Embracing ourselves

top surgery and the gift of hugging

It’s Pride Month, and all of my posts this month are going to be about trans joy, which is something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in the world. Bear in mind, some moments of trans joy show up in unlikely places, and some start out as anything but joyous occasions. In each case, this is a month of happy endings. However you celebrate Pride—whether you’re a seasoned parade-goer, a new ally looking for ways to high-five your friends, or a parent thinking about how to celebrate Pride with your kids—I wish you all the love, glitter, and disco music your heart desires.

I had made my way down half the steps in our home, midpoint between up and down, my hands clutching at the railing for balance. After two days of post-operative bed rest from top surgery, I was finally ready to walk outside in the sunshine. My nine-year-old son darted past, zero regard for the teetering stance of my early recovery and instability. But he paused, just two steps higher, and he looked back at my stiff body in awe. “You look like a boy,” he said, as though he had never noticed it until right then.

Between the pain, the discomfort, shaky legs and sweaty hands gripping walls to keep myself upright, a joyful laugh huffed its way up my throat. “That’s the point,” I said back.

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Our kitchen table is a rowdy place with constant reminders to “please finish chewing first.” We share the highs and lows of our days at work or school, the changes we have seen in the garden that day, the video or board games we’re excited to play afterward. We pride ourselves in building a space where it’s okay to speak your mind, where questions are welcome and not shunned. Foolish me, I thought my children couldn’t possible ask a question that would shock me, not at such young ages as they were. But a year prior to me coming out as transgender, in a time when even I did not understand that part of myself, we all sat around the dinner table enjoying an easy meal. My hair was still long back then. My face was soft. I had not started testosterone, I had not asked for different pronouns, and no one—including me—expected any of that to change.

That same child, only eight years old, looked up at me from across the table as though seeing me with entirely new eyes, and he asked in complete sincerity, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

I stared back at him, shaken, defenseless. I had not seen that coming at all.

He wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t judgmental. He wasn’t rude. He had only looked at me, this person he had known since his birth, and asked the most genuine question he could from a place of wonder and fascination.

To be seen in such clarity by a child, by his innocence and desire to simply know how to categorize me, he had inadvertently cut through every protective layer I’d wrapped myself in for my entire life. He saw the truth sitting there across from him; that I was asking myself that very question, that I knew the answer and feared what it revealed. It was the loose thread at the edge of a sweater, and he tugged gently, firmly, and I began to unravel without my own consent.

“You know better than to ask that,” I said in something barely above a whisper. I told him it was rude to ask that kind of thing, that it had hurt my feelings, that he knew the answer. I was his mother. I always had been and always would be.

Within six months I would come to regret every single word I said to him.

I remember the sound of my chair scraping the floor, the tang of adrenaline in my thighs as I rushed to stand, the stumbling pressure of the floor under my feet. I was outside in a blink, fresh air rushing down my burning throat, tears stinging, and it was only the cold of concrete under me to explain that I’d half fallen, half lunged into sitting on the bottom step. I sat there for a long time wishing I understood where the pain was coming from.

In another six months, he would pass me on those same stairs and see the boy I had become.

His question echoed in my head for days after it happened. Was I a boy or a girl? There was no answer I could give that felt genuine or true. My brain circled it over and over, never quite finding the answer it needed. And I shielded myself from digging too deep into why I couldn’t let it go. I focused on how I’d been bullied as a kid and called a “he, she, it thing” on the playground in third grade. The closer I got to seeing myself as myself, the harder I dug in on NOT seeing myself. Shovel by shovel, I covered myself in knowing I was a girl, in believing I was just misunderstood, until the spade bottomed out on rock and I couldn’t dig further. And then I proceeded to beat the shit out of that shovel against the rock, bending it, twisting the blade, pummeling my hands bloody.

I kept my hair long, and I purposefully went out to purchase new, more feminine clothes for a job interview. Spaces online or in the real world that emphasized gender inclusivity felt like a trap, and I avoided them. My own voice was a constant background in my thoughts, a chanting rhythm of “I am a girl” over and over to convince myself of its truth.

I’m not alone. Some of us do this, this self-torturous abuse of leaning harder than humanly possible into being that mistaken gender on our birth announcements. It’s the cutting edge of fear in a last, desperate gasp to maintain its grip on us before we finally see – finally finally finally – who we really are when we stare deep into our reflection. I use the metaphor of digging and hitting bedrock, and it feels fitting how we almost literally dig our own graves to bury that mistaken identity alongside ourselves and our dreams and our most delicate desires to live, really live, for the first time in our lives. But clawing your way back up and out of that collapsing soil is terrifying. You don’t know what you’ll look like when you emerge, if crowds will run and scream from your zombie-like lurching gait, if your heart will fall victim to a well-aimed wooden stake, or if the ones you love gathered around your grave would rather you stayed in it as what they knew before you revealed this tender self.

