Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About My Breasts
The other day, a man in a car pulled over and rolled down his window, waving to get my attention. I stopped walking because I figured he wanted to ask directions — but he only wanted to know about my breasts. Were they natural or did I have implants? If the latter, where did I get them done?
I gave him the finger and resumed walking away.
But in honor of that bold truth-seeker, I thought I would share with you, my beloved readers, the complete and true story of my breasts. (SFW, but there’ll be more mentions of harassment.)
Back in 2002, I wrote an article for a local newspaper about my breasts (or lack thereof). I had started my transition, but I was scared to go on hormones because of the scary research that showed huge health risks from HRT. (That research has since been heavily contested.)
Anyway, this newspaper article1 was mostly about my experiments with herbal breast-enhancement pills (tl;dr: do not try them — the side effects sucked.) But looking back at that article now, and seeing past the silly, funny style, what’s obvious is that I was anxious and dysphoric about my body:
My failure to display the goods is everybody's business. Total strangers ask me all the time if I'm on hormones, or if I plan to start on them soon. I rarely have random people come up to me and ask, "So, have you used any suppositories lately?" Or: "Have you tried Zoloft yet?" But for some reason this one aspect of my body chemistry is open to public inquiry.
Having a chest as flat as Vin Diesel's delivery means I'm a failure as an MTF2. Never mind there are all sorts of valid health reasons for avoiding a big dose of chemical X to turn me into a real Powerpuff Girl. Hormones signify so much that a friend of mine whose doctor told her she couldn't keep taking them without risking fatal blood clots seriously considered going to Mexico to buy them without a prescription. And the state of California won't change the "M" on my drivers license to an "F" unless I can prove I'm on hormones3.
But OK, I admit it: I also wanted to be an object of desire. I wanted flesh I could cup. I wanted to be able to peel away my bra and reveal more than an existential void. I wanted cleavage that didn't involve my toes.
Around that time, I went to Dragon*Con in Atlanta, where I tried to haunt the hotel bar at which the “real authors” hung out. I was wearing a Wonder Woman costume that I’d made myself, and one of the men at the “real authors4” table announced loudly that I didn’t have the boobs to pull it off. I slunk away — my friend Kelly, a former ballerina who was as skinny as a rail, kept reassuring me that actually, plenty of cis women were just as flat-chested as me, and it was no big deal.
When I finally overcame my fears and decided to start hormones in 2003, I needed to get a letter from my therapist. At the time, the requirements for proving that you deserve treatments were still extremely stringent, but my wonderful therapist wrote a letter in which she told my doctor that I met "the spirit if not the letter" of the guidelines. And that did the trick.
There's something magical about manifesting a whole new shape of yourself. Life is full of involuntary transformations, and nobody ever really gets the last word on their own body. So I found myself looking down at my own chest, or gazing in the mirror, and thinking: This is part of me, and I put it there. It's amazing how quickly novelty gives way to comfort, until you suddenly can't remember a time before hormones. Medical treatments didn't make me a woman, but they did go a long way towards improving my sometimes wonky relationship with the physical world.
So much of being a person in the world comes down to proprioception: the shifting place where your personal space ends and the common world begins.
In part because of my fears regarding the health risks of HRT, I took the most cautious and conservative approach possible to estrogen. That could be one reason I ended up with A-cup breasts. I didn't much mind — they were beautiful, and they made me inexpressibly happy — but they were not particularly, ummm, in your face. I adopted the Peaches song that goes "Only Double A, but I'm thinking Triple-X" as a bit of a theme song.
Years went by, and I thought about getting implants some day5 — because I felt like they might increase this feeling of comfort with my body, but also because I thought I might get less static in the world with a more classic lady silhouette6. I was working full-time as a woman, and every professional interaction felt like a minefield — especially once I started working at io9, and I was suddenly doing press events all the time.
My first year covering San Diego Comic-Con as press, I got misgendered a couple times, and it hit a thousand times harder than the still-frequent street harassment. So I went into my second year at SDCC feeling anxious AF. At one point, I was at a press conference where Robert Downey Jr. and Joel Silver were answering questions about the Sherlock Holmes movie, and I wanted to ask how steampunk the film’s aesthetic actually was. I was in a mosh pit of mostly straight-white-guy journalists, waving and shouting while trying not to sound too much like a dude myself. Robert Downey Jr. pointed at me, and my heart flipped out because I was terrified he was about to misgender me — but then he called me “the lady in the blue shirt,” and I felt a wave of relief akin to a serotonin rush. (Plus Joel Silver wasn’t familiar with the term “steampunk,” so I got to hear RDJ explain it to him.) I was so relieved. I came out of that press conference walking on air. I could do this. I could hold my head high, and—
Cue some dude the very next day, pointing at me right when I’m trying to interview some fancy Hollywood peeps and yelling, “HEY THERE’S A MAN IN A DRESS.”
That moment still lