by Nick Krieger
In the bathroom, I removed my T-shirt and looked in the mirror. In my old loose-fitting sports bra, one of a handful I wore regularly, my breasts merged to form a saggy uniboob, or a lycra-encased sausage. The image was not attractive, but I didn’t find my look in an underwire bra, which was more like an over-the-shoulder boulder holder on me, any better. I’d stopped wearing these standard bras due to overstretched straps, and bent clips and wires.
I envied women like my mom, small enough to free-boob it and go braless. I had more than a handful, and my hands were large enough to palm a women’s basketball, a men’s if it was sticky. Each breast weighed approximately four pounds as measured on a produce scale, although scientific accuracy is questionable because I might have rested too much of my upper body on the scale, rushing before another customer could turn down my grocery store aisle.
For most of my adult life, friends, teammates, and roommates told me I was in denial by claiming a bra size too small. They would all say, “How can you be a C? You can’t possibly be a C, because I’m a C.” One of my A-gays had even staged a mini-intervention, asking me to prove my size. Wearing a 36-C, I demonstrated that my breasts didn’t spill out the sides, the underwire didn’t crush the bottoms, and I even dipped forward to show that my breasts didn’t accidentally release. My success surprised my friend, but my bras came from solid companies like Maidenform and Bali, not lingerie stores like Victoria’s Secret, from which few bras—and no Cs—ever fit me.
Jess and I had similar-size chests, and once I had her Frog Bra on, I understood immediately what she meant: the bra lofted my chest, as well as flattening it. I jumped in place a few times, amazed by the complete lack of bounce. When I put my T-shirt on, I could still make out my curved shape through the cotton, but instead of softballs, I saw baseballs. I forgot about running and athletic function and opened the bathroom door. “I kind of like it,” I said.
“You’re welcome to have it,” Jess replied.
“You’re not going to wear it?”
“I don’t need it.” Jess went back into her closet and emerged with a white sleeveless crop top. “This binder works much better,” she said and held it out to me.
Made out of nylon and spandex, the binder had a thick front with multiple layers while the back was transparent and stretchy. It appeared medical, like it might require a prescription, and looked as appealing to wear as a mosquito net corset.
I tried to remember when Jess had traded in her old loose-fitting sports bras, specifically the yellow one with the crisscrossing lines visible through her undershirts, for these binders. Perhaps the change, permanent as she made it seem, had been too recent for me to notice. But before I could ask about her, the desire to see my baseballs downsized to golf balls overwhelmed me. “Can I try it on?” I asked.
“Of course,” she replied.
In the bathroom, I left the door slightly open and removed the Frog Bra. I placed my arms through the holes of the tank top and all of the material bunched above the hump of my breasts, digging in like a rubber band with no more give. “There’s no way this is going on,” I yelled.
“Find the bottom. Pull it down from there,” Jess shouted. “Don’t worry, it’s much easier to get off.”
I searched for the bottom, but it was tucked too far underneath the fibrous clump. I took the binder off and started over, making sure that at least some of the lower edge remained accessible. I gripped a piece near my armpit and slowly began to work the bottom out. When my arms tired, I dropped them by my sides, took a deep breath, and then got back to work. Once I’d pulled the entire lower edge out from the crinkly cluster, I was able to pull the binder over my breasts. The force pushed all of my flesh downward, nipples toward stomach, and the binder ended near the bottom of my rib cage.
I went into my room and found my smallest shirt, collared, short sleeved, and green with a black horizontal stripe. I’d bought it used, but it must have originally come from the boys’ section of a department store because of the faded logo, written in a children’s script, that said either “Trains9” or “Trans9.” About once a month, I would try on this shirt as a test, using it the way some women check their weight fluctuation by trying on their “skinny jeans.” With my Trans9 shirt, I was checking to see if maybe I’d lost a couple pounds and my chest shrunk. I would stand before the mirror only to see the black stripe expand across my chest, accentuating my curvature. My mirror needed a warning sign: “Objects in tight shirts appear larger than you want them to be.” I always returned the shirt to my closet.
