by Nick Krieger
I thought back to the weekend I’d gone away with some of them to Portland, three summers before, crashing at their hotel for a campy lesbian soccer tournament. I hadn’t brought a bathing suit, and yet I wanted to be included so badly that I went into the hot tub in my black bra and underwear—now packed away in a cardboard box with other items from a different era: my VCR, cassette tapes, and additional objects I held on to in case the digital revolution was just a phase. How hard I’d tried to pretend I fit in; I’d fooled all of my A-gays and they accepted me, they let me be one of them. They considered me safe, part of the collective, subsuming me under a group that now made me feel paralyzed, as if I couldn’t move or speak with this womanhood hovering over me.
I saw myself most clearly in the brothers outside, in my own brother, in the teenage boy in the old health class video, and yet I was not like any of them at all. I’d played in those lesbian soccer tournaments, traveled to the Sydney Gay Games for basketball and soccer, lived in my college rugby house, lettered in five high school sports, all with women. Those experiences, my camaraderie with these women, were my greatest joys. My awareness and incomprehension rendered me speechless. Zippy licked the last trace of frosted sugar off her finger, and I left her in the kitchen to bounce off the walls.
When I returned outside, everyone was still eating or passed out by the side of the empty pool. I dipped my foot over the ledge. The sun was falling fast, a grayness settling on the water. As I started to remove my tank top, Stephanie stirred on her nearby towel.
“Finally,” she said, sitting up. She adjusted the triangles of her bikini. “We’ll be able to see who has a bigger chest.”
Word of my size complaints must have gotten around, mangled by the A-gay game of telephone. I tucked my elbow back into my shirt.
“Oh, come on,” she taunted playfully. “You think you’ve got a big chest? Let’s see who has something to show off.”
Stephanie was a loud, brash leader, the captain when it came to soccer and always a competitor. She was the kind of person who’d try to carry all her grocery bags up to the house in one trip even if it left marks on her arms and wrists, just for the challenge. She pulled her shoulders back and pushed her chest forward, not with feminine pride, but tomboy pride, for being able to play sports, scuffle, do anything and everything physical, while also owning large, sexy breasts. Like the other A-gays, Stephanie fought not only to be strong but also to be a strong woman.
I felt no allegiance to her side in us versus them, and I was done comparing breasts, done listening to, “You’re not a C because I’m a C,” done engaging in the party game where a blindfolded person tries to guess who everyone is by feeling their chests, done likening myself to other women. Still reeling from my epiphany in the kitchen a few minutes before, I felt anger rise in me. “It’s not about whose chest is bigger,” I said with controlled intensity. “I complain because I don’t want mine at all. And I’ve been waiting all day for a quiet moment to swim. So, please, please, can you let me do so in peace.”
Back-pedaling apologies tumbled from her lips. I calmly explained that I wasn’t upset with her; she’d had no idea how I felt. Until I asserted myself to her, I hadn’t realized the power of my own feelings, nor my ability to express them with some composure. For a brief moment, my confidence displaced my physical discomfort. Empowered, I stripped off my shirt and entered the pool from the steps on the shallow end.
The water was colder than I’d anticipated. I could feel goose bumps prickling up on my skin. To warm myself, I did a few breaststroke laps, keeping my head above the water, watching the waves ripple away from me in tiny splashes. I flipped onto my back and floated, still and alone, with only the occasional shout or laugh from the upper deck breaking the silence.
I stayed at the party until the very end, when my same friends drove me home, my unused bicycle back on the roof rack.
After the pool party, I decided not to talk about my body or gender issues with my A-gays. They didn’t get it. The problem was I didn’t know what “it” was, and so I didn’t get “it” either, and I needed to understand something, anything, even if it was why I was becoming so fixated on my chest. Whenever I walked past mirrors, my attempts to avert my eyes only lured me back into the frame, and at work, I found myself taking unnecessary pee breaks as excuses to steal extra glances at myself.
