know.
I remember my ex-roommate who's an mtf saying something about a new kind of material that's lighter than silicon...
My impression has been that there's such a widespread sense of risks and negative impacts from breast implants that, speaking just for myself, and assuming I had had them, I wouldn't want to say anything to endorse them, for fear that I was recommending something toxic. Also, the publicly available info on implants (and their drawbacks) is pretty widely available in the press available to ciswomen and transwomen alike. Many of us, not having had implants yet (and many of us taking a "wait and see" attitude) often just don't have much personal insight to add to what's already widely available. Whereas issues surrounding packing and more complicated implants seem to come up (forgive the double entendre) much earlier in transition for FTMs -- I've been discussing them openly with (or at least listening to) my son about implants (not a lot about packing, but he doesn't ask me about prosthetic breasts either) ever since he made it clear he's trans, and he is presently at the presenting without top surgery stage, sans testosterone.
I don't know for sure whether this is as true as it once was, but most MTFs I've known tend to drop off the support forums once they've gotten to a point where their main concerns are dealing with life as a woman, unrelated to trans-specific concerns. If I encounter them online at all, they are usually, except for some activists, presenting themselves as female and not calling attention to their trans-ness.
Practically speaking, if I were looking for insights on implants, I'd probably look to a more general forum where women of all kinds were more likely to post, since that would almost certainly be a fairly active forum with many, many examples and a fairly open willingness to share and compare notes?
Maybe there's a by-product of female socialization going on here, just a little too? Even though cismen do sometimes also need implants, its probably something a lot of them, being socialized male and discouraged from showing "weakness" might tend to avoid discussing to anything like the degree that women are willing to discuss breast implants, something that's a lot more common among cis-women, even if it remains a little controversial, it's still discussed
a lot.
