Mammogram

[Trigger warning: explicit language about mammogram and, especially, breasts.]

Today I had my first (& hopefully last) mammogram ever. 

I had it done three hours ago and I’m still feeling all emotional and confused about it. 

I cried a little in the clinic and wish I could cry some more now: cry more fully, more deeply, letting it all out, although I don’t know exactly what “it” would be. 

Somehow the mammogram felt more upsetting than the gynecological visit I had ten days ago. Probably because of my upcoming top-surgery and my complicated relationship with my breasts. 

I’ve never liked them. I’ve never hated or disliked them, either. I’ve always sort of ignored them or put up with them and acknowledged their presence only because of society. 

I developed relatively late and slowly so at age fourteen I was still running around without wearing a bra (& dressed in boys clothes), ignoring my small breasts that were definitely there and had gotten to a point where they could have used a bra but not enough to make it absolutely necessary. They never really got to a size that made a bra absolutely necessary. 

I started wearing bras in my second year of high school, at age fifteen, but only because of the social pressure I felt. (Same for shaving the hairs on my legs, by the way: I didn’t start shaving my legs until age seventeen, I think, and even then only because of the social pressure I felt, and I always only limited myself to shaving below the knees, never my thighs.) Social pressure coming both from the girls in my class — more directly, I think, from comments in the locker-rooms — and boys — more indirectly, I think it was the eyes I felt on me as I started realizing that I was attractive to boys. But it took me years before I really went out to buy myself bras: at first I just used hand-me-downs from my mother; and when I was left to my own devices and choices, I always instinctively went for sport bras — which anyway were more practical for me since I was an athlete already back then. 

It’s been the same as an adult: left to my own devices and choices I’ve always defaulted towards sport bras or simple, comfy bras, and then since moving to California more and more often going completely bra-less. 

When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I got to have enough breast to benefit from using bras. But for over a dozen years now my breasts have been small enough for me to not really need a bra except for when I exercise. And since bras have always felt so uncomfortable, so constricting to me, why wear one if I don’t really need to? 

I’ve always defaulted to going topless at the beach and wearing bras as rarely as possible and as sporty and flattening as possible. It was boyfriends, and one partner in particular, who forced me into very “girly” or feminine or even “sexy” bras — something I really really hated. 

But I don’t hate my breasts — “my tiny tits”, as I call them affectionately. I came to put up with them, especially because they weren’t much of a nuisance, they didn’t “get in the way” too much, and they actually could (& still can) give me some pleasure to the touch. On the other hand, though, they’ve always felt somehow alien, extra and out of place on my chest. Which is probably why doing masculinizing top-surgery was the first “active” procedure I decided to undergo when I fully acknowledged my non-binary/trans-masculine gender identity. Once I realized that having a flat, “empty”, masculine chest was an achievable reality, it made no sense to me to have to continue putting up with “my tiny tits”. Indeed, for months now I’ve been feeling that I cannot wait to have a flat masculine chest, I cannot wait to go around bare-chested like my buddies, I cannot wait to see my fully masculine torso, my fully masculine upper-body, in the mirror. 

And yet, I know there will also be a sense of loss, at least at the beginning. And I think it was partly also that sense of loss, or a taste of it, that I felt at the mammogram clinic today. A sense of loss, almost of betrayal towards “my tiny tits”, mixed with gender-dysphoria. As I sat there in the examination room waiting for the mammogram expert to come in, I almost felt like I was doing something mean to “my tiny tits”: getting them squeezed into the mammogram machine, almost tortured, to just chuck them off in less than a month and a half. 

Also, this mammogram felt like the first real Goodbye to “my tiny tits”. When I had the visit back in August with the surgeon who will perform the masculinizing mastectomy on me, all I felt was excitement and exhilaration. And it still felt like a dream, almost unreal, probably because the actual surgery was still almost six months away. Now that the surgery is less than six weeks away, though, and that I’m getting all the balls rolling in order to get it done, now it’s really hitting me that it’s actually going to happen. 

Last Thursday I got my pre-op assessment and “green light” for the surgery from my primary care physician. Last Monday and then this past weekend I talked about it from a more practical and logistical viewpoint with two of my non-binary friends. Moreover, both my counselor last Tuesday and my non-binary friend this past weekend started to gently, nicely bring up the more emotional aspects of the upcoming procedure, poking me to think about how I’ll feel about it, what I’ll be looking forward to, and how I’m feeling about it now, in a gentle way nudging me to start preparing myself for this. To start to really think about it. 

And I agree: now, maybe just as of today because of the mammogram, I realize that a new, important emotional phase has started for me: the “pre-top-surgery” phase. Which is happening in parallel with the phase of uncovering what kind of boy I am and want to be. And I don’t think it an accidental coincidence that these two phases are coinciding…

I think that one of the biggest, or most important, phase of my “gender journey” is starting now…