Safety tips for chest binding for trans people here!  I thought this was fairly common knowledge, but apparently not…  Please reblog or do whatever you can to spread this information (feel free to repost if that would help), because it seems way too many people don’t know it, and it’s super important.  This post is pretty long, so I made a shorter version of it here that you can read if you don’t have the energy for lots of words.

So, binding wrong can cause really really bad health problems - your ribs can snap and puncture your lungs, they can deform into your lungs, you can get pleurisy (inflammation of tissue around lungs - super painful, trust me), you can end up coughing up blood, you can get pneumonia, etc.  Binding less badly but still unwisely can cause less severe problems from passing out to difficulty breathing to bruises to bleeding at the skin to chafing.*  I want to emphasise that this is not just overblown scare tactics; these are things that actually happen to actual people.  Here follow ways to avoid this:

Absolute do nots:

• Don’t bind with Ace bandages (Do not listen to the movies and books! This is basically the worst possible thing you can do.  Ace bandages are designed to get tighter the longer you wear them.  It’s like wrapping yourself up in a Boa constrictor.)
  
• Don’t use duct tape (even over an undershirt, which some (severely misinformed) people will tell you is safe; this is almost as bad as Ace)
• Don’t sleep while wearing whatever you’re using to bind
• Don’t do heavy exercise while binding
• Don’t bind for more than 8 hours in a day (You should be fine binding 12 hours if you wear it more briefly the next day to compensate; that should only be for special occasions, though.  Never ever go above 12 hours.)
• Don’t bind more tightly than you should be (if you’re feeling pain or having difficulty breathing, you’re binding too tightly, loosen up)
• Relatedly, don’t get a binder a smaller size than the seller recommends for your measurements
• Don’t try to compensate for loose binding by putting on so many layers you are in danger of heat stroke/heat exhaustion (I’ve never seen a warning about this, but it is a serious danger, I’ve done it, layers in Texas 115 degree summer are bad news)
• Don’t think that if you’re binding with sports bras instead of a binder you’re exempt from any of these rules - see my post about that here

Dos:

• Give your chest, ribs, lungs, etc. time to rest (in addition to only binding for 8 hours a day, breaks during the day are really helpful even if they’re very brief)
• Cough hard every time you take your binder/whatever you’re binding with off (one of the primary issues with binding is that mucus builds up in your lungs and can give you pneumonia; coughing loosens the mucus up)
• Cough hard every so often while binding
• If you start wheezing or hear your breath rattling, immediately go into a bathroom or whatever you have to do to take off your binding and cough (seriously, coughing is like the best thing, cough all the time, make like the “before” in an allergy medication ad)
• Put a reasonable number of extra layers on so you can bind more loosely (sweatshirts zipped halfway up so the zippers go across the centers of your lumps work wonders, it disguises the shape)
• Stand up straight (hunching over with a binder on can put bruises on your lower ribs, as well as, of course, screwing with your spine)
• Every so often pull your shoulders back and then breathe really deeply (the shoulders are important)
• Carry around a more gentle method of binding than you usually use (not overly small sports bra, extra layer, etc.) in your backpack or whatever so you can change into it if you have problems (if you have a velcro binder, moving it to its loosest placement may be fine)

*If it’s something that concerns you, binding will also over time make the chest tissue less dense which makes your chest lumps all floppy.  It’s permanent.  That’s pretty much inevitable and can’t be avoided no matter how safely you bind, though less intensive binding obviously does it less.  But we’re talking, like, over years.  It does make it easier to bind - the less dense tissue squishes much more nicely.