Within the first few days of recovery from top surgery, moving was nearly impossible. This is major surgery, in case you weren’t aware. Getting up and down from a couch required assistance. Climbing or descending stairs required assistance. Walking outside the house required assistance. You get the picture. I was rarely alone, and I certainly could not care for my own needs at all for the first week. Forget bending over – that would send a rush of blood through my body, vessels and capillaries pumping and swelling like a tsunami of fluid through all of the most broken and torn parts of my body, especially that tender, delicate center of my being, my chest. There were moments when I feared my spine was the only intact part of my physical self, and if I allowed the tension of the Velcro binder around my chest loose, I would fall to the floor in chunks, a gingerbread cookie split in half. I had visions of this happening, terrible nightmares that shook me when I slept in a drug-induced fog.

Physical pain wasn’t what I endured. It was the visceral pain of an uncontained fear, this horror of being cut in half to be made whole.

Maybe I would turn my torso in the wrong direction and all of my internal organs would come spilling out that gaping hole the surgeon had cut across my midline. It was absolutely within the realm of possibility to think that those stitches could tear if I coughed or sneezed too hard. And my body told me with every breath that it, like my conscious and unconscious mind, was similarly panic stricken that we had endured immeasurable physical exposure and risk just to recreate this body into a recognizable form.

You’re told that you’ll heal. You’re told that the scars will seal up, they’ll be pink or some other wild color for a while. Sometimes they’re even honest about the bruising your body will endure. To willingly submit to top surgery is to know that your physical form will literally be split wide at this new seam, and that a little whip-stitching is all that will hold you together once it’s done. And the surgery itself is an intense trauma to the body.

What you are not told is how you will feel when the wrapper comes off, and as much as I longed for that freedom, it terrified me to exist without the binder holding me together. I tried short dog walks in the neighborhood, the light July breeze tickling my back as my shirt brushed it. Entire swaths of my skin had not felt air movement like that in over thirty years, and it was one part excitement, four parts sensory overload. My steps increased in speed, my arms learned to swing at my sides, and my breath loosened. While I couldn’t expose my skin to sunlight, I could still feel its warmth through the fabric.

By the end of the third week of recovery I felt more confident that my body would hold, that I would learn to move again, that I would someday lift more than ten pounds. My family moved around me differently, too. My children lost their fear of dragging me along by the hand, and in one swift moment of impulsiveness my oldest son ran to me, arms outstretched, and hugged me like nothing about my body had changed.

But it had. Everything had changed.

And for the first time in my life, and in his, I felt his heart beating against my own. I could feel his chest expand with each breath. I could feel his arms wrapped around my entire rib cage. My sternum pressed into his little body and held him close, and I hugged him with sensation, with numbness, with my own fears scrunched up tight between us. It took my breath away to feel him so close with nothing to interfere or come between us.

I had been told what gender euphoria was, I’d read about it, I’d fantasized about having that kind of feeling in my own body. And in one rushing, sweeping crush of tender carelessness, my son gave me my first taste of euphoria. I hugged him back with every ounce of myself.

And then I hugged my younger son.

And I hugged my wife.

And I hugged the dogs.

And I hugged friends when they visited.

I became an unstoppable force of embraces for any reason, for no reason, for every reason I could think of. I could not get enough of hugs, of that feeling of another human being pressed close to my body, and I’m certain I broke all of the rules about toxic masculinity and “guys don’t hug” and even some possibly important protocols about hugging coworkers, and I couldn’t manage to care about any of that. I just needed to hug.

It hasn’t stopped yet, and I hope it never does.

the author on his trusty unicorn steed

Today’s post for Pride month is longer than what you usually see from me. That’s because a) this is a not-quite-finished excerpt from my upcoming memoir, and memoir chapters can be long, winding paths through many experiences, and b) today I am celebrating the two-year anniversary of having gender affirming top surgery! What better way to party than by sharing the joy of warm hugs with all of you.

I would also like to mention just how helpful, supportive, and illuminating my time in the Creative Nonfiction Class with

Rey Katz (they/them)

was. Their guidance in the process opened my eyes to how readers view my work and what I can do to bring them along on a journey of words with me. Many aspects of this essay were made so much better through Rey’s direct influence. Click on this form link to find out more about Rey’s upcoming classes.

Wishing you all the very best Pride season!

Your trans friend,

Robin