The first time I realized I was a man I burst into tears. I was in a Zoom therapy session and saw my face, just a few months on testosterone, and recognized myself in it for the first time. I couldn’t be a man though. Non-binary I could reconcile with, but a MAN? Through all my fear, and though I sobbed, in that moment I knew that it was true. All the harm men had caused me flooded my brain and body. But the true reason that I didn’t want to be a man was because I knew, in honoring that, I would lose the man I loved.
John and I, we’d been straddling a line between hope and denial for half a year, wanting love to conquer all. I’d come out as gender questioning almost three years into our relationship, the spring before this therapeutic revelation. John, whose compliments of my body almost allowed me to enjoy it, was now afraid of the changes I would undergo. As we talked about top surgery, I thought of how his fingers pressed into me as we spooned in bed; my breasts, which I could not love alone, seeming nearly bearable under his touch. He was honest with his fears. I was honest with mine. Both of us hoped against hope that he might be less straight than he thought.
Before I realized who I was and what I needed, I’d actually been worried John might be gay when he sang show tunes in the shower. Or Disney. To this day, I’ve never heard someone so much in love with Moana’s “Shiny.” But in my heart, I knew those stereotypes held no weight. John loved me, yes, but he also loved my body, the exact curves I avoided looking at each time I passed a mirror. Despite his fear, John promised to drive me to surgery. He reminded me in my moments of doubt why I was pursuing transition, even as I knew he did not want me to go further.
No one has ever loved me the way John did. There is irony in that. I could not have accepted the man I am, without first experiencing unconditional love. Love that was truly about me. But learning who I was meant it might be the end. I told John all this then. It broke his heart and made him proud- of both of us. John could rarely access pride, struggling throughout our relationship with depression and unemployment, ashamed nearly as often as he was breathing. It was such a gift to see him glow that way and such a hurt to know, though we had yet to admit it aloud, that this relationship could not continue much longer. Really it was already dying.
On December 11, 2020 John drove me to the hospital. He could not stay because pandemic policy and a winter surge had the hospital closed to visitors. I watched Pitch Perfect alone in my hospital gown as I waited to go under the knife. And then it was done. My surgeon informed me that ten pounds of tissue had been removed from my chest. One weight was lifted.
Every time I’d seen my surgeon before the surgery, he’d told me “everybody panics about their nipples.” He said this at my consult, at my pre-op appointment, as he drew guides on my chest with Sharpie just before surgery. He warned me again and again that my nipples would likely turn black, flake off, bleed and crust. They would look, “for all the world,” he almost threatened, “like they were dying.” I nodded along, unafraid, because no nipples felt like a fair price for a flat chest.
That first week of recovery I had no opportunity to worry about my nipples. I was completely bandaged up, with two plastic bulbs hanging from my armpits and filling with bloody fluid. John helped me drain the liquid and measure it carefully. John cooked for me. He used to do the same when I was depressed, encouraging me to eat in front of the TV so I might consume just a bit more. John washed my now short hair in the sink when it began to plaster to my head. Under his gaze, I was so happy and so ashamed of what I had done. How could I have refused this love? For what? John drove me to my first post-op appointment one week after surgery. My surgeon removed the bandages, pulled out my drains (painlessly), and instructed me on nipple care. Once again he warned of the frightening process by which they would heal. Then, John drove us home.
I never had a nipple crisis, though that itself nearly caused me to panic. I’d been told to be scared; yet my nipples day after day seemed pink and healthy. There were no black scabs, no pus, no flaking at all. I went back to the surgeon, this time driving myself, and waited for his verdict, concerned that something strange was happening. He remarked, surprised, that my nipples seemed to be “months ahead” of where he would expect them to be. My recovery was easy, nearly painless. I remembered the X-Men Wolverine’s incredible healing abilities and joked with my trans friends that the surgeon had grafted Wolverine’s nipples to my chest in place of my own.
