I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way.

A microcosm of transition

In four days, I will be having my second top surgery.

I need it because my first—which is lovely—has not been enough to alleviate my top dysphoria. I currently have 900cc implants, and while I know that sounds like quite a lot, it really isn’t. As best I can figure, I need a few hundred more cc’s on each side to slay this dragon once and for all. I picked my surgeon because he specializes in really large implants, and making big boobs look amazing. I knew I was going to need a lot of volume, just because of the size of my frame and the fact that I’m not skinny, so I wanted to make sure I was working with a guy who was really excellent at the scale I need to go to.

But… it turns out all breast implants are the same price, regardless of how big they are. And my guy? He can go a lot bigger than the few hundred extra cc’s I need. And… well, I need boobs big enough to stand out on my frame, but I’ve always, always dreamed of more. A lot more. And none of any of this matters to my insurance, or to him. It’s all the same as far as they’re concerned.

So I told him to go as big as he can this time around. With a little luck, I’ll hit 2,000cc implants.

That’s two liters of implant. Per implant.

Over a gallon of boobs.

I am thrilled.

I am terrified.

Gravity

It’s impossible to explain the fullness of why we transition to cis people. It is. I’ve tried so, so many times. The best I can do is to use metaphor and simile, to at least try to get them to a vague comprehension. I’ll explain dysphoria as a type of chronic pain, or euphoria as joy and relief, and they vaguely smile and nod, and that’s okay. It takes one entire human brain to really understand one entire human being.

That’s not how I explain transition to trans people, though. Specifically, to hatchlings—those of us who have only recently come out to themselves, or those of us who are only now realizing, after a lifetime of repression—that transition is something they need to do. This is what I tell them:

Transition is exactly as easy and as impossible as letting go.

Imagine you’re hanging over a hole so deep you can’t see the bottom of it. You’re clutching a rope, and you have been your whole life. You’re good at it. Your hands are strong. But the rope is rough, and your hands are sore and cramped from holding so tight, for so long. A call comes in on a Bluetooth headset you’re wearing.

“It’s okay,” the stranger on the other end says to you. “You can let go. It’s safe down here, and while the fall is scary as hell, it’s great at the bottom. There’s a whole community of us down here, and we’ll take care of you. It’s wonderful.” And then they hang up.

Transition is exactly as easy as letting go of this rough, painful rope you’ve been clutching your whole life, and exactly as impossible as plunging into the unknown below you, praying all the while that the person on the other end of the call was telling the truth, and that you won’t die on impact, smashed against rocks you can’t see.

All the while, knowing that sooner or later your grip will fail. That sooner or later, you’re going to fall, whether you want to or not.

There is a profound gravitational pull to transition, and it’s as constant and powerful and, ultimately, as irresistible as gravity itself. We can fight it, we can pull ourselves up and away from the center of mass, we can even fly for a time… but gravity always wins in the end.

Always.

And this pulls at me, irresistibly.

But… why?

I don’t understand why I want boobs this big. Why, maybe, I need them in ways I absolutely refuse to admit to myself.

And here’s the thing: if there was a way out of this particular one—a way to make myself not want these breasts, the body that they’ll mean I’ll have—I’d take it. It’s the first and only part of my transition I’d opt out of if I could, and I know that makes me unusual. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of us who’d take a magic pill that’d just make our transness go away.

But a big part of me wants that kind of escape from this desire.

I’m not getting them for any of the reasons that women usually get really big breast implants. Like, none of them. I can say that for sure.

I’m not a sex worker. These aren’t a business expense.

I’m sapphic. These aren’t at all to attract men’s attention. Hell, I’m demisexual. They’re not about attracting anyone’s sexual interest.

You want to know why? Really why? Okay. Here it is.

I want to feel feminine in a really quintessential physical way. I feel feminine. I do. But it’s like… it’s like a small glass of water when I’ve been dying of thirst. The way things are just aren’t enough.

