by Arin Andrews
Oh no, I thought.
“You’re so selfish and mean,” she cried. “This isn’t working anymore!” She handed me the ring I’d given her. “Here. You’re not ready for something like this. You don’t make me feel loved.”
The only thing I lived for was to make her feel loved!
“Katie, we-we’ve got to talk about this,” I managed to stammer. I was thoroughly freaking out. “We can’t just throw away what we have!”
I convinced her to come back to my house so we could talk about it, and the whole way over she rattled off a list of all the ways I was mean to her. But none of it made sense. She asked for her space because of school, and so I gave it to her. And when we were together, I doted on her. She seemed desperate to cling to the ski trip as an example of our entire relationship. I felt like I was going crazy. Was I an asshole and just didn’t know it? I was pretty sure I wasn’t. Maybe testosterone was having an even bigger effect on me than I’d realized.
By the time we got to the house, I was so worked up that I punched the garage door. Which probably didn’t do anything for my image as a jerk in her eyes.
“Please,” I begged her. “We’ve got to work through this. We can’t just ditch it. I’ll do whatever you need me to. I’ll keep the ring. I can give it back when the time is right.”
After a deluge of promises and tears, she agreed to stay with me. But it was never really the same after that. I saw less and less of her, as she often broke dates. When we did hang out, she talked a lot about her college friends, new ones that I’d never met. She kept the two halves of her life separate. There was college Katie, and my girlfriend Katie.
The main thing that kept me going for the rest of my junior year was that I was scheduled to have my top surgery as soon as the school year was over. I’d been living as a guy for a year, and Mom had finally agreed to let me have the surgery. After that I’d have the entire summer to finally be in at least half of my true body with Katie. We could rekindle what we’d had before, after all the pressures of her first year of college were gone.
I had a suspicion, though, that maybe one of the reasons Katie was withdrawing was because she finally had the body she was meant to have, and therefore she no longer needed my support and companionship. But I buried that thought whenever it came up. I was just projecting my own insecurity. When we were together, and not fighting, she always told me how much she loved me.
My surgery was nowhere near the level of Katie’s. Since my breasts were a small B cup, I was just on the border of being eligible for something called full keyhole surgery. If your breasts are any larger, you need to get a bilateral mastectomy, which can leave significant scarring. But with keyhole surgery a surgeon simply makes an incision around your nipple and pulls the tissue out through the hole, and uses liposuction to remove the rest of the fat out through your armpits. If the doctors need to, they resize the areola to make it smaller so it matches your new flat chest, but mine were small enough to begin with, so they didn’t need to change them. Keyhole surgery leaves virtually no scars, and it isn’t supposed to affect nipple sensation. And since I was so young, it would be much easier for my skin to snap back into place and adhere to the pectoral muscles without any stretch marks.
Taylor had recommended a few surgeons to us, but they all charged between ten thousand and twelve thousand dollars, and there was no way I could afford that. So I did a lot of Internet research and found a doctor in Cleveland who charged only sixty-five hundred dollars. Not that sixty-five hundred dollars is cheap, but I was able to save part of the money myself through working at Danco, and Mom agreed to pay for the rest. I don’t take this lightly. I know that there are so many transgender people out there who can’t afford any kind of surgery, and I’m beyond grateful that I have a family willing to help me financially.
Katie wasn’t able to come see me off, because she had a final that day, but she sent me a ton of Good luck and I love you texts. As I was getting into the car to head to the airport, Wes came running up to me in the driveway.
“Listen,” he said. “Since this is the last time you’re ever going to have boobs, can I touch them?”
“Fine,” I said, and sighed.
He reached up and squeezed them, making a honk, honk sound before cracking up and giving me a huge hug. “Come home soon,” he said, suddenly getting all quiet and serious. “I love you.”
• • •
After we landed, we checked into a one-bedroom suite in a hotel near the hospital. Aunt Susan and Gigi had come along with us, and I shared the main bed with Mom and Susan, while Gigi stayed on a foldout sofa in the living room.
That night Mom and I went downstairs to the hotel hot tub. I wore my binder under a tank top, barely able to comprehend that it was the last time I would ever have to feel self-conscious about my chest. The double layers of fabric felt even tighter than usual because of all the steam, but I didn’t care—the joy of knowing that my breasts would be gone by that same time tomorrow more than made up for any discomfort.
We sat in the tub not talking, mist swirling up around us. I knew what kind of thoughts must have been running through my mom’s mind, and I didn’t want to interrupt the moment for her. Even though she was happy for me, I knew a part of her was grieving, that the finality of it all must have been fully hitting her. I wanted her to have this time of quiet reflection with me still in the physical body she had given birth to, rather than her having to hear me gloat about how psyched I was. It was still hard for me to fathom how far we’d come together, and it meant everything to me that this was all happening with her blessing.
• • •
The surgery was an outpatient procedure, and we arrived at the hospital at noon. In the prep room Susan kept making jokes about breasts, bouncing hers up and down and drawing smiley faces on her arms using the surgery marker. “You’re cutting your boobs off. Come on, let’s have some fun,” she said, laughing as the nurses shot disapproving looks our way. I knew it was just her way of masking how scared she was that I was going into surgery.