If I was wearing a binder and shirt, my reflection would ask me, “Can you see your breasts? Are they too big? Do they look funny? Can other people see them? If you were less neurotic, could you let this go?” If I was topless, either before or after a shower, I’d scrutinize my breasts themselves, searching for an identifiable problem. From above, they looked like rockets about to crash or like a pair of socks weighed down with coins—could my annoyance be caused by the sag, or my stretch marks? And why did my nipples seem, I don’t know, too nippley? Occasionally, when I wasn’t deep into one of my investigations, I’d peek quickly, catch myself head-on. “Nice rack,” I’d think, before all my synapses could fire and connect the rack to me.
When I wasn’t obsessing over my boobs, I was reading about gender. I substituted my “Classics of Literary Nonfiction” books with my own “Classics of Transgender History” reading list. Of course, the trans-themed book list was short, which made almost anything on it a classic. I breezed through Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man, recommended by someone at the gay bookstore in my neighborhood as the most informative transsexual narrative, and then turned to Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues.
I was in the living room reading the semiautobiographical novel when Bec came in, fresh from an afternoon nap. She yawned and stretched her long arms overhead before her eyes landed on the book cover. “Tough read,” she said, curling into the love seat.
“No joke,” I replied. The story was not only painful but personally scary. If Bec and I had been born in a different era when laws enforced gender-appropriate clothing, a bad night at the dyke bar would’ve meant a beat-down and a jail cell, whereas I considered no new phone numbers and the spins something to whine about.
“Sometimes I wonder how many butch and trans people killed themselves back then.” Bec untucked her legs from her chest, planted her feet on the ground, and sat up tall, spreading her broad shoulders like a butterfly. “I wonder how many suicides there are even now,” Bec said. “I’m lucky.”
I spoke directly into the target of her chest. “Lucky?”
“There’s a lot of people desperately seeking top surgery. I was able to do it. Though I’m still paying for it. Probably will be for a while.”
She interlocked her fingers between her knees and leaned forward, encouraging me with her openness. “Why did you do it?” I asked. “If you don’t mind talking about it?”
“I don’t mind.” Bec headed to the kitchen and offered me a Bud Light, which I declined. “Gotta maintain my girlish figure,” she joked as she slithered a hand down the side of her hip. She dropped back down into the love seat, her Gumby-like frame filling a space made for two, and placed her bottle by her foot. “What I did was a big deal. I removed a huge part of what the world views as Woman.”
Without much prodding, Bec told me about her decision-making process, and it revolved, to my surprise, entirely around her body, not her gender. She said she didn’t know what would’ve happened had she ended up with a B-cup rather than a DD, but she couldn’t be bothered to speculate on the what-if. Ever since her breasts showed up, she’d found everything about the look and feel to be unattractive, uncomfortable, and unhealthy. They caused zits and sweat in the creases. They were a risk for cancer. They acted as an annoying barrier to snuggling up to girls in bed. They were weird, saggy, and gross, stage props with a use and purpose she never understood.
She’d always fantasized about their disappearance, imagining a breast reduction to nothingness. In her early twenties, being in queer spaces, she discovered that pe
ople did remove breasts entirely. Lack of money prevented any serious consideration, and then she entered a long-term relationship with a lesbian and thought it selfish to make a change to her body, especially with joint funds.
Bec moved to North Carolina with this girlfriend, and a year and a half later, when their breakup became imminent, Bec planned a return to San Francisco. This major life transition presented the perfect time for a major physical change. What had always been in the background of Bec’s mind leapt to the forefront. She searched online, using words like breast reduction, gay, and queer, until she acquired the terminology, words like top surgery, bilateral mastectomy, female-to-male, transgender—the latter a word she hadn’t considered applying to herself at the time. Bec found a website that housed a repository of before-and-after surgery pictures from a variety of doctors. Nothing she saw on those pages was worse than the baggage she carried on her own chest. Bec repeatedly concluded the best results came from the San Francisco–based Dr. Brownstein, a talented and well-respected surgeon, and one of only a few who performed the procedure.