My brain says my arms should brush the side of my breasts when I reach forward for something. They don’t.

I’ve felt just a little bit off-balance my whole, entire life, like I’m rocked back on my heels all the time. My first top surgery was the first thing I ever did that helped fix my sense of balance. Finally, there was something pulling me forward like I’m supposed to be… but I’m still off-balance.

And I’m so tired of being off-balance. I want to stand and feel my weight on the balls and arches of my feet, where it’s supposed to be, not the backs of my heels.

Yes, I know it’s stupid, but there it is.

Jessica Rabbit, the asexual icon

I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of Jessica Rabbit. She’s kind of a remarkable character. One-of-a-kind, really.

But I bet you didn’t know she’s a worldwide icon for the asexual community.

She’s this bodaciously feminine woman who’s absolutely head-over-heels in love with her partner—not because he’s strong or manly or any of the normal things, but because he makes her laugh. Deep intimacy, to them, is playing patty-cake. She’s always underestimated, always the smartest person in every room, and her ultimate motivation? She just wants to be reunited with and protect her partner.

And yes, she’s sexy as hell.

Re-watch her opening song some time. She’s sexualized and wolf-whistled constantly by a bar-full of cishet men as she struts around the stage. Everyone focuses on what she looks like, but listen to the lyrics. Watch what she does. She croons, over and over, telling those men to go away, to “do right" like other men—her partner—does, as she physically mocks and rejects these men who sexualize her body over and over again.

There’s a difference here many allosexuals don’t often understand, because it blends together for them into a pool of generalized sexual attraction—the difference between sexuality, sexualization, and being sexy.

Sexuality is the heart of sexual attraction to another body. It’s that magnetic force of wanting to touch, and be touched by, someone else.

Sexualization is looking at another body and, regardless of whether it has anything to do with sex, making it sexual. If you see a mother breastfeeding, for instance, and feel attraction, that is sexualizing her—there’s nothing sexual at all about feeding her infant child. It is inscribing sex onto a body, willingly or not.

But being sexy is about rejoicing in your body, in the way it inhabits its gender and how it exudes that gender outward. As far as I’m concerned, being sexy is to physically embody gender euphoria. You do it for yourself, exclusively.

And being sexy? It doesn’t have anything to do with sexuality, sex, or desire. To quote Jessica herself, she’s “not bad,” meaning naughty or sexual, “she’s just drawn that way,” meaning that sex has been literally inscribed into her very being, regardless of her will. She's a drawn, created person, so it's a brilliant bit of writing.

I have wanted to be Jessica Rabbit my whole life, in every sense of that statement. Body, for sure—but I have always wanted to rejoice in my femininity, to exude an uncontrollable delight in my womanhood, even if I didn’t understand for a long time that that’s what I wanted.

I want to be sexy, but not sexual.

The fear of being Jessica Rabbit

If this is what I want, what I’ve always wanted, why do I wish I could opt out of it?

Please. You know why.

You know how cisgender, heterosexual men treat women with breasts like I’m going to be getting. You know what they’ll do. You know the things I’ll be at significantly higher risk for.

You know how many, many women react when they see another woman with very large, visibly augmented breasts. You know the things they say. The assumptions they make. The cruel things they do. You know the meaning they’ll inscribe onto me, with or without my consent.

These implants will be the end of my academic career. I’ve got tenure, so I won’t be fired—having big boobs is not a fireable offense, it turns out, not unless they want a sexual harassment lawsuit bigger than my cup-size-to-be—but I will never be promoted again, and definitely not into a leadership position. They won’t respect me enough to do so. Not with boobs like I’ll be getting.

I will never, if something happens at my current university, be able to land a new tenure-track position at another university. Many or maybe even most queer folks will understand, or at least listen when I explain to them. Maybe even a chunk of the feminist crowd who really understand and believe in bodily autonomy. But getting university administrators to sign off on an offer? No. No, I don’t think so.