With the binder underneath, the Trans9 shirt already felt looser than usual. I approached the enormous living room mirror and stepped into the frame. I was shocked. Forget golf balls. I had flapjacks. It was a sight I never could’ve imagined. “Goddamn, I’m cute,” I said. I watched my smile spread before I caught Jess’s reflection in the corner of the mirror and blushed.
“It looks really good,” Jess said. “Those binders are pretty amazing.”
I nodded, unable to take my eyes off myself. I took a step closer to the mirror and could see through my shirt the rounded ledge where my breasts ended. I tried readjusting the flesh, raising my breasts higher so they were more evenly compressed. Some extra flab squeezed out by my armpits, but I couldn’t see it once I pulled my shirt back down. Although my upper body looked a bit thick, the arch of my chest was subtle, like a slightly warped board. “This binder really is amazing,” I said.
Jess went into her room and returned to offer me the full-length version. In the bathroom, I easily peeled off the one I had on. When I pulled the full-length one over my head, even more fabric bunched across the upper part of my chest. “I really don’t think this one is going on,” I said, grappling to find the bottom. “There’s just no way.”
“There are larger sizes, but that defeats the purpose,” Jess said. “And they stretch.”
With my elbows out, I wiggled and wormed. I felt my heat rise, my face flushing. Taking down a small crocodile in the bayou would’ve been easier than wrestling that thing onto my body. I was lucky I didn’t dislocate my shoulder in the process, but eventually I won the fight and headed back into the living room.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “This is warmer than a sweater.”
“I don’t wear the long ones often,” Jess replied. “But they’re good underneath dress shirts.”
This one compressed my love handles for an added bonus, narrowing me so much that I imagined I could find a tuxedo shirt that fit. All of a sudden, the thought of a wedding invite didn’t scare me anymore. By the time I handed Jess her binders back, I was exhausted from the effort of trying them on. She said they came from a website called Underworks, which appeared to sell compression tops and bottoms for after surgeries—just what kinds was unclear—or as cosmetic solutions for males seeking a more masculine shape.
At the time, I cared more about my handsome streamlined reflection than who and what the binders were for, or how much they cost. My contract job at the bank had been extended and for the time being I could afford to spend money, it just required my motivation to override my frugal mentality. Inspired by my boxer brief splurge, the last time I dropped over a hundred bucks at one time and the best impulse decision I ever made, I ordered two tritops and one full-length compression shirt. For sports, and potentially binding, I ordered two Frog Bras from Title Nine to complement the one Jess had given me.
For the next couple months, I wore the tritop binder everywhere. I wrestled it on in the morning before going to work and felt it dig into my skin as I slouched at my desk during the day. When I found time to go to the gym I changed into the Frog Bra, which turned out to be extremely effective for workouts, and after my shower I battled the binder back on in a bathroom stall. I had no problem with strangers seeing me topless, but I didn’t want anyone to see the strain on my face, my elbows flying as I fought to squash my breasts in the same
careless and aggressive way I might stomp closed an overstuffed suitcase. I understood that women at the gym, women like my mother, women in the workplace—the large majority of women—would consider my actions harmful to all of us as women, or at the very least, harmful to me.
And I was hurting myself. The binder rubbed, scratched, and compressed like a panty-hose tank top; breathing on top of an Andean peak would have been easier. My baseline sweat level rose, especially when I commuted on my bike, so my skin always felt clammy and irritated. My second year of grad school started up at the end of August, and on class days, I’d wear the binder for at least twelve hours. Common sense told me that smashing any part of the human body for such long periods could not be healthy. But every time I caught my reflection in the mirror, I thought to myself, Goddamn, you look good. So, I kept at it, bearing in mind the blisters, twisted ankles, and foot cramps that every woman with stiletto heels or knee-high boots endured for the sake of appearance.