I’d learned from my readings that the “top surgery” everyone around me threw out so casually was considered by the medical community to be gender reassignment surgery—a step in the transition from woman to man. Doctors, regarding this surgery as a treatment for Gender Identity Disorder, followed a set of recommended ethical guidelines, which included a psychological permission slip. But Bec didn’t appear to be sick, and as far as I could tell, she wasn’t transitioning from woman to man. “How’d you get around the therapist’s note?” I asked Bec.
“Brownstein asked me how long I’d been living as a man,” Bec explained. “I said a year and a half. That’s how long I’d been in North Carolina where everyone thought I was a guy. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then maybe it’s a . . .” she trailed off.
I cocked my head, waiting for her to finish the phrase, but she shrugged her shoulders. She wouldn’t claim herself as a man, or male, being one or becoming one either. That she’d bypassed medical community guidelines left me unfazed, but I was astonished that she’d trusted her top-surgery desire without any intention of “being a man”—that was the only accepted reason I’d ever heard to pursue a flat, streamlined chest.
There had to be something Bec wasn’t telling me. Like a prosecuting attorney, I tried to trick her into stating her manhood. I asked why she always “packed” a huge noticeable bulge in her briefs and she said it was because she liked her reflection, not because men had bulges. Every aspect of her physicality, from her natural height to her flat chest and large package, screamed man, and yet Bec, sitting across from me in her pink-and-black T-shirt, her women’s flag-football uniform, didn’t consider herself one.
She lived as a seahorse, an identifying animal she threw out, and not for the reason I expected—the anomalous male “pregnancy” or brood pouch—but rather for the fact that seahorses change coloration in adaptation to their surroundings. “Some people would call me genderqueer,” Bec said. “I don’t use that term, but I do think of myself as occupying the middle ground.”
I loved the way that sounded, like the best of both genders, a compromise. I wished our culture, language, and public bathroom situation allowed a person to hold elements of man and woman at the same time.
“The middle ground must pose problems for you,” I said, emboldened by Bec’s frankness. “I notice people refer to you with both pronouns. Do you have a preference?”
“I do prefer ‘he,’ ” Bec said. “But ‘she’ is easier and makes the most sense to a lot of people. So, really, either is fine.”
I was one of those people for whom it was easier. It had taken me so many months to pose such a simple question, but underneath my inclination to ask was the willingness to let go of the rules and reconfigure a training so ingrained it felt hardwired. And this was not simple. Allowing a person to make a choice, especially a confusing choice like linking “Rebecca” with “he,” threatened the entire foundation of gender as permanent, given, and obvious. This might’ve still been scary had I not felt so free. I wanted to refer to Bec as “he,” his clear preference, and to uncover terms like genderqueer and middle ground that articulated what I thought I could see but not explain—that there were more identities and people under the category of transgender than just transsexuals, those who transition from female to male or from male to female, making those other terms real. Making them possibilities for me.
“Do you ever consider testosterone?” I asked Bec.
“T is not something I’ve ruled out, but it’s not something I want to jump into,” Bec said. “And I’m a little concerned my career could push me further into man territory.” Interested in working in trauma settings, he recognized that a medical emergency is not an ideal time to confuse others with his androgyny, and that looking like an adolescent boy could scare someone whose life he’s trying to save.
For now Bec was content in the middle and with himself. I was amazed that he managed to do it, though, exist in a realm that to most people didn’t exist, and do it with such grace. I pictured him on Canada Day, floating around my kitchen with the maple-leaf flag as his dance partner, his ease and glide visible in every step. “Were you always this comfortable with yourself?” I sputtered with incredulous reverence. “Or was it a process for you?”
A smile opened on Bec’s porcelain face and he crossed his legs effeminately. “Oh, it was a process,” he said. “A metamorphosis. Although I don’t know what I’m metamorphing into.”
