A Detransitioner’s Story in Three Parts: The Boob Job
Pre-Transition
We were six and eight years old, respectively. I was the younger, smaller boy. Ryan came from a broken home.* His family lived in the tall yellow house across the street, with its dingy paint coated in the dust from the yard where his father kept scavenged tires for resale. It was a feral place, wild in an urban way, that filled me with a sense of danger and adventure my own parents would not allow. Between the tall wooden fence that enclosed his yard was a swinging metal gate which we climbed, grasping at each other’s hands as we swung apart in an imaginary game.
“Nooooo!” we cried in unison. “A black hole!”
I brought a rich imagination and wealth of knowledge to our games, educated by the documentaries my dad watched on TV. Ryan, on the other hand, watched TV for hours in his room, unsupervised. His favorite channel was MTV and his favorite rapper was Eminem. He did not have very many friends at school. At recess he called me over to the jungle gym. He was lurking beneath the perforated platforms to peek up girls’ skirts.
“Look!” he needled me.
I locked my eyes straight ahead, afraid to look.
“Don’t let them catch you,” he teased, “or they’ll turn you into a girl.”
“Liar,” I said.
“No, they have a pill that makes you into a girl.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Yes there is, a pill that makes you grow boobs. I saw it on cable!” he crowed victoriously.
My family did not have cable and he knew it. Ryan’s family did not last long in the yellow house across the street. By the time he was twelve Ryan had been to “juvie,” a youth detention center. The family collapsed, sold the house, and moved away.
My parents did the best they could to shelter me from the world and to grant me the opportunities they wished they had had. I was enrolled in the best schools my city had to offer, went to church on Sunday, and participated in family vacations. As a teenager I worked summers on the family farm, stacking crates full of berries and pushing them into place. By freshman year of high school my chest and biceps were strong and handsome. The only thing I lacked was a girlfriend. The girls in class leaned over their desks to feel my pectorals and I flexed them one at a time, making them dance in their hands. They squealed in delight. I was especially close to one girl, Antoinette, a classmate since middle school. We had joined a daily after-school club, coordinated our schedules, and sat close to one another, often pressed together while we studied, yet I never thought of making a move. She had developed very rapidly over the previous summer. One afternoon we sat across the cafeteria table, filling each other in about the day’s events.
“Daniel Retford told me I have shiny tits,” she giggled.
A hot cocktail of feelings leapt up my spine. The tops of her breasts were showing and her skin looked soft and smooth as caramel. For a moment I lost my cool.
“That’s terrible!” I sneered.
“Why?” she laughed.
For months I had only dared to glance at her breasts in secret. My stomach tied itself in a knot as I thought I should have been the first guy to say it. Everything I had learned from the women in my family, from my church, and even from my school district had taught me to shame (if not report) such behavior as sexual harassment. It had never occurred to me that a woman might actually be flattered by the attention. In addition to the anger and jealousy, I felt an even worse alien feeling: envy. I was envious of her, of all the newfound attention she was receiving, the new friends and clothes and places she was invited on account of her developing breasts, and I was ashamed of my envy. My face flushed red as I stammered for a response. She took offense, scolding me for my bad reaction before moving on to the next conversation, but I could not move on so easily. Over the course of the next semester, I grew to resent her, even as I clung onto her friendship. Eventually, we had a falling out. She rejected me, and I made a public spectacle of myself. Although there were many other girls that I could have pursued if not picked from, I never recovered from the embarrassment of that first crush. At times I would try to flirt with other girls, but as soon as my attention was reciprocated, I would report back to my older sister and her friends, flustered and clueless about what to do. I walked the halls with constant anxiety, worried about what others remembered about me. I also had my own secrets.
Ryan reappeared for the first and last time junior year. He was standing in the driveway when I pulled up from school. My mom had welcomed him in after finding him at our doorstep. She brought us bottled Cokes, and we sat in the backyard to catch up. I quickly realized that he was not in his right mind. He told me that his father had died.
