Culture

Facing My Fear of Top Surgery


Such hurdles seemed obnoxious. They seemed merely like cis gatekeeping. I nonetheless dutifully did everything required of me. I tried to ignore the especially sucky parts of this — the invasiveness of these letters and what information I gleaned my providers were having to share about me. I tried to ignore that in order to get covered I’d had to get a new diagnosis, gender dysphoria (a concept I have some fundamental problems with, a topic for another day). Or how, as my doctor explained apologetically, insurance companies are still pretty binary in their thinking about all this gender stuff — that insurance will even consider covering such surgeries is pretty new. So, my doctor explained, though she knows I identify as nonbinary, in her letter she’d be emphasizing the trans part. All the paperwork about my surgery refers to it, to me, as FTM, though I’ve never identified as a man.

In such letters, one must perform, most of all, certainty. Certainty that this is the right path. But as my fall surgery date approached, I felt my resolve falter, like a ship in a rocking sea. In the harbor the vessel had looked so big, so sturdy, but now it was being battered around like a plaything by monstrous waves and winds.

I felt afraid of pain. I felt afraid of the drugs for pain. I felt afraid of what coming to a halt for several weeks during recovery would do to my body and my soul. I felt afraid of not being able to help out around the house, the burden I’d be to my husband especially. I felt afraid of what I couldn’t control — for example, what would some relatives say when they learned? Or what if something went wrong? I felt afraid of death.

I also worried that there was something wrong about wanting surgery in the first place. Wasn’t I fine as I was? In asking to have my boobs removed, wasn’t I just giving into some fictitious binary? Couldn’t I just live like this forever and not bother with this whole stressful, painful surgery nonsense? And (perhaps the meanest thought I had): Aren’t my boobs too small to bother?

Sometimes, when I’m very stressed, a corridor of my back on the right side will seize with excruciating spasms. This summer, as my head screamed my doubts about surgery, louder and louder, my back began to throb along in concert. One morning, flat on the kitchen floor, I searched on my phone for someone who gave massages in my area. I found only a few leads. Eventually one called me back. Even better, she would come to me.

I liked her at first; she seemed about my age, smiley. She set up her table in my living room. I undressed and lay face down on the table, while she stood around the corner. My back was immediately reassured by her hands.

To my surprise she was chatty. She questioned me about my house, how long we’d been here. One of our cats slept on a nearby chair. She turned to him, said something in a high-pitched voice-for-cats about how “you’re a good friend to her,” referring to me, I realized. A while later, she addressed the cat again, again calling me “she.”

Whenever a stranger misgenders me, I face a dilemma. Option one is to say nothing, which is easier in the sense that you can just be totally silent and still. Option one also sucks, as it means you’re implicitly condoning whatever they’ve said. Option two is to correct them. This also sucks: it means potentially signing yourself up to play professor for a Gender 101 course. It also might mean you’ll witness someone bare their (ugly) soul.

Her fingers were now working their way into the Eye of Sauron of my pain and so I felt a melting sort of warmth toward her. I decided to try my luck at just being frank. I explained I’m trans, I’m nonbinary, and my pronouns are actually they/them.

Her hands kept working but her mouth, briefly, was quiet. Then the questions began. She wanted to know, first, about whether I was, you know. I eventually gathered she meant whether I was transitioning medically. Now feeling (for some reason) committed to honesty, I told her I was, in fact, getting top surgery this fall. Perhaps I wanted to hear what it felt like, to say this to a cis stranger.

Again, she processed this for a second. Then she started to ask whether my husband was transitioning too, but withdrew the question. She moved onto babbling about how she could never do it. She could never let knives touch her. Never ever. She just hates that idea of surgery. Hates pain.



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