I yearned for his physicality, for the unobstructed energy that flowed through his every action. I thought myself foolish to believe that by shedding my chest I’d be able to escape the heaviness of my head, to achieve such bodily elegance. But that’s what I saw in Bec—the bars stifling my movement raised, my straitjacket slipped off. I wanted his freedom, independent of gendered terms, although I had the sense that language itself created some of the space. I also had the sense that his lightness could be mine and that all that weighed me down was a measly eight pounds.
In mid-November, two weeks after his top surgery, Greg showed up at Melissa’s birthday party at my house wearing a yellow collared shirt about two sizes smaller than any shirt I’d ever seen on him. Even from across my back deck, he looked less beefy and more agile, as if he’d switched from the offensive line to the defensive line in football. He stood loosely, his arms hanging by his sides, his shoulders tilted back.
I congratulated Greg with a hug, wrapping my arms awkwardly around him so as not to press myself into his upper body. I asked how he was feeling, and when he replied with a dull, inexpressive “fine,” I hovered, hoping that he might share more information with his better friends as they greeted him with similar sideways hugs. One of his flag-football teammates asked to see his chest and I couldn’t believe it when he enthusiastically agreed. I considered any “show us your tits” request inappropriate, which made “show us the site of your lopped off tits” seem doubly inappropriate. Six months after Ta-Ta Tatas, and I still needed to switch into the mind-set of the breast guillotine as blessing and not humiliation.
Greg opened up his show-and-tell invitation to anyone in earshot, and I jumped on the back of the three-person train following him. “We can go in my room,” I offered, but Greg led us into Jess’s room instead and shut the door behind us. We all formed a close circle around him and he lifted up his shirt. A large elastic wrapping, like an Ace Bandage, covered his chest from his sternum to his stomach, raggedly cut underneath his armpits. Julie, an artsy tomboy with do-it-yourself dyed hair tucked under a vintage baseball cap, helped him unlatch the Velcro in the back. “How long do you have to wear this?” she asked.
“Only a couple more days,” Greg said.
He’d already completed the hardest part, the first five days with drains, small tubes that carried excess fluid from his chest into grenade-like receptacles. He’d
already had the stitches removed from the nipple grafts. He’d started showering again, his back to the water stream. He’d returned to regular hours at work.
I knew all the details regarding the pre-op appointments, three-hour outpatient procedure, and two-week recovery from talking with Bec and then checking out Dr. Brownstein’s information-rich website afterward. With a few clicks, I’d found the mother lode of top-surgery pictures, and in the privacy of my own room, I looked at dozens of poorly lit and often headless before-and-after pictures, all too clinical to be appealing. They reminded me of the before-and-after teeth-whitening photos on the wall of a dentist’s office, where it’s hard to focus on the results since I’m too disgusted by the close-up of a stranger’s mouth, teeth, and gum line.
But this was no anonymous, mute stranger before me. It was Greg who, in two days, would chuck the white bandage in the trash. There’d be no more doubling up with Frog Bras and binders—no more strangled chest, shortness of breath, rashy skin. It would soon be over. Forever. My joy for him was mixed with jealousy, my curiosity charged with anticipation. I tapped my foot on the wood floor, waiting for Julie to unlatch the Velcro on Greg’s bandage.
Underneath, white protective tape crossed over patches of gauze on Greg’s nipples to form asterisks. A few inches below, two sets of small diagonal lines, patterned like the stitching on a football, stretched horizontally across his chest.
With Julie holding his shirt up for him, Greg painstakingly lifted the tape, his skin sticking ever so slightly to the adhesive. He removed the gauze from his right side to reveal the healthy rosy pink of his nickel-size nipple.
“Oh my god, so cute,” Adina squealed. “Your nipples are so cute.”
A “pretty boy” with a taste for designer clothes and highlighted hair, Adina was also a motorcycle-riding, hard-nosed athlete and could tear up the dance floor in “umptse-umptse” gay boy clubs. I’d known her for years, but only recently had I come to see her as effeminate, kind of faggy, actually.