by Nick Krieger
I folded his letter and placed it in my wallet, next to the cash for the jacket I couldn’t bring myself to buy with money I didn’t need or ask for, and decided not to engage, finally setting a boundary. I understood fully that by ignoring him, I was restricting his role, setting myself up to break our contract. I would no longer permit him to express his feelings about me, to oversee everything I did, thereby giving up all the future wads and relinquishing the safety net. But as much as I wanted to toss off the golden handcuffs right then, they represented the last vestige of connection to my dad, and that was a lot harder to give up.
Distancing myself by disregarding my dad had an instantaneous and extraordinary effect. My flat-chested fantasy, the elevator music that had been in the background for nearly two years, immediately developed a steady thumping bass line. Like a heartbeat, it was with me when I ran, practiced yoga, took a shower, put on my binder, ate cereal, rode the bus; my daydream was so continuous, my thoughts so repetitive that I had a hard time keeping track of when I spoke them, when I was silent, and how much time passed between each time I said, “Is it worth the money? How unattractive are the scars? Will it hurt?”
I shared these concerns with Derek, a combined extrovert/introvert type like me who could socialize and party all night, then spend the next week reading novels, working out, and claiming “alone time,” which was really just “home time” because he and I were spending so much of ours together that we’d quickly become best friends. He filled a void I hadn’t noticed until he’d arrived, that of a very close friendship with a male roommate. He was also my first gay one, and we shared a homoerotic intimacy that was both playful and meaningful—he objectified me in a man-on-man way that made me feel truly seen. When I rambled about my chest, he patiently listened, acting as a sounding board so I could hear myself—I heard that my considerations had moved from the theoretical to practical realm, and that I wanted comfort in my body, independent of gender.
Although I considered bringing up the subject of surgery with Greg before a yoga class, and Bec once when he was over for dinner, I was afraid of being influenced in any way by something they could say. I also kept quiet around Jess, not wanting to be impacted by his intellect, persuasive oratory, or the issues he was working out for himself. If I were to talk with Jess, I would need to employ reason and arm myself with brainpower, the very things that I sought to silence upon experiencing the briefest and most fleeting moments, often in my yoga classes, of peace from my mind. Underneath and in between the distractions in my head emerged that which defied logic and control, actual feelings—the one thing Jess and I had never talked about with any vulnerability and honesty.
He must’ve been keeping to himself as well, because he waited until after he’d made a consultation appointment with Dr. Brownstein to tell me. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, since Melissa had mentioned his intent eight months earlier, but so much time had passed, I hadn’t really believed he’d go through with it. I still didn’t, until, a week later, we were headed to a new evening yoga class together. Walking down the subtle hill of our quiet residential area to the pattering rhythm of his flip-flops, he made his announcement. “I’m having top surgery,” he said. “I set a date and everything.” His date was mid-November, about a month away.
“Oh my god. Wow,” I said. “Congratulations.”
His smile spread slowly, curving up from the center of his lips. I searched for uncertainty or his trademark confident overcompensation, but he looked content, no doubt or second-guesses hidden in the recesses. “I can’t wait,” he said.
“That’s really amazing,” I said. “I’m so happy for you.”
And I was, not just happy, but proud of him. He must have reconciled his career fears, his hospital trauma, accepted that he could make this change without becoming a man. Stopping at the corner, I noticed the mat rolled under his arm, the early dusk of autumn falling, the studio that would grow dark during class with only the flickers of candles for light. I wondered how much he’d settled in there, if maybe we’d been sharing in each other’s process without talking, but with our mats side by side, listening for our own voices, finding our self-trust, learning to love our bodies in all of their imperfect perfection. That’s where I was slowly leaving behind my own fears and concerns, where I was often dedicating my practice to my dad, holding him in my heart even as I solidified in my bones the decision to cut him out of my life.
As we approached the studio, I asked Jess his impressions of Brownstein, if the renowned doctor, notorious for his lack of bedside manner, was as coarse as everyone claimed. Jess validated his matter-of-fact attitude, but chalked it up to surgeon’s demeanor. “I really liked him,” he said.
I pictured Jess roaming around the house with a towel wrapped around his waist, ironing his T-shirts while topless, brushing his teeth in his boxer briefs, the daily sight of him advertising exactly what I wanted. And I knew at that moment, for sure, that I would go through with it myself. “I’m about a year away,” I told him.
“Take your time,” he said, as he opened the studio door.
A year had been a completely arbitrary amount of time, and right after I said it, I knew it was only the safety of far far away that had allowed me to verbalize my certainty. But once I stated my intention, it took on the power of a driving force.
Ever since my parents’ visit, I’d been making excuses to avoid my weekly lunchtime phone call to my mother. Initially, I hadn’t wanted to end up in a discussion about my dad and his e-mail. It’s not that she would’ve defended him, but she would’ve done anything to keep our family together, and since she had no sway or impact on him, the onus fell on me. It would’ve been hard to talk to her about top surgery; it would’ve been even harder to tell her that my dad and I had reached our last stand and my seat at the dinner table would soon remain empty, we would no longer be a family. I was building up to both, so consumed with thoughts about surgery that I couldn’t even feign a discussion about anything else. A few days after my conversation with Jess, I sent my mother a brief e-mail to tell her I was “going through some stuff” and would let her know when I was ready to talk.
