Picture from my infusion treatment today. Battling stage 3 breast cancer has given me more personal insights than I already knew about embodiment. I have been fighting breast cancer for almost a year now and have about 8 more months to go. One major success was being able to reduce my tumor in such a way that I was able to get a lumpectomy rather than the full mastectomy. My major reason for wanting the lumpectomy rather than the mastectomy was to be able to retain as much sensation as possible. The first surgeon I saw who was heavily pushing me to choose the mastectomy kept telling me that despite losing my whole breast, how great my breasts would look after plastic surgery and that no one would be able to tell. The doctor told me this was my opportunity to “get the boob job you always wanted.” I let the doctor know, I never wanted a boob job. But I was clear to me that the doctor assumed I would prioritize how I looked to others rather than how I felt in my own body. Caring more about how you externally appear to others rather than how you feel in your own body is a symptom of self objectification. Only other people really look at you. Except for looking in the mirror for grooming, we don’t really look at ourselves. When I am immersed in activity, I am not looking at myself, I am experiencing myself. To constantly hold in one’s mind how others perceive you while you are experiencing is compartmentalizing and separating. Self objectification separates us from wholly immersing ourselves in being and experiencing, it keeps us from intimacy with ourselves and intimacy from our experiences. Trans ideology is concerned with constant self objectification and constant management of controlling how others perceive you. This is mentally and emotionally exhausting. It is also highly dissociative behavior. It dissociates the person from being fully themselves because they are more concerned with managing external perceptions than just being. There are so many reasons this ideology harms those who practice it, and one of the biggest harms is dissociation from intimacy with self.