“They said it was an overdose,” he told me, “but it was murder.”
I sat in stunned silence, unsure what to say, but he had already moved on to the next subject.
“My girlfriend broke up with me. Bitch said I had stinky feet!”
I quickly finished my Coke and set it down on the table. He snatched it and rolled it over in his hands.
“I can read barcodes,” he said.
Instantly I felt the familiar admiration, still believing in his hidden genius.
“Really?”
He squinted at the bottle, then recited a string of numbers as though reading between the lines.
“That’s so cool!”
“Do you remember how you used to talk about black holes, Isaac?”
My heart warmed at the memory.
“I went through one,” he told me, “and came out the other side.”
He wrote his number down before he left, and I slipped the paper into my pocket with a bad feeling as I promised to keep in touch. By the end of the week, I had lost his number.
During Transition
The name of the organization was SMYRC, which stood for Sexual Minority Youth Recreation Center. It was a wing of NAFY, New Avenues for Youth, ages 12–24.
“Sign in at the door!” sang Deedee, a middle-aged man with long bleached hair, flip-flops, and a sparkly purse.
The club was held ten blocks from my university’s campus, in the basement of a converted parking garage. Most of the interns were from the university’s queer and women’s studies program or another minority studies program. Then there was staff like Deedee, older gay men, drag queens, and transsexuals.
“Remember each guest is allowed two allies only!” he bellowed, reciting the policy for non-LGBTQ visitors.
La-La and I had just come down the stairs and were standing by the entrance to the drag closet when a young man stumbled down the stairs on his own, between the small packs of regular guests and their friends. He wore faded jeans and a gray hoodie. He was bearded, with a hard look in his eyes.
“Please sign in at the door!” Deedee shouted, raising his voice loud and shrill like a nagging mother.
The young man had walked straight past the clipboard. Deedee circled around the desk, squared off with the young man, blocking his way in.
“Do you identify as LGBTQ plus?” he demanded.
Of course, he did not.
“Then you can’t be in here,” Deedee asserted.
The young man would not leave, tried to push his way past Deedee to the pop and pizza laid out on tables. Deedee pushed back and the young man began to cuss angrily.
“CALL THE POLICE!” Deedee bellowed again, “SOMEONE CALL THE COPS!”
One of the interns scrambled for the phone behind the desk. With a violent sweep of his arm the young man threw the contents of the desk on the floor then stormed up the stairs. The intern held the phone in her hand, looking to Deedee for direction.
“He’s gone,” Deedee breathed. “Hang up the phone.”
Beside me La-La hissed.
Deedee was white, and it did not look good for him to call the cops on a black man.
It was a special day at SMYRC. Performers from RuPaul’s Drag Race came to visit the homeless youth, put on a show and photo shoot. The staff at SMYRC brought out their best; a spread of medical-grade breast forms and padding for the hips and buttocks was laid out on a row of collapsable tables, like a feast. I followed La-La over to the table, in awe of what lay before us: the shiny, flesh-colored breast forms. I had only read of such things online. At first, I did not dare to touch them. Then La-La pushed ahead of me, grabbing them carelessly, laughing. Very gingerly I tried on the smallest pair, considering it modest. La-La picked up the largest pair and held them to his chest, lips pursed, swinging his hips provocatively, then thrust them at me, laughing loudly, before sashaying away to the drag closet. I held them to my chest in stunned silence. Not only were they the largest but they were also the most realistic of the prosthetics, with stiff nipples and dark-pink areolas. One of the staff shouted an announcement behind me.
“Clothing closet!” It was Liam.
Liam was a short trans man, flat-chested with a beard and cracked voice like a pubescent boy. I followed him upstairs to the clothing closet, where the LGBTQ youth got first pick of the program’s finest donations. I strapped the giant breast forms to my chest with a black sports bra and pulled on a Sarah Lawrence T-shirt.
“Is-a-belle!” he cheered. “Those look great on you!”
