Video/ Transgender breast cancer
Doctors say the number one risk for getting breast cancer is being a woman, but what about women who become men?
November 22nd, 2009
Doctors say the number one risk for getting breast cancer is being a woman, but what about women who become men?
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So as a transman with both grandmothers having female cancers in their histories, I should go have sex with women to lower my risk of breast cancer?
I hate the assumptions made in this piece (ie, transgender persons are not straight, they smoke and drink more than other people, and we don’t take care of our health), but it’s nice to see the mainstream trying to bring light to the fact that cancer doesn’t care who you are that it will go after anyone it wants.
What a great video and message, however lets not forget that female to male transgender are also susceptible to getting breast cancer, especially if there is a strong history of cancer in the family. So please impress upon the MtoF’s to also do self-breast exam and get those yearly mammograms.
Sarah, a breast cancer survivor
This is a very good report on an important and often-overlooked issue.
Just one quibble. The reporter says:
“Transgender people stand just as good a chance of surviving cancer as straight people.”
This statement is poorly worded because transgender people are just as likely to be straight as gay. A transgender woman (male to female) who is attracted to men, for example, is straight. A transgender man (female to male), who likes other men, is gay.
My point is that sexual orientation is completely independant of gender identity, and the reporter conflated the two by referring to non-transgender people as “straight people.”
Luckily there is a proper word: cisgender. Cisgender is the opposite of transgender. It means that a person’s inner sense of gender identity matches that of their physical body. Thus, the majority of people in the world are cisgender. And of, course, as with transgender people, cisgender people can be gay or straight themselves, which has nothing to do with the fact that they are cisgender.
Hopefully the media will catch on to this stuff someday.