The Allure of Body Dissociation

Examining the Instagram account of TomBoyX underwear and Vogue model, Chellaman, a young woman who has had her healthy breasts amputated to express a “non-binary identity,” I can feel the allure of beautiful, young faces, clever performance, talented photography, fashion, color and style as the photos coalesce into corporately stylized glamour. The allure, for me, though I am an artist and appreciate fashion, is unexpected. The images are nothing like the surgery scars on the young women I’m used to seeing, who’ve just undergone this barbaric surgery to amputate healthy immature sex organs. Those pictures tell the truth about unnecessary surgeries. Chellaman’s modeling photos are selling a fantasy, the glamorization of body dissociation.

How can young people resist body dissociation displayed as fashion if I, fully aware of and writing to expose the tragedies of the gender identity industry, can get momentarily sucked in by the deliberate corporate cultivation of desire and beauty made out of the unnecessary amputation of healthy sex organs? I teeter on the edge of this kafkaesque ledge.

Chellaman’s message is one of self-definition overriding biological reality, a message of empowerment, designing the self with drugs and amputations that serve the medical-industrial complex and somehow, we are all to consider this a human rights movement.

Chellaman, an Instagram influencer and YouTuber with a manufactured sex identity, has come a long way since her TomBoyX modeling days. She has been featured in Instinct Magazine and Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Popsugar, and other fashion spreads, walked NYC Fashion week runway, posed for Gay Times UK and Calvin Klein (another fashion house celebrating body dissociation as progressive), had her own Tedx Talk, and is looking toward her first television role In season two of the live-action adaption of Teen Titans.

How do parents fight the onslaught of these advertising campaigns targeting their children when attempting to discuss the realities of corporately cultivated identity medicine and the life-long consequences and complications of making such decisions?

Why are so many people refusing to resist these corporate messages?

A decade ago, the normalization of adults transgressing their sex, with modern medicine and technology, was well underway via media presentations and Hollywood. But the trend of glamorizing medical identities was not yet in its zenith. Six years ago, the narrative of the "transgender child," had only just emerged on the cultural landscape. Suddenly, children born in the wrong sexed body seemed everywhere and were marketed as having the terrible condition of gender dysphoria that needed treatment, clinics, specialized medicine, surgeons, and above all, compassion. Gender clinics for youth proliferated across the American landscape, along with the advancements of "trans" identified characters in the media, and children presenting to "gender" clinics rose exponentially. The "poor transgender child" emerged alongside a sudden glamorization of adult "transitioning." The shift from a terrible disorder of body dysmorphia to celebrating adults and children using drugs and surgeries to de-sex their bodies as progressive, trendy, and cool has been swift and penetrating.

The glamorization of de-sexing young women, in particular, has initiated clever t-shirt campaigns and online apparel stores selling body dissociation as fashion accessories.

How do those of us fighting the normalization of body dissociation compete with an industry that allows for this glamorization of dismemberment?

It breaks my heart that young people are being sucked into this madness, but what entirely unhinges me is that corporations are getting away with selling it to them. Underwear, sneakers, shaving products, menstrual products, and fashion are being sold with the dismembered bodies of society's youth (or the mock dismemberment in some instances), promoting liberation, sterilization and de-sexing while wrapping them in the chains of the medical-industrial complex.