I can’t remeber ever liking my breasts. Or wanting them. When I was twelve or so, a girl from the neighborhood and me hid in the stairwell when no one would see me and she showed me her breasts and asked to see mine. She was anxious for hers to grow and showed me how she pulls on her nipples to make them grow faster. I couldn’t understand what the big deal was and shrugged it away.
In highschool, I had a good friend who was almost flatchested. She kept buying padded bras and suffered terribly and kept telling me how lucky I was. I wasn’t feeling lucky at all and told her I’d trade her anytime.
A couple of years ago (actually, six years ago, because I remember exactly where I was), I was considering saving up for surgery. The word transgender had not yet entered my vocabulary. I did not know that wanting to be a guy was a legit thing – it was just this fantasy of mine buried deep down in my mind, in the places where you don’t really look. But I had had it with my breasts.
- I am not able to wear a shirt, because nothing buttons up over my breasts and stays buttoned. There is either a gape in between buttons that looks ridiculous, or the shirt is way oversized.
- I have tshirts that either stretch over my breast if they fit everwhere else, or are comfy for me, but the shoulder seems are way below my shoulder.
- I cannot see my toes. Would be nice to be able to look down and see what is going on there.
- I sometimes have this feeling going down stairs when just like in a Looney Toones cartoon I realise that I do not actually see where I am stepping and that is the moment I risk stumbling unless I hold on to something.
- I only have two bras that fit. One of them claims to be a sports bra – but let me tell you it does nothing to make activities any easier. Also, if I dig for hours around the internet, I might come up with something that does not try to be a porn movie prop and can act as a minimizer or sports bra – and then I’d have to fork over 50-60-70 euros for it.
- I cannot jump, I cannot run – because they jug around and it goddamn HURTS!
- I once lied down sideways in bed to read and wanted to prop myself up on an elbow – I accidentally propped my elbow on my boob and that HURT.
- Don’t let me get started on my back pains. Most of the times it’s a low key ache between my shoulder blades, but there are days when it is way worse. When I just want to lie down on a hard matress and lie on my back. And on my back is sadly not how I sleep – I’m a curler.
- I have terrible posture, but I keep bending forward because I have these two useless, huge jugs attached to my chest that serve no function whatsoever. They are not even a sensitive area for arousal.
- I have this faint thought in the back of my head that I am at a higher risk of breast cancer (also because my grand-grandmother died of it).
So the breasts are my biggest pain point with regards to being uncomfortable in my body. They are by far not alone, but the one thing I’d point to if I had to name just one thing. I sometimes have this dull ache and regret that I will never ever be able to feel what arousal would feel for a guy – no matter what course of treatment I’d pick. And yes, I’d be nice if I fixed my teeth and lost some weight, but I know full well that that alone would not suffice. I have been there.
I have been chubby all my life, as far back as I can remember. I can thank my genes, my education, my grandmother’s horrible cooking habits and my complete lack of will for it. However, just once, I managed to overcome all that. In my first and second year of uni, I managed to lose a lot of weight through a mixture of painful exercise locked up in my room and starving myself. Unhealthy though it may have been, for a brief while it worked, though at that time I still considered myself fat. But I could buy the same clothes as my friends and I looked okay, I guess.
I still hated to see myself in pictures, though. I had learned to live with hating to see myself like that and I usually put it down to being self conscious about my body weight/shape (though I am the only one from whom I am taking shit about it). However, recently seeing a picture of me and my friends taken at that time, with me blending in just fine shape-wise, I realised I still hate to see it there and it hit like a freight trein that the size was not my issue. The issue was that the image on the paper was nothing like the look in my head. It was the overall decidedly female appearance. The angles of the face (or lack thereof), the shape and curve of the body, the lack of veins… My jeans and shirt and short hair did nothing to hide the fact that I was a girl (I don’t think I ever consciously used the term “woman” about myself, to be honest… it is always “girl” when it has to be) and not the male image I had in my head.
I do not know if this qualifies at dysphoria. I do not have a nervous breakdown in the shower or in front of mirrors. I do not get anxiety or panic attacks over how I look and I would not qualify it as “extreme distress”. I have learned to live with it and be a fairly functional individual when out in society. It is also one of the major reasons why this past year or so I have debated with myself whether I am valid, whether I am truly trans or just unhappy with my body, of which I never took care of. I learned a new word today, “truscum”, which apparently defines people on social media who believe that dysphoria is an essential criterium for being trans and everyone else is just fake. I don’t know why I would fake being something to which such a powerful social stigma is attached, something which keeps me up at night as long as I am keeping it to myself, and which could potentially harm relationships, careers and generally make life complicated for me otherwise.