As the nurses got ready to wheel me off, Mom’s eyes started to tear up. She kissed me good-bye and told me she loved me.
“Ready?” the doctor asked when I arrived inside the operating room.
“Ready,” I said, and the anesthesiologist lowered the mask over my face and asked me to count back from ten. The last thing I remember thinking is, It’s not real.
The second I awoke, I stuck my head up and looked at my chest. There was nothing there except a tight black surgical-grade binder to keep everything compressed. The room suddenly started to spin, and I dropped my head back down. It happened, I thought. Mom appeared by the stretcher.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
I struggled to get words out of my mouth. “Loopy,” I managed to slur. “I got morphine.” There was no pain, and it actually felt sort of amazing. I turned my head and saw a camera in my face. I’d forgotten that we’d agreed to let Inside Edition film the surgery. I closed my eyes and let the world fall away.
I stayed in the hospital for the rest of the afternoon for monitoring, and then got sent home to the hotel. There were two drain tubes sticking out of my armpits for extra fluid to pour out of—a sort of thin, watery blood that collected in little bags I called blood grenades. They needed to be emptied constantly.
Mom stayed by my bedside, feeding me Percocet so that I could get through the pain. I couldn’t even raise a glass to my lips to drink water, so she ran out and bought bendy straws to hold up to my mouth. My arms were utterly useless, and she even had to pull my pants down for me the first time I needed to go to the bathroom. Gigi and Susan left after the first two days, and by the third, Mom and I were going stir-crazy. We watched a never-ending feast of cooking shows on cable, but it did nothing to help me work up an appetite. I pretty much lived on ice cream and soup. The painkillers made me feel good for a little while, but soon they started to make me feel nauseous and cloudy. I wanted my clear thoug
hts back, but more than anything, I wanted to see my new chest. The binder had to stay on for five full days, though. A barrage of text messages from Jamie and Andi and my cousins sending their love helped stem the boredom. Toward the end of the stay, I finally felt strong enough to actually leave the hotel. Mom and I went to a nearby restaurant and were so psyched to be around other people. We felt like tourists in an alien world, after being cooped up with just each other for so long.
The day before we left, we went back to the hospital to have my bandages removed. As the nurse unwound the wrap, I glanced down. My nipples were scabbed over and there were still incisions healing from where the tubes had gone into my pits, but other than that, it was perfect. It was like looking down the sheer side of a cliff. The nurse brought over a mirror.
I was finally looking at myself—the person I always saw when I closed my eyes. I was wearing my soul on my skin for the first time in my life.
I was insanely happy, but there was also a sort of calm that settled over me, a peaceful feeling of relief. It was similar to the sensation I got after finally cutting my hair off, but magnified times a million. My shoulders were still bent from years of hunching over to hide my chest, and I tried to straighten my posture. Pain shot through me, so I let my shoulders release back to their normal position. But not before I took a quick selfie.
Everyone back home kept texting and asking me to send them photos, but I wrote that I wanted to show everyone at once when we returned.
I showered carefully as soon as we got back to the hotel, cleansing away a week’s worth of sweat off my chest. It felt so wonderfully strange to soap up the area, no longer encumbered by the two mounds that had gotten in the way for the past six years. I had flashes of being a child, remembering how normal it had felt to shower, back when there had never been anything there to begin with.
When I was done showering, I walked back into the bedroom to grab some clothes. Mom was sitting on the bed, and she gave me a funny look.
“You know you don’t have to do that anymore, right?” she asked.
I was confused until I followed her gaze and glanced down. Out of sheer habit I had wrapped my towel around my entire upper body.
“Oh yeah!” I said. I let the towel drop down to my waist and sauntered casually across the room, relishing every second.
Early the next morning, as our plane sped down the runway, I felt so strongly that I was leaving a part of me behind. I suppose because it was true. Some people leave their hearts in San Francisco; I left my tits in Cleveland.
The entire ride home I stared at the photo I’d taken of myself on my phone. A whole new chapter of my life was about to start—shirtless Arin. I could finally have sex with Katie without worrying that my breasts were going to flop around. When we landed, she was waiting, along with Amanda and Cheyenne. Aside from texting, Katie and I had barely spoken the entire time I’d been gone, but I’d been too excited about the surgery to really notice. Amanda gave me a homemade notebook called 50 Reasons Why You Are Awesome, with exactly that—fifty cards with beautiful little compliments written on them.
We drove to my dad’s for the big reveal. I needed some help getting my shirt off, and turned my back to the room while Mom helped me undo the binder.
I spun around.
Everyone whistled and cheered. And then Cheyenne said, “Your nipples are really black.”
“They’ll heal,” I answered.
Katie met me back at my house, and we went upstairs so I could show her my chest.
“It looks incredible,” she told me, reaching out and gently touching it.
I told her all about the surgery, and we compared our spaced-out morphine experiences.
“Get into bed with me,” I said. I was still in too much pain to attempt to have sex, but she didn’t seem especially eager to anyway, so we just stretched out side by side and flipped on the TV. She stayed over that night but spent most of the time texting someone on her phone. I fell asleep early, exhausted and emotionally spent.