He encouraged me to take them home with me and I ran out the door without a word, back up the stairs and onto the street. For the next month I wore them everyday. I put them on first thing in the morning, to class at university, to dinner at the homeless youth services and out on the streets with friends. I learned to cradle them as I ran after the bus, as they bounced dangerously in my shirt, and when it was hot my chest grew slick with sweat. I reveled in the confidence they lent me, the added weight and presence, how they turned heads and made men jump up to open doors ahead of me. I felt imbued with an undeniable and matriarchal authority. At the end of the night, I took them off and laid them down by the mirror where I sat and stared contently at my own reflection. The social workers at SMYRC took notice of my new presentation. One day Liam called me over to his desk, smiling warmly.
“Isabelle,” he said, “do you want on the waitlist for breast augmentation? I know the referral specialist at OHSU [Oregon Health and Science University]. You can get it covered on public healthcare.”
I hesitated. I had never considered surgery. Although I enjoyed the power I felt with the breast forms on, I enjoyed just as much to take them off at the end of the night. The thought of plastic permanently lodged beneath my skin made me feel ill. Liam spoke up before I could answer.
“There’s a waitlist,” he said. “You’ll have a year to make up your mind.”
“Then why not?” I shrugged.
He smiled happily and turned back to his computer. The next day it was one of the program directors, Elizabeth, who called me over to the front desk.
“Isabelle,” she asked, “have you heard of the Unity project?”
I had not. She told me that it was an independent housing project for LGBTQ youth, using federal funds for rental assistance. As a student, I would have my own room for two years at $25 a month.
“You’re the perfect candidate,” she assured me.
I seized the opportunity without second thought. For the next two years I lived practically rent-free in downtown Portland on the condition that I met at least once a month with NAFY case management and therapy. Liam was right. It would be a full year before my turn came for a consult with the plastic surgeon. By that time, I had long since ceased to wear the heavy plastic breast forms. I remember the night I took them off for the last time. I had been on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for two years. I stared at my naked chest. Each small mound was the size of a fig, hanging to the sides of my pectorals with small, dark nipples. I touched them gingerly, seeing and feeling their softness for the first time. The next morning, I pulled a tank top over my tender breasts and stopped to admire their petite shape beneath the cotton. I pulled on my favorite skirt, threw a flowery shawl over my shoulders, tied on the rich black leather sandals I loved so much and ran down the stairs, out the door to where my friends were waiting on the street.
“I’m back, bitches!”
My feminine identity felt rejuvenated. In rejecting the false breasts, I had rejected the degrading beauty standards that guffawed at the size of a woman’s “knockers”; I had rejected misogyny and escaped the gross stereotypes of previous generations of male-to-female transsexuals, in favor of authentic self-acceptance—with the help of exogenous hormones.
The day before the consult I picked up the phone to a woman’s voice, slow and silky smooth.
“Is this Isabelle?”
“Yes,” I answered pleasantly.
She introduced herself as Yolanda, Dr. Burgi’s personal assistant. She advised me to wear a bra. That night I picked out my outfit, a bright orange one piece with short sleeves under my black denim short-shorts. The next day I arrived at the doctor’s office fifteen minutes early. I took a selfie with my back pressed against the blue wall, green hair swept over my shoulder and a placid smile on my face. To my surprise the surgeon entered the room with a box of implants in his hands. He smiled, pushing the box aside to shake my hand and ushered me onto the dressing table. He pulled a curtain between us with a bashful nod of his head. I stripped down to my underwear.
“Ready,” I said, and he swept back the curtain.
He began the examination, wrapped a measuring tape beneath my breasts and then, with a ruler, measured the distance from the center of my chest to the nipple.
“What happened here?” He asked.
Three thin lines of scar stretched across the gap between my pectorals in the center of my chest. It had been years since I cut myself, in the dark months before my official diagnosis of gender dysphoria. I remembered how contrived it had felt, reporting to my therapist the next morning. I had barely been able to break the skin, but the scars remained.
“Cat scratch,” I said.
