Taking my shirt off

This afternoon I showed my “new” chest in person to a friend (a non-medical person) for the first time. 

With one of my closest (cis-male) climbing buddies I am working on a project about non-binary/transgender athletes and he came to visit me today to continue some work on this project. We hadn’t seen each other in several months and he hadn’t seen any post-op pictures of me. When my friend arrived today I needed to treat my scars with ointment that he had picked up at the pharmacy for me; so I took the ointment from him and said I’d go fix up my chest and then be back to start work on our project, but he asked, “Can I see?”

I’m always very wary about showing people my chest now because it could be bothering to see with the bruising and scars and all, so although I was delighted by his request, I cautioned him that it might look “ugly”. But he reassured me not to worry so I slowly took off my sweater, shirt, and thank top and showed him my bare chest. 

There were several layers to this act and how it felt to me. 

There was a layer of slight embarrassment to overcome — even though having been brought up in Europe I’ve always felt relatively comfortable about topless females (& going topless myself), I was after all socialized as a woman so there is a level of ingrained modesty and/or awkwardness around baring my chest, especially for a hetero-/bi-sexual male who’s not my romantic/sexual partner. 

There was also the aspect of learning to do something new — connected to the previous layer — i.e. to remove my clothes and show my naked chest to a hetero-/bi-sexual male who’s not my romantic/sexual partner. In some sense, maybe, I was learning to do something “normal” (or considered normal) for a boy — i.e. to remove my clothes and show my naked chest to another boy. 

I was being a boy with a boy. 

And in fact, the final layer was the recognition that I (the boy in me) got from this other boy as my friend exclaimed, “WOW, it’s amazing! It’s perfect! It looks like the chest of a sixteen-year-old boy swimmer… you look like a sixteen-year-old boy swimmer! And boy, you have more muscles in your back than I do!” 

It’s hard to put into words how affirming moments, and comments, like these are for me, for the budding boy in me. Seeing the boy through other people’s eyes, not just my own. Like when two other friends the other day (& then my climbing buddy this evening) saw my pre-surgery nude portraits and they all said that my breasts seemed to not belong, to not really “fit” my body, that the rest of my torso was just too masculine for them. 

These are little gems, precious little gems, that now more than ever I need to treasure.