Those nipples could not be mine, for I knew that I could not heal like Wolverine. This was so clearly true as my body healed and my heart tore open. The outside of my chest, though scarred, so much more intact than the inside. John was hurting. I was hurting. Our only physical touch came as we comforted one another, never touching in casual intimacy or joy. John, despite his best efforts, was angry. He spent time away from home. He spent time drinking. And then, after glimpsing an old picture of me on our fridge finally admitted, “I’m still attracted to that person, I can’t make this work.”
John moved in temporarily with a friend. I looked for an affordable place for my cat and me. We’d been practical enough, when we first moved in together, to decide that John would stay in our old space if we ever broke up. I never thought we’d break up. After we said I love you, I felt so confident in us. I’d shared those three words with him after we’d been dating six months. I was afraid to. Just the night before, he’d shutdown and nearly panicked when I mentioned that I “felt safe with him.” I didn’t think he could handle me loving him, but I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I sobbed against his back in the kitchen and told him the truth. He said he loved me too, that love was “easier” for him than safety. From that moment on, if he’d asked me to marry him, I would have said yes, no matter my doubts.
Instead, John and I now lived apart. He texted me drunk and angry. He said that I wasn’t as attractive as other men, so even if he were gay, it wouldn’t have worked. In my awkward second puberty my heart broke just a little more. There are so many reasons to believe you will never be loved again.
In those spring months that felt more like a second winter, I wished not for Wolverine’s nipples but for Wolverine’s heart. So often, he seems like the masculine ideal of tough and aloof. But boobs or no, testosterone or estrogen, my heart stayed human and soft. And despite pain that sometimes left me without an ounce of energy for living, I couldn’t regret my choice. In each day there was a moment of joy; the seatbelt lay flat against my chest; my button-up didn’t gap; a temporary lover ran his hands across my scars and kissed them.
I couldn’t decide though, if this was enough. In one moment I’d be confident, happy and free, and the next I’d remember John and the life I’d dreamed of with him. Country songs on the radio (a guilty pleasure of mine) now stung: every song valorizing finding the girl, marrying her, having a family and some land. I wished over and over again that I could have been the country girl in her baseball cap, rather than this awkward 28-year-old teenage boy. Each day though I was a in a body more fully my own, and bit-by-bit feeling stronger in body and heart. Eventually country songs began to hurt a little less. Even songs I used to listen to with John became slowly less painful. And John and I got back in touch, agreeing to risk pain to preserve some of the intimacy we’d once had.
It wasn’t a fair set up. I was no longer someone John could desire, but he was more and more the man I’d hoped to marry. After our break up he’d finally gotten support for his alcoholism; the sobriety I’d begged for our entire relationship was now here. He began to pull his life together without me and I watched with a combination of pride and grief that I still do not have the words for. I pulled my life together too. I made friends more easily; I worked and wrote more; I adopted a dog who walked with me every day and tormented my cat.
John and I rekindled old habits, playing Magic the Gathering together as we used to as partners, finishing a season of Pandemic Legacies that we’d started before the break up. We touched with the casual intimacy of friends. Leonard Cohen sings, “You know my love goes with you as your love stays with me/ it’s just the way it changes like the shoreline and the sea.” Somehow, despite myself, I began to let my love for John change, though I will never completely let go of those dreams. Some part of me will always wonder about the life we might have lived, about what our family screensaver might have looked like.
If you’d visited me in middle or high school and told me any part of this story, I would not have believed it. I could not have understood that I was a man, or that any man could ever love me. I could not have understood how I could lose such love and still be, most days, okay. It’s scary now to imagine what tomorrow’s stories will be, but I (perhaps naively) feel a little bit more like I will survive. There are many ways healing happens and they are all a mystery to me. I am glad, perhaps, to not have Wolverine’s gift of healing; to not have things return to just how they were before. Instead, I have scars.
Felix Deiss
DCC: Deiss Composition Collection 