He took a seat in a rolling, swiveling chair and spun around to face a screen and keyboard. I peered over his shoulder as he typed: “Remarkably similar to a cis-female chest.”
I beamed in pleasure. It would be many years before I considered the note in light of my detransition, at how the slightness of my chest contributed to my dysphoria as a man.
“So, Isabelle,” he spun around in his chair, “what do you think about at home when you imagine this surgery?”
His question caught me off-guard. I realized, quite suddenly, that I had never considered the surgery on my own accord, never sat around imagining it, nor had I studied the procedures in advance—at least not in the case of male-to-female transsexuals. The majority of breast implants were performed on cis women, who had breasts to begin with, and I could not make sense of it.
“I want my breasts to look more feminine,” I told him.
He wrote in his notes: “Pt desiring more feminine breast shape.”
He pushed off the tiled floor, rolled to the counter and back with the box of implants in hand. He sat them on the table beside me and picked out a large capsule of clear plastic jelly, perfectly round and dome-shaped.
“For you I would go with 500CC jelly capsules,” he said, holding them out. He beckoned me to try them on in the mirror. I held the large capsules in my hands and stood awkwardly in front of the mirror, feeling his eyes on the back of my head. Even if I were alone, I knew better than to trust my judgment based on how things looked in a mirror. As it was, the presence of another man in the room made me uncomfortable, especially in a professional setting. In an instant I was painfully aware of myself, like a boy caught in his mother’s underwear. I spun around, desperate to escape the reflection.
“Do you have anything smaller?” I demanded.
The capsules he had handed me were not nearly as large as the breast forms from SMYRC, but both had given me an awkward top-heavy proportion when compared to my slender hips and buttocks. The doctor patiently retrieved the next smallest size, and the next after that, down to 250CC. Each time I turned to the mirror I was met by the same uncomfortable reflection.
“It’s not the size I care about, it’s the shape,” I explained. “Can I draw it?”
“By all means,” he said, ushering me to the dry erase board at the back of the room.
I attempted to draw what I had in mind, small perky breasts like drops of water with nipples pointing out to the side, a cartoon character I had drawn in my art books.
“I want them to look natural, not so round,” I said, feeling stupid.
It was one of my worst drawings.
“What you’re referring to is the profile,” he said, waving his hand back to the first capsule he had chosen.
“These are a high anatomical profile. I would advise placing them under the muscle to hide the round shape. They will drop with time.”
“Under the muscle?”
He explained the technique in a few brief words: incisions would be made beneath each breast, cutting through the pectorals to insert the capsules beneath the muscle. The decision was based on cosmetics, for patients with less breast tissue to cover the round edge, but it came with its own flaws.
“Rippling,” he called it—when the muscles squeeze the capsules and cause them to wrinkle beneath the skin.
“Does that damage the muscle?” I interrupted suddenly, feeling guilty at my disgust toward his profession.
“There will be some loss of strength,” he said carefully, catching my eye with a knowing smile.
With every word I felt more apprehensive. I struggled for the right questions. I thought that because he was not trans himself, he could not tell me if it was worth it; he had never felt the discomfort of plastic capsules under his chest. Besides that, it was his business to profit from me. It was his speciality, gender affirming care, and I was prime steak. I asked for time to think about the size before a second consult and he agreed. A few hours later I got a call from Dr. Burgi’s personal assistant to schedule the surgery. She assured me it would be a year before the date and I would have plenty of time to make up my mind.
Over the course of a year, I would meet with Dr. Burgi four times before the ill-fated surgery. I could think of nothing but to fuss over the size, trying to assign some meaning to the choice, when really it was the permanence of the decision that caused my anxiety, knowing I would most likely regret it. Each time I changed my mind added to the growing guilt that I was abusing public health insurance, which in turn added to the pressure to make up my mind. Despite my guilty conscience, Dr. Burgi was nothing but kind, smiling humorously at my indecision. Yolanda also seemed to enjoy taking part in the process. Once, I asked her about the anesthesia. She explained that I would be knocked out, with my arms strapped to the bed, so that when the implants were in place they could tilt me up and see how they fell.
