Anaise Hitchcock can walk for about three minutes before she has to stop and rest.
Her chest is the reason.
The 24-year-old from York wears a size K, owns one bra because each costs £90, and doesn’t want a smaller chest.
She wants no breasts at all.
“It’s exhausting and I don’t enjoy having breasts at all so I want them gone,” she told Creatorzine.
“My life would be easier without them.”
“Like carrying a rucksack but on the front”
The pain sits in her back and shoulders and follows her to bed, where she can’t find a comfortable position.
Her bras dig in. Heat rash underneath has left her with permanent discolouration.
“It’s so sore under there,” she said. “It’s like carrying a rucksack but on the front.”
Then come the small indignities. She pushes her plate away at the table so she doesn’t spill food down herself.
Showering takes effort because of the weight she has to lift to wash underneath.
“I’m 5ft 6in – perfect door handle height – so I get bruised a lot from hitting them,” she said.
“My breasts are so big it takes you by surprise.”
One £90 bra and no shop that stocks it
Anaise is unemployed because of hereditary spastic paraplegia, a condition that causes progressive weakness and stiffness in the leg muscles.
Money is tight, and her bra size makes it tighter.
“I can’t find a physical store that has my bra size so I order online and they’re £90 a bra,” she said.
“I have one because I can’t afford [more].”
Swimming is out too. “My boobs hang so low because of the weight of them, so I can’t go swimming and swimsuits don’t fit.”
Builders, “boing boing” and a man with too many questions
The staring hasn’t stopped. On a recent trip into town, she says builders made sound effects and laughed as she walked past.
One chanted “boing boing”. Hilarious stuff.
“It’s so frustrating because they don’t understand how tiring it is,” she said.
“I don’t enjoy living like this. It makes me not want to leave the house.”
Dating has its own problem. Anaise says she can never tell whether a man likes her or has a fetish for her chest.
One man angling for a date kept dragging the conversation back to it.
“He was asking what size they are, if I get them out for people, if I let people touch them,” she said.
“It’s so inappropriate and I told him I wasn’t going to answer.”
Stared at by older men at 12
It started early. Her breasts grew rapidly from the age of 12, and she was a DD by 15.
“There was a big issue with older men staring at me,” she said.
“I spent a lot of time shopping in town and I noticed men staring at me. I was 12, it was so uncomfortable.”
Nobody else her age was going through the same thing.
“My body was changing but I couldn’t talk to anyone about it because my body was different.”
Turned away by the NHS
Anaise says she had an NHS consultation about breast reduction surgery in 2019.
She claims doctors checked her shoulders and the grooves left by her bra straps, then told her they couldn’t offer surgery because her symptoms matched those of other women with large breasts.
Too ordinary to treat, apparently.
Private reduction surgery would cost her £9,000.
She has launched a fundraiser, organised by Jennifer Fracas, aiming to raise £5,000 towards it.
“Just looking at me, you can tell something needs to be done,” she said.
“It angers me, it’s physically tiring, it’s inconvenient in every way. There’s no positive to having breasts this size.”
What stings most is the assumption that this is vanity.
“I feel like nobody cares and people think it’s for beauty reasons. They think I want to look better but that’s not true, it’s for health reasons.”
Why It Matters
Large chests drive a lucrative corner of the creator economy, where attention is the product and audiences pay for it.
Anaise gets the same attention for free, from builders and dating matches, with none of the upside and all of the back pain.
What some creators sell, others simply live with.
She also joins a long queue of people turning to crowdfunding for procedures they say the NHS won’t fund, with breast reductions among the operations many health boards restrict.
Her fundraiser remains open. A reduction would ease the weight, though not quite give her what she says she wants.
“If they get bigger,” she said, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
