My best friend asked me this before I started my medical transition. I couldn't give him a definite answer, and I have mulled over the question for months.
Now that I've started T, I feel that it was the right thing to do. And I don't plan to have bottom surgery. But my top half...that's a problem. Unlike a lot of other guys, I became relatively accustomed to the top equipment I have, and I do get sexual pleasure out of my chest. And my partner likes that part of my anatomy. But when people see my chest, they read me as female. I have been hiding that part of my body for years--hunching over, wearing baggy clothes, stuff like that.
So my perceptions of that part of my body are all tied up in society's way of reading me. I wasn't sure I would get rid of the cannonballs if people still read me as male no matter what.
Last week, I came out of the shower one day when the bathroom mirror hadn't had a chance to steam up very much. And I took a good look at my top half. And was sickened by what I saw. "Those just don't belong there," I thought. "They're gross. They're wrong. I don't want those things on my chest. They are all WRONG."
The trouble is, I'm not sure where that perception, that disgust comes from. It seems to me that most or even all of it must come from the way we (in this country, on this planet, in this species, whatever) read bodies. And I have absorbed that attitude over the years and can't just toss it aside. So my loathing of these body parts has been implanted and hugely reinforced by other people. And what if other people suddenly stop reading my cannonballs as female structures? That depends on whether I suddenly stopped interpreting them as female parts, too.
If I had actually been brought up by those same "nonjudgmental" people in that same "nonjudgmental" society, I wouldn't be so judgmental about those body parts. I probably wouldn't obsess over them the way I do. I might want to keep them.
But I wasn't born into such a society. So I do dislike those body parts. And I plan to get rid of them. I will lose something when they go. But I hope I will gain much more than I lose.
P.S. I should add that these chest deformities are a terrible inconvenience because they bounce around and get in the way, and I never have used them and never will use them for the primary purpose they're designed for. More reason to wish them gone, I guess, even in an ideal world.