“Like a doll?” I gasped.
“Yeah,” she chuckled, “it’s kind of funny.”
The surgery date was fast approaching. I discussed the situation with my therapist. The surgery date coincided with the end of my lease at Unity. Besides that, upon turning twenty-four the following month, I would age out of the homeless youth services. I had barely saved enough money for rent, working part time at the coffee window at my favorite drop-in center. I decided my money would be better spent on a vehicle. At the end of our last meeting my therapist stood up to say goodbye with tears in her eyes.
“You’re strong, Isabelle,” she said as she threw her arms around me.
Three weeks later I rode the elevator to the top of the hospital for my pre-op examination. Outside the plastic surgeon’s office, I looked out over the cityscape in silent determination. I knew what I had to do, and yet when Dr. Burgi met me in his office, his face clean and smiling, I remembered the attractive dream he represented. I could not bear to abandon the transition altogether, so I took my time to explain that it was the timing of the surgery that gave me hesitation. Finally, I told him that since I was having second thoughts, I should not go through with the surgery. With that act of self-abnegation, a course of strength ran through me. I remembered the faith my therapist had placed in me and took it one step further.
“I think it would be a mistake,” I concluded.
To my surprise, a look of relief spread over his face.
“I think you’re making the right choice,” he told me. “I think many of my trans female patients on public health insurance are making a mistake with this surgery.”
I sat in stunned silence. Suddenly, it was though I were not there. I was no longer his patient; I was his confessor. He went on to describe the operations he had performed covered by public health insurance.
“I could count their ribs,” he shuddered. The population he was referring to was predominantly homeless; most had emancipated bodies because they were anorexic, drug addicted, or simply starved.
Once again, I rode the elevator in silence, only this time it was the silence of relief. A part of me was sad to be walking away from the glamorous ideal represented by Dr. Burgi’s office. On the one hand, I knew very well that the surgery would not give me feminine breasts—the gruesome reality of plastic capsules stuffed beneath severed pectoral muscles was undesirable—but on the other hand I clung to the fantasy of what my life could be like as a woman. As the elevator came to a stop, I smiled. I had never felt so strong as I did that day, after turning down the thing that I most desired. A feeling of serenity surrounded me as I rode the bus home, undisturbed by the noise of the city. No sooner had I returned to my room at Unity than my phone rang. It was the slow, silky voice of Yolanda.
“Isabelle,” she said, “I just wanted to let you know if you ever change your mind, you’ll be at the top of our list. We won’t make you wait again.”
“Thank you so much,” I said warmly before hanging up the phone.
My spirits soared.
A plastic surgeon on speed dial! I thought and imagined myself as a superstar as I drove through the city with my room laid out in the back of my car and the bass thumping to a dangerous beat.
Post-Transition
In the last instant before the anesthesia knocked me out, I had known I would regret the prosthetic breast implants. As Dr. Burgi entered the room, I realized suddenly that he was at least an inch shorter than me, but he was stout chested. Better yet, he was clean and confident, with a wry cunning smile. My stomach churned. He swiftly ushered me onto the bed. Nurses tittered around, handing me paperwork. I scratched a sad defeated mark on the lines. Even then I felt it was not my signature in truth. I did not yet understand that the real consent was not in packets of papers handed to me or promises made by handsome doctors and giggling secretaries, but in that action when I climbed aboard. Nurses hung over me, took my signature, and stuck me with drip.
“375CC under the muscle, like we agreed?” he quizzed me one last time.
I threw a desperate look to my boyfriend in the corner of the room, Nick. His jeans were torn, stained with sour cream and cheese from the restaurant where we met as line cooks. The baffling naivety of his look. He had no idea how bad I would regret it.
“Mm-hmm,” I gulped.
The drugs kicked in and I went under.
