THINGS I NEED TO FUCKING KNOW: Why every fuckin trans man or nb person I know who binds is like “oh binders are the worst, you can’t breathe in them, I know someone who broke a rib once”,
And meanwhile over in historical costuming, we are fucking eating, sleeping, swordfighting, riding horses, and feeling great like this:
Omigods yes that’s what I used to make my trial binding corset for under a 1830′s gentleman’s costume! I adapted the Elizabethan Pattern Generator Corset to look more like the gentleman’s corset of the time as portrayed in satirical cartoons.
This was only the second pair of stays I made, but it already made me practically flat and was quite comfortable. I didn’t even full bone it and it looked like this:
(don’t judge me for the awful way the boning sticks out at the top, I am by no means a corsetry expert)
People who are actually good at stays will be able to make things like these with no trouble, because if something made from old sheets and recycled boning can do this, imagine what you can do with proper materials.
Just for fun, here’s me in my gentleman’s outfit:
It basically eliminates my boobs, but leaves the hips alone because at that time the hourglass silhouette was fashionable for men as well. I’m not exactly flat-chested, so I’d say for a first attempt this one is very succesful.
You are choosing to do that to yourselves. It’s not required of you or something you do in order to fucking live your life as you’d like to otherwise someone might misgender or harass you. Binding because of dysphoria and fucking cosplaying are two totally different things.
Whoa, this isn’t about trying to put transmasc people down compared to costumers. This is about saying, “Modern binders are based on medical compression technology–would it be possible to use other design methods from centuries past to make binding less painful and restrictive for people who bind today because of dysphoria?”
It’s about bringing two groups of people with really DIFFERENT experiences and motives, and saying, “Can we share knowledge and experiences to make trans peoples’ lives BETTER?”
Fair enough. The tone was confusing. I apologize for the hostility.
I also I don’t particularly think boned corsets are the way to go. 1) expenses and 2) the shape isn’t exactly what people are going for, and larger trans men will no be any flatter than traditional binders (it may even make the issues worse)
Yeah, sorry about the tone–I was so outraged by how universally binders seem to be uncomfortable and painful, in compared to my own experiences recreating an era where the conical torso was the ideal.
I’m working on taking the basic principles of rigid vertical support and making it a lot more accessible. After a quick test-run, I found that it is possible to convert a sports bra into a binder, so now I’m experimenting with different ways to do that cheaply and effectively–my test run got some compression, but wasn’t totally flat, so we’ll see if I can improve that, or if this will be a kind of makeshift halfway binder that appeals because it’s inexpensive and can be made at home even if it doesn’t completely provide the desired look.
Right now the biggest chests I’m working with are DD/E cup. You’re right, I’m definitely worried about how it will work for bigger chests. Part of what I’m doing in my work is reaching out to biomedical engineers to ask about how much compression is realistic; it’s the kind of question mammographers ask all the time, since breasts vary a lot in density and squishiness, and to get a proper mammogram, they need to squish the tissue as flat as possible. So hopefully I can get several different fields of knowledge in there.
Some of the bigger trans men I’ve talked to have said they’ve given up hope for any kind of binder that fits them, and others say that even if it’s only halving their chest size (taking an H breast down to a D, which is still an impressively Chris Evansian pigeon chest) having chest wear that isn’t as obviously feminine as a bra would be worth it.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 