All of my friends noticed my physical change. A straight friend, someone I’d known for years, couldn’t get over not just my flat chest, but also the effect it had on my whole presentation. For an entire brunch she kept repeating, “You look so hot, like the boys I date, but cuter.” I was flattered, since straight girls, attainable or not, made up my ideal dating pool. One of my A-gays cautiously asked, “Where did your boobies go?” and I could see her relief when I said I was only binding. They all knew about top surgery and binding, even if their knowledge came from Showtime’s The L Word. Tori, one of my better A-gay friends, asked if I was using an Ace Bandage or duct tape.
I told Tori about the Underworks binders while celebrating an A-gay birthday at a sports bar, the kind of place that catered to both lesbian softball and gay rugby teams. The mixed crowd, as well as the pinball machine, dartboard, and selection of beers on tap made it one of my favorite neighborhood haunts.
“So it’s a tank top that just mashes them?” Tori asked.
“It pancakes them but good,” I said.
Tori grabbed her breasts and scrunched up her face as if she were a guy who had just gotten nailed in the nuts with a baseball.
I ran my hand down the front of my Golden Girls T-shirt, always a Castro crowd pleaser with its sketch portrait of Rose, Dorothy, Blanche, and Sophia. “I think I look great,” I said.
“You do.” Tori took a sip of her Budweiser, her standard drink even though a martini would’ve gone better with the business suit she wore from work at a law firm. “So, what happens with this binder when you’re with the ladies?” she rasped.
I had wondered the very same thing. But with my current hook-up rate, about once or twice a year, I wouldn’t need an answer for a while. “I’ll let you know.”
“I’m not sure I’d go home with a girl who wore one of those,” she said.
A few claps and hollers came from the stools next to us. Tori howled as well, tapping her beer on the bar. She slapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the Giants game on TV. It had been several years since we’d fought over the sports section of the newspaper, or since I fell for sporty women. Tori reminded me of a professional soccer player I’d once liked, although thankfully, my crush had been a Yankees and not a Giants fan. Just thinking about the night I messed around with that soccer player, I could feel her hand, her mouth, on my breast. I wanted to molt my skin right there in the bar.
I slapped Tori back on the shoulder. “You know, I’m not dying to hook up with someone who’s all into my chest,” I said.
Tori returned her focus to me. Her tiny features seemed bigger now that she was staring me in the face. “I’m not sure I could date someone who wouldn’t let me touch her tits,” she said.
“Really, Tori? You dated guys. For many years. They don’t have tits.”
“Girls. I’m not sure I could date a girl who wasn’t into hers.”
“Well, then, you and I would never date,” I said. “Because I don’t want mine.”
Tori pressed her thin lips together. I was shocked that her first response was silence instead of her usual defensive antagonism. I was even more shocked that in my frustration, I’d blurted that out with thoughtless ease. When Tori inquired further, I said my chest was large, annoying during workouts, unnecessary since I never planned to breast-feed, potentially cancerous, and I looked better when it was flat anyways. She understood and definitely shared some of those same thoughts, yet she never wished she didn’t have breasts at all.
“Don’t get rid of your tits, honey,” a piercing voice said. Rick, a gay guy and friend of the birthday girl, stuck his head around Tori. His high-pitched voice was even more jarring than usual in combination with his mountain-man beard, newly grown since our last encounter. “I really wanted to be a girl when I was younger,” he said. “I used to run around in my sister’s dresses.” He laughed awkwardly, a shrill rumble that vibrated in my bones. “But then it passed.”
“Wait, do you want to be a boy?” Tori asked me.
Ever since Greg’s party, it was something I’d asked myself. Imagining being a boy was like trying to envision myself as an alien, or a whale, or maybe Belgian. It was unfathomable. So I kept asking myself, repeatedly, until it was like saying a word over and over until it lost all meaning.
“You’re too pretty to be a boy,” Rick said.
