Hello
I'm a member of the Binding Health Project. Back in March 2014, we posted here asking for folks with experience binding their chests to participate in a survey. Our team is super grateful to all those who participated and made our work possible. We had 1,800 folks respond — an incredible turnout!
An overall description of the data was published in Culture, Health, and Sexuality in June 2014. (see here:
https://transfigurations.org.uk/filestore/binding-project-postprint.pdf) In short, 97% of people who bind reported at least one of the 28 negative physical outcomes on the survey (e.g., skin issues, breathing problems, tingling in arms). Binding for *more* days per week was associated with the greatest number of negative outcomes — this suggests that taking days off binding may help. The other thing was that negative outcomes were generally more likely to be associated with commercial binders (as compared to elastic bandages or duct tape). We're not really sure why that is, so we're going to do a deeper dive into that topic soon.
Anyways!! The whole point of this post is that we JUST published another paper. Obviously, we wanted to share the results here
In our newest paper, we identified factors related to seeking care for a chest binding concern. Here's a brief summary of what we found: Although chest binding can improve mental health and physical safety, it can also cause physical harm. A majority of people in our study had experienced negative symptoms from binding, but VERY few (14.8%) had ever sought care to address those symptoms. 57% of people reported that their health care provider knew about their chest binding. When providers were aware of the binding practice, more than half addressed it in a positive (or at least neutral) manner.
The most important (and kinda "no duh") finding from the data is that a trusting, safe relationship with one's health care provider is the most important factor for seeking care. Basically, people go to providers that they feel good about — no one wants to go to a bad doctor. Even though this would be really obvious to most people here, we hope scientific literature like this can inform future policies and be convincing to providers to show how stigma can prevent good healthcare. Some other interesting results from the paper:
People who had pain or neurological/musculoskeletal symptoms were more likely to seek care than other types of symptoms (e.g., gastrointestinal or skin). This means that health care providers should ask about other kinds of less-talked-about symptoms. We also saw that the mere presence of pain was associated with seeking care, but being in severe pain was not really predictive of whether someone sought care. After accounting for the presence of severe pain, someone's CONCERN about the symptom is more likely to result in seeking care. In other words, if someone is concerned about their severe pain then they'll go seek health care. If they're not concerned, they won't. Again, this feels obvious, but it is informative to see a phenomenon where people are minimizing their severe pain. This could be because folks don't think that their doctor can do anything to help with that pain (?), so a next step is coming up with best practices for binding in a safe and healthy manner. We're moving there (albeit slowly, but... we're moving!)
You can access the full article here: (
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/trgh.2018.0017). If you'd like to share this article with others in the community or who might be interested, here's a link to the tweet-nnouncement from the Journal of Transgender Health profile:
https://twitter.com/TransgenderHlth/status/1073646344718434304Excited to hear comments, feedback, and questions.
Thanks again!!
Brooke
<link removed by moderator>