17
Over the next week, I still needed help with normal things like getting milk out of the refrigerator. The full recovery time is six weeks, and you aren’t supposed to do any sort of heavy lifting for twelve, which meant the whole summer. For the first few weeks all I did was sit around and watch a lot of TV. I was pretty boring to be around, so I didn’t blame Katie for not coming around as much. And anytime I started to get nervous about us, she assured me in her texts that everything was fine, per usual.
I needed to line up a summer job. Doing something in the warehouse at Danco would have been the first choice, but I couldn’t because of all the physical exertion it required.
I ended up getting hired to make tamales out of a wagon run by a local restaurant called Molly’s Landing. They kept it parked next to the giant blue whale of Catoosa, one of the most famous roadside attractions on Route 66. The story goes that back in the 1970s some rich guy had a wife who was obsessed with collecting whale figurines, so he built her a giant whale next to a pond on their property. It has a huge open mouth that you can walk into, a slide coming out of its belly that goes into the water, and a ladder that leads up to a little viewing platform at the tip of its tail. Kids used to sneak onto their property to play on it, so he eventually opened it up to the public and built a little beach. Today you aren’t allowed to swim in the pond, but the whale itself still gets plenty of visitors—a lot of overseas tourists doing the fabled Route 66 road trip across America. So I started to spend my days passing out tamales to a never-ending caravan of fussy Brits and unimpressed Germans.
During this entire time the original media company that had contacted me and Katie was visiting and filming every few weeks because they wanted to put together a reel for a possible documentary about Katie and me. 20/20 came to do a special on us too, so whenever the camera crews arrived, Katie dutifully came over and got dressed up, and we played our parts. We had the role of the all-American teen trans couple down to a science at that point.
I understood why the cameras liked us so much. We were safe for the masses—white, telegenic, and heteronormative. It bothered me that no one was interested in filming any of the other trans teens at OYP so that we could represent a broader spectrum of our local community, but I told myself that we were at least helping to get the conversation started on a larger scale.
The other problem was that the only time I felt like Katie and I were in an actual relationship was when the cameras were rolling. She’d become super-affectionate and laugh and tease and kiss me, but as soon as everyone packed up, she’d disappear too. She continued to assure me that everything was fine between us, but we barely ever fooled around anymore. It bothered me of course—hell, I was a horny teenage guy—but at the same time the emotional distance between us made the physical desire lessen. The best part of sex with her had always been the emotional closeness. And in a weird way I missed Katie’s old body, when we’d both had the wrong genitals but had been matched up in our minds. We had been on an even playing field before, but now she had not only surpassed me, but she also seemed anxious to make the distance even wider.
As summer neared its end and I became completely healed, I started hitting the gym really hard. Now that I had my chest taken care of, I wanted to start shaping the rest of my body. I could grow a full chin strap of hair by then, but I still had hips, sort of an hourglass figure, and the only way to get rid of that is to add bulk and muscle to the torso so it fills out the sides. My metabolism is out of control, though. I can eat, like, a gazillion calories a day and not gain a pound. I started drinking protein shakes and installed a pull-up bar in my bedroom doorframe to bulk up my pecs. I’ve always had abs, even as a little kid, so they weren’t hard to start toning more. It’s not like I want to look like some totally ripped tool, but I’d already undergone major surgery to get the body I wanted. I owed it to myself to keep it healthy. And, to be perfectly honest, I hoped that if I looked manlier, then maybe Katie would start showing
more interest in me. But as had become her habit, she got really invested in hanging out only when a media opportunity arose.
Right as school was starting, we got a call from the Trisha Goddard show, asking us to appear on it. I’d never heard of the program, but I got excited. The producers were offering to fly us to Stamford, Connecticut, where the show shoots, and our moms both agreed that we should all stay on in New York City for a few days afterward, since we were going to be so close. I figured it would be a great opportunity for Katie and me to have a romantic getaway.
Everything was great at first. We cuddled up against each other once we were settled on the plane, and I carried her bags for her through the terminal when we landed. We spent the first day shooting random footage of us wandering around outside in the grass, playing the carefree couple. It all went great, and we were given vouchers for free dinners that night at our fancy hotel. As soon as we got into the car service to head to the hotel, Katie started acting distracted again. She was glued to her phone, sending text after text after text. When I asked her about it, she said, “Oh, it’s just my friend Todd. He’s been helping me study for this one exam.”
Todd. I’d heard her mention the name before. When we got to the hotel, I snuck off to the bathroom and went onto Facebook on my phone, searching her friends for someone named Todd. There was one guy, but every time I tried to click on him, I got an error message that said, page not found. I figured it was a reception problem.
When we started to get ready to head downstairs to dinner, Katie begged off.
“I’m so tired, and not really hungry,” she said. “I’m just going to stay up here.”
We tried to convince her to come down with us, but she kept insisting, so we told her we’d bring some food back up for her later. Jazzlyn seemed embarrassed when we got to our table.
“She’s just really been under a lot of stress lately,” she said.