In the end, I’m a teacher. How do you think my students are going to respond? Just because of the classes I teach, about 80% of my students are men. I’ve thought about that a lot. A lot.

In four days, my options, my world, will be forever narrowed.

I can’t not do this. That’s why it’s so scary. I need to do all of these things because my balance is wrong and I need to fix it.

And yes, that’s both literally true and a microcosm of something much larger.

Internal transitions

I love being trans. I wouldn’t give it up for anything, and there’s a real piece of sadness for me, knowing that this surgery is the last of my transition. For the time of magic and possibility and what-might-be to be coming to a close. I suspect that I will come to love my new breasts just as much as I love being trans, even with all of the difficulties that come with both of these parts of me.

As I close in on this surgery, though, I find myself remembering the fears I had at the very beginning of my transition—that my colleagues would constantly be thinking about what was in my skirts, that I’d be discriminated against, that so many people would hate me—want to kill me, even—despite not knowing me at all. These fears feel very much the same. I know that my fears, at the beginning, are the same fears so many of us have when we enter our transitions, or when we’re holding desperately onto the rope over that bottomless pit, praying that we won’t drop. The fear that our bodies, our selves, will be smashed to bits when we fall. And yeah, there’s plenty of fear to go around. Plenty, especially these days. But would I go back to the way things were, for the fleeting, false promise of safety?

Never.

It’s hard for me to acknowledge the internalized sexism and internalized transphobia that I’m feeling, but I am. My wish that I could be happy with smaller breasts is a rejection of my own femininity and a desire to look and be more like a “mainstream” trans person, or even to blend in with cisgender, heterosexual society—to shape myself into someone more easily palatable for the cishet people in my life. It’s a desire to compromise who I am because it makes someone else uncomfortable. To surrender my queerness.

And it’s an urge I see constantly in our community.

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Several months ago, I stumbled into a Mastodon friendship with CJ Bellwether, sister of the equally incredible Mira Bellwether, author of Fucking Trans Women. She’s been in transition for much longer than I have, and offered this four-post statement of wisdom a few months ago. It absolutely poleaxed me.

CJ Bellwether on trans bodies.

If anyone tries to convince you otherwise about what you want for your body you should throw sand in their eyes… You’re a trans girl, you’ve already come out as the pariah of the world, reach for the stars with what you want for your body. Let them howl with jealousy that they don’t have the courage to do the same with theirs.

Anyone.

Anyone.

That means me too.

I wish I could be happy with smaller breasts—almost all of us wish, at least at the beginning, that we could be happy without transitioning—because we are trying to convince ourselves to change our minds about what our body should be.

We are trying to compromise on our transitions—our very authenticity—for the comfort and prejudice of other people.

Authenticity is all-or-nothing. You cannot be 50% authentic. 80% authentic. 99% authentic. All of those are just wordy ways of saying “inauthentic.” And living authentically is why we needed to transition in the first place.

What’s the fucking point of any of this if we’re not living authentically at the end of it?

We hide ourselves away for so much of our lives, trying to minimize who and what we are so that people don’t notice this thing inside us, this magnesium-fire pinprick of unquenchable heat. Our authentic selves, which we hide and cradle and protect because we’re sure that those selves would never be accepted by those around us. We tell ourselves over and over that this thing inside us, this “part” of us which is in reality the totality of our real selves, is bad, is shameful, is undesirable. We tie ourselves in chains and hate ourselves first, so nobody else can.

That is what the wish to not be transgender is, at the root of all things.

Self-hatred.

I spent 35 years hating myself, and I refuse to hate myself anymore. Never again.

I am terrified of the breasts I will have in a week’s time. But every single part of that fear is fear of being hated by others, and I’ve already thrown those gates wide. I’m trans. I’m not just out, I’m an activist. I tell everyone who’ll listen that I’m trans. There is no cup size I could possibly choose that’d make the people who hate me accept me.

So let them howl with jealousy that they don’t have the courage to reshape themselves the way we do.

Let them howl.