I came to in the shadow of a bad dream. I looked down at my chest. The skin was stretched tight over the prosthetics. Stiff, bulging protrusions. My nipples were hidden beneath a medical bra.
Stretched thin, tingling numb, I realized as the grog cleared.
A nurse tittered over me as she prepared me for departure.
“I’m so jealous!” she said. “They’re perfect!”
They did not look or feel perfect to me, but she promised they would soften and sag with time.
“Like mine!” She laughed, pointing at her chest.
I reported back to Dr. Burgi’s office for the ten-week post-op exam. The secretary handed me a survey in the lobby. Each question listed a scale 1–10 and three answers to choose from.
How high would you rate your preoperative dysphoria?
How high would you rate your postoperative dysphoria?
How satisfied are you with the size, shape of the implants?
Crammed toward the bottom was a section for comments:
If unsatisfied what is it about the shape?
I circled the numbers quickly, on the point of tears. It was all the same to me. I had quit work on account of the breast implants and crashed with Nick in his rental because I saw little other option. Men at work immediately picked up on my newfound vulnerability. The worst came at the end of the night, as I slaved, closing the kitchen with Nick and our bad-tempered lead. He stood at the fryers while I bent to lift out the metal bins from under the counter.
“I could kick you in the head right now,” he sneered.
He had turned from the fryers to loom over me. He was, in fact, much larger than me. Pale, chubby, white skin, baby faced, and a mean drunk. He scared me. The feeling of severed pectorals grasping at the capsules sent a paralyzing fear through my whole body. Immobile plastic lodged between the muscles of my chest, and I was still a man.
A man like him, I thought, could crush me.
As I sat in the doctor’s office wearing Nick’s soggy hat, Dr. Burgi walked through the door, his face already smiling, shining like the sun.
“Well!” he clapped, “what do you think? Are you happy?”
I squirmed, torn at heart, feeling guilty and ungrateful.
“What I regret most,” I said, “is the size.”
Only from very certain angles, or with the right bra, did the plastic capsules resemble a lady’s bust. To me, they appeared more like the engorged muscles of a body builder. Perhaps worst of all was the stupid disappointment that it had not worked. The destruction of my masculine chest was all for naught. I imagined if the capsules had only been larger, fuller, jigglier that gravity might pull them down, stretch muscle past the point of recognition, create an illusion of something soft and voluptuous, better than the abominable reflection of hard round breasts.
“I wish we had gone with 500CC,” I said.
He simply smiled more brightly, tossed his head back victoriously, white teeth and golden hair, laughed and cried: “You— I don’t feel sorry for!”
I hung my head in shame. On account of the constant discomfort I disassociated between body and self. In the ensuing months I spiraled further in self-medication and codependency. I made several attempts to leave Nick, pack up and move out, only to come crashing back weeks later.
I came down with COVID-19 two months after surgical castration in preparation for gender reassignment surgery. Nick’s housemates had finally had enough. I was voted out. At last, I called home. Nick drove me to my parent’s house, helped unload my car, nodded briefly at my mom and then took off. For the first time in years I was grounded, quarantined in the guest bedroom on the second floor. The fever lasted all of ten days. With it broke the rebellion of my youth.
The sky was the deep blue of late September as I walked back to my mom’s car one Sunday afternoon, parked on the gravel outside grandpa’s house. My uncle had just pulled into the yard on his tractor. He climbed down and loped across the grass toward me in his stiff and heavy gait. He raised his hands, spread out his arms in a hug and smiled, his eyes wet and warming. In an instant I forgot the painful capsules lodged under my chest. We embraced. It was the familial love I had been missing out on during those dark years of adolescence. It had been there for me all along. I was the one who had turned my back on family.
“Take a look at the orchard,” he said. “See something you did with your hands.”
On the drive home, we turned down the long driveway to the orchard and got out of the car to look. It had been five years since I had helped plant the orchard. The trees had grown and were bearing fruit. I was the one who had turned my back on God.