You sound too much like Pee-wee Herman to dress like Paul Bunyan, I thought. I was annoyed he’d hijacked our conversation and frustrated by his backhanded compliment. I liked being pretty, but I didn’t want to be too pretty for anything. I certainly didn’t want to give up being pretty to be a boy, nor did I want to be told what I could and couldn’t be, or should and shouldn’t do with my body from a random acquaintance like Rick. “My dad once told me I was too pretty to be a dyke,” I countered.
Rick laughed knowingly, as did Tori. We’d all heard that ignorant doozy countless times.
“But really,” I said with complete seriousness, my eyes on Rick. “Why would anyone want to be a guy?”
“No joke,” Tori said. Catching the bewildered look on Rick’s face, she gave him a friendly tension-diffusing squeeze on the shoulder. “But Rick here isn’t so bad.”
He let out a self-conscious laugh, screechy enough to break glass, before excusing himself to the bathroom. I finished my beer and pushed it away from me. Tori nodded to the bartender, signaled another round, and placed her hand on my back. “I got this one,” she said, even though it had been my turn to buy for years.
After experimenting with the tritop binder throughout the summer and early fall, the problems beyond the basic sweating, constriction, and skin irritation had mounted. The bottom part ended near my lower rib cage and rolled up constantly, the annoyance akin to a sock that scrunches down into a shoe. While compressing the upper portion of my torso, the binder foregrounded the padding around my hips, making me feel especially curvaceous. The binder shape also showed underneath T-shirts, as if I had a piece of pliable cardboard wrapped around me, and to be discrete, I often wore two shirts. On gym days, taking the binder on and off burned so many calories that I could’ve skipped my actual workout.
Without a doubt, I looked best and felt most confident when flat chested, but I needed some relief from binding. To cut corners, I developed a system. I started to wear the less effective yet more comfortable Frog Bra to the office, figuring nobody there noticed anything about my chest, and I’d already be prepared for the gym. After my postworkout shower, I’d put on a fresh Frog Bra, which I’d keep on when I biked to class in the evenings for sweat control. Upon arrival, I’d go into a bathroom stall and change into a binder, in case there were any cute first-year students to impress. There was one, Ramona, who caught my attention with her sharp comments in our “Classics of Literary Nonfiction” class, but after she dropped the “boyfriend” bomb in casual conversation, I stopped bothering with the binder on class nights.
By October, I was wearing the Frog Bra most of the time and the binder only if I went out on weekends. The less I wore my binders, the more Jess wore hers. Sometimes, she wouldn’t even change out of her binder when she got home from a twelve-hour day at the office. One evening, I found her in the kitchen, cooking all her farmer’s market vegetables on the verge of spoiling. Steam from the boiling water had fogged up the windows and just seeing the outline of the binder underneath her T-shirt made me hot and itchy.
“How do you do it?” I exploded. “How are you still wearing that binder?”
Jess chuckled as she poured some of her thirty-two-ounce specialty beer from the corner store into a pint glass. I turned down her offer to finish the rest. “I’m serious,” I said. “I’ve been trying those things for the past couple months and they drive me nuts.”
Jess leaned back into the crook of the counter. Her laughter gave way to a relaxed smile. “What seems to be the problem?”
I ran through the list of my frustrations, though some didn’t apply to Jess since she didn’t ride a bike or go to the gym regularly. To prevent the bottom portion of the binder from rolling up, she lifted her shirt to show me a trick. She’d created a crease, folding the bottom, a couple inches of material, back on itself. “It doubles the binder up so it works even better,” she said.
I shook my head with a mix of disbelief and admiration. “I still don’t know how you do it.”
“I find it comfortable.”
Comfortable? A bubble bath, a pair of baggy jeans, and fuzzy slippers came to mind. “Comfortable?”
“Look, you can wear a regular bra and have your breasts out there, you can wear a sports bra and have your breasts out there, or you can bind and not have them out there. That’s comfortable for me.” Jess hopped up on the corner of the counter, settling in for a conversation. I changed my mind about the beer and poured the rest of the bottle into a glass.