Then I returned to the website Bec had told me about checking out long ago—the repository of headless before-and-after top- surgery photos. I began clicking through big breasts and small breasts, long straight scars and short cupped scars, fat bodies and thin bodies. In about half of the pictures, hair and muscles camouflaged the healing chests—a bonus of testosterone, which preceded top surgery for many people. Trying to envision my surgery results, I ignored the guys on testosterone, a hormone I wasn’t considering. Facial hair, a deep voice, being recognized or identifying as a man had never been connected to my desire for a flat chest—something that I’d stopped associating exclusively with men, even though that was the easiest way to describe my self-image to someone like my mother. But Bec had a flat chest, Jess would have one, and the possibilities for design-your-own gender-malleable identities, creative neither/nor gender expressions, were growing every day in my queer subculture; they would have greater currency when more people could see and understand them.
The pictures showed chests swollen and bruised, incisions raw and red. The lines were symmetrical, at least in Brownstein’s work, which I deemed the best, but they were still huge gashes sewn shut with hundreds of stitches. I reminded myself that I despised anything medical, fainted at the sight of my own blood, and grew queasy if I heard hematoma instead of bruise. I clicked and clicked, and in the very best images, those chests captured a year out, the imperfections still glared at me until all I could see were deflated balloons marred by scars. I thought of Bec’s chest, not quite perfect, yet pretty damn close, the flat white lines melding into his ivory skin. He’d arrived at this end not caring what his chest would look like. As he’d once said, “Anything was better than having breasts.” I checked out well over a hundred pictures trying to decide if this held tr
ue for me.
Eventually, I clicked over to Brownstein’s site and the linked blogs and testimonials. On one page, there was a sideways shot of a man holding a surfboard in the shallow ocean, a wetsuit rolled to his waist, and in huge block letters, it read, “Thank you for making this a reality.” On another page, a buff guy posed with his arms aloft, flexing his biceps, the beam of his smile, his effervescent pride, a distraction from his chest scars. I followed links through to YouTube videos, landing on one of an attractive guy with a goatee who’d been on testosterone for two years while saving the $8,000 for top surgery. He made his confessional-style video the night before, and at the very end, he grabbed two handfuls of flesh through his T-shirt. “Finally,” he said, and broke into a heaving sob, the explosion of his relief reverberating through me as if it were my own. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, making a swift recovery, but I did not, the tears still streaming down my face.
Alone in my room, surrounded by my bare beige walls, my mind started to spin around the images of disfigurement and stigmatization, the inescapable depth of desire I shared with the people in these blogs, testimonials, and videos. I folded down the screen on my laptop. My sole decoration, a world map tacked above my fireplace, stared back at me, revealing only the futility of flight, the breasts that would come with me to India, Nepal, or South Africa. I felt dread block my throat. Wind whooshed through the chimney, barreling down the hill outside; a jog was out of the question. I opened the weed drawer and was overcome with the rare instinct to close it. I caught the time on my travel alarm clock. It was a quarter till the next yoga class. I’d memorized the schedule for the same reason alcoholics memorized AA meetings, for emergencies—mine was needing a minute-by-minute reminder to breathe.
I was inside the studio with time to spare. On my mat, I lay down on my back and stretched my arms and legs into a long straight line. Staring up at the ceiling, I envisioned my breasts crumbling away like an old stone statue, my empty sports bra falling off to the side. This could be so easy, I told myself, just get rid of them—three hours under anesthesia plus two weeks off work and I’d be free forever. I would call Brownstein, make a consultation. I had the money, I could do this. There was no reason I couldn’t do this.
The teacher, an elfish Jewish guy who chanted like the cantor from my bat mitzvah, soon began our movements with cat and cow flows. On my hands and knees, I dropped my stomach, arched my back, and practiced letting go of self-consciousness with a deep “Moo.” I lifted my stomach to my spine, rounded my back and shoulders, and in the middle of my scaredy-cat “Rrrwww,” I felt a sucker punch to my gut as I suddenly thought of the scar on my shoulder.
I couldn’t believe I’d looked through hundreds of pictures online without thinking about the keloid scar on my upper right arm. It had resulted from a mosquito bite I overscratched when I was eleven, and for the rest of my adolescence I treated this hard, raised bump, about the size of a button on a woman’s dress shirt, as if it were the worst flaw imaginable, single-handedly destroying all of my potential to be beautiful.
People around me raised legs, wrapped arms, and although I tried to follow along, I kept returning to memories of trying to hide my scar, the head tilt I maintained to drape my hair across it at the beach, the T-shirt I wore under my varsity basketball team tank top, and finally the skin-colored Band-Aid I taped across it for every game during a traveling softball season with awful sleeveless polyester uniforms. It was after the summer of the Band-Aid tan line, as if that was less glaring than a small scar, that I went to a dermatologist and received a cortisone shot that broke up the tissue.