Statewide quarantines still held the public in its grip. Wildfires that summer had scorched the hills, raining ash down on the valley under a ghastly red sun. It was the first year of global disaster. A cosmic shift was underway—for me, it was an era of grace. I was just happy to be alive.
I hid my chest beneath an oversized hoodie, put in the paperwork to change my name and sex marker back. It would be another six months before I was ready for the breast explant surgery. By that time, my detransition was well underway.
I held the card reader in the palm of one hand and signed along the pixel line.
Isaac Arbol Reed
My hand slipped, dragging the stroke into an illegible scribble. I tried again.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect,” the office girl said, snatching the board from my hand.
My arms were strapped up by the wrist, a numbing cream was rubbed over the lines of incision. I was doped, but wide open and conscious for the operation. The scalpel slit open the underside of my left breast. The first implant slipped out easily. I felt the skin relax as the muscle sagged back into place. The second capsule did not come out so easily. The doctor’s first push revealed it was lodged in the muscle. Suddenly, he stopped, twisting his head to a nurse with an intense jerk. A unexpected song came on the speaker over his door—”Solo” by Frank Ocean. The beat dropped, a pause before the storm of lyrics. Suddenly, cities were burning, there was a bull and a matador fighting in the sky, like it had really happened.
“Who put that on?” he snapped.
By the time Ocean started singing about love and contraception, he’d had enough. “Someone turn that off!” he shouted, his whole upper body jerking backward angrily, pointing with his lips. The nurse closest to the door ran off in a flurry. The doctor returned his intense gaze over my shoulder. He pressed again and again, violently trying to thump out the implant. Suddenly, the underside of my right breast exploded as the capsule burst out. It felt as though a giant zit had popped. With the implants removed, the doctor stitched catheters into place, with long tubes and suction bulbs at the end.
The nurses sent me home with a clipboard of sheets to record the volume of drainage each day. For ten days I milled around our family spaces, scrolling through digital screens on my phone while the puss drained from chest. I walked around the house, exercising my legs and lower body, without moving my chest. Any big movement could jerk the tubes stitched into my chest, giving an uncomfortable tug to the wound. Over the weekend I made a short visit to the farm. It had been an era of grace. In previous visits with family, I had hid my chest under the same oversized hoodies that now hid nothing but catheter tubes strung into pocket-bulbs.
The doctor looked at the numbers I had recorded on the clipboard. In the last three days the drainage had all but dropped off. He told me to come back again in seven days. A week later I sat on the operating table while he released the catheters and stitched up the small holes they left behind. A nurse bustled in to clean up. I blinked in amazement. At last, it felt as though my body had finally registered the exit of foreign objects. My chest was free, but it had been turned to jelly. The leftover muscle jumped like a line of slack, loose and jiggly across my chest, detached from the lower chest. The door opened and the doctor strode in, stepping to the side while his nurse exited and closed the door behind her. I asked him about my chest strength.
“You’ll be able to rebuild some,” he said firmly.
I asked him again about the muscles in my chest and shoulders. He silenced me with a look. We finished our business and I left. That night I felt still quiet. No matter the damage, I was grateful to be free.
By the second year of detransition I had reentered the workforce as full-time production labor. Muscles regrew slowly across my chest. Long months of hard work, heartbreak, and isolation tested my confidence. I had learned it was better not to spend so much time in the mirror, at least not so often.
One night I looked up to see the naked body, lean and muscular, twisting to disrobe before a hot shower. Its spine unrolled and shoulders dropped. Jagged scars stretched tight on its chest. Muscles knotted themselves under dark fuzzy hair. The man in the mirror glanced but did not look back at me. A prisoner at peace in his cell, his body striving to be healed.
*Certain names and details in this essay have been changed for purposes of privacy.
Isaac Arbol Reed grew up in the Willamette Valley and today lives on the beach of Lake Michigan. He is currently on his fourth year of testosterone replacement therapy, after five years of male-to-female transition. He writes as a way of healing the past and moving on, but uses a pseudonym out of respect for his family.