Alright gonna make a PSA post but dear artists; You do not have to draw trans men with just double incision scars.
In fact, it’s actually legitimately annoying. Not all trans men get DI top surgery. There’s loads of other ways to indicate a character is trans besides JUST DI marks which at this point is way overdone imo.
Here’s a run down on different surgeries trans men can get and what that scarring looks like;
Double Incision
DI surgery is the most common form of top surgery I see depicted for people’s characters. There’s nothing really wrong with that, because it is the most common form of top surgery, but it’s also really overplayed at this point and I’d like to see some variation. As you can also see above, DI surgery fades overtime. So if you’re drawing your character with bright pink scars and they got top surgery years ago, that’s not really accurate. Not only that, but depending on the surgeon the scars can look wildly different from each other, so it’s not all uniform. If you just google “top surgery results” there’s loads of examples out there.
Peri-Areolar Top Surgery
This is what Peri surgery results look like. The thing about top surgeries besides DI is that you can’t really get them unless you have smaller breasts, because of complications. So to get Peri your character would need to already be pretty flat chested to begin with. Peri does not leave behind the trademark DI scars, but does leave it’s own type of distinct scarring around the nipples, and it’s own type of chest shape.
Keyhole Top Surgery
This is what Keyhole top surgery looks like. It’s the least invasive form of top surgery, although you can only get it with a chest that’s already very flat. As you can see, it leaves almost no visible scarring. So it’s totally possible for your character to have next to no top surgery scars and still have gotten top surgery.
Above is the difference between DI and Keyhole. As you can see, it’s a lot different in terms of scarring. Both of these men had top surgery, but the results look completely different.
No Top Surgery At All
You can literally just design a trans man with either; A) Breasts B) No breasts because he started hormone treatment early and had puberty blockers. Someone who went on puberty blockers and then testosterone would never develop breasts to begin with.
If you’re cis and decide to draw a character who has breasts, just don’t do it in a fetishistic way. It’s actually totally possible to design and draw a trans man with breasts without it being weird. He doesn’t even have to bind. Loads of trans men don’t bind for personal or health reasons.
Personally, I don’t even bind most of the time and I have D cup breasts, but I wear a massive puffy jacket all the time so no one can tell. I do this because of a mixture of health problems and discomfort with binding. No two trans men are alike! Not all of us like binding.
I hope this was informative and helps people to draw a variety of different chests on trans men!!!