As I placed my hands together as if in prayer and twisted in a lunge, I barely noticed the flat white spot on my shoulder. But the distress, as well as my susceptibility to keloids, was still with me. I got into child’s pose and took a mental inventory of my body, the formerly pierced earlobe that had a hard lump, the scar near my left armpit that did not. The debate with myself over whether top surgery was worth the risk of excessive scarring continued unabated. I was relieved when frog pose was called, knowing the end of class was near.
I folded my mat to pad my knees, splayed my legs like a frog, and leaned forward onto my elbows in a position meant to be held for a while. The teacher began to tell a story, and with nowhere to go, stuck with my legs about to snap out of their sockets, I tuned in. He spoke of a forest full of big strong trees, their branches flush with foliage, and of a storm. Lightning struck one of the trees, splicing it, severing the trunk into raw splinters of wood.
I felt the hands of an assistant on my shoulders, the physical “hello” before an adjustment that came only once or twice a class, the release I jonesed for. The hands moved to my waist, slowly pulling my hips back as my pelvis dropped to the floor. I expected the hands to stop. I always expected the hands to stop, thinking that my body couldn’t possibly go any farther.
The teacher spoke of the unpreventable, undeniable force that was this lightning, before returning to the gashed, mangled tree. “It’s still beautiful,” the teacher said in a sweet, angelic tone. “So, so beautiful,” he repeated as the helping hands guided my body into a space I could not find on my own. I took a deep, nourishing breath, imagined the beauty of that scarred tree, and exhaled my adolescent trauma.
Yoga had become many things to me, but whenever I tried to hone in on a specific effect it belittled the profound power this practice had upon my life. It was whatever it offered that day, whatever I opened to, and on this day, it was a parable, the support of a stranger, the time to let go of the last thing blocking my way.
For the next week, I intended to call Dr. Brownstein for a consultation appointment, finally mentioning it to Ramona, with whom I was now having regular instant message conversations during the workday. After barely talking for five months, I hoped we were both ready to be friends and had convinced myself that confiding in my ex and instigating immediate closeness was like playing with bang snaps rather than dynamite. “I usually tell someone I’m about to do something when I want to be held accountable,” Ramona wrote in an instant message.
“That’s probably why I’m telling you,” I replied.
“Call Brownstein. You’re ready.”
I considered asking Ramona or another friend to go with me to my consultation, but instinct told me I needed to go by myself. It’s how I’d know I could stand alone behind a decision that was exclusively for me. For the two weeks leading up to the appointment, all I could think about was logistics and whether it would be possible to have surgery before the Christmas holiday so I could still catch some of the snowboarding season, thoughts that proved to me I was, in fact, ready.
On the morning of my consultation, I filled an entire sheet of yellow legal paper with questions while scanning the online before-and-after pictures again. With my paper in my back pocket, I rode my bike the two miles to the live/work space, excited to meet the man behind the legend. Performing top surgeries for nearly thirty years, Brownstein was one of the few surgeons who didn’t hide his specialty underneath pamphlets for breast reductions.
Brownstein’s dachshund Frank greeted me at the door of what seemed more like a home business or a small dot-com than a doctor’s office. The place was tastefully decorated with textiles and art, including a metal sculpture, a sort of Tin Man Tit Man with long pointy rocket breasts standing in the corner like a sentinel.
As I walked farther into the office, I caught a woman behind a computer singing to herself, “The Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria.” When she looked up, she noticed me. “Oh my, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so so sorry.”
The assistant was blond and reminded me of some kind of “ist,” a cosmetologist or a dental hygienist. I was curious if it was her general lack of professionalism that distressed her, or if she knew that calling attention to a feminine name, potentially a source of pain for someone seeking gender reassignment surgery, wasn’t
the smoothest move. “It’s totally okay,” I said.
“I’m just so embarrassed.”
“Really, it’s okay. People have been saying that to me my whole life.” As I spoke, suddenly aware that that may have been the final time I’d inspire that memorable string of ships, an unexpected sadness overwhelmed me.
Now that I no longer felt constrained by how my decisions would impact my parents, I’d begun to consider changing my name. Although I’d revisited every gender-neutral or masculine N name in the baby book, I had allegiance to “Nick” for popping up at a time when the boy in me was begging to be seen, if only by me, in my own mind. Lately, I’d been considering “Nic” versus “Nick,” but my preference for the latter was more of a creative than a gendered interest. I liked the way my first and last names linked together with the double K. Thinking about a new name had been fun, except I hadn’t fully realized that to take one on, I’d have to give up the word that had been closest to me for thirty years.
When the “ist” stopped apologizing, she sat on the other side of a solid wood desk and explained much of what I already knew about the surgery center, the five payment installments, and the series of follow-up appointments. She reminded me of a favorite aunt, an adult who didn’t understand kid things but whom you talked to instead of your mom. “Will you be transgendering?” she asked.
I imagined this was her synonym for transition, but did she want to know if I’d be changing my name, switching to an M on my driver’s license, taking testosterone, considering bottom surgery, if I used the men’s or women’s bathroom, or which dressing room I was sent into at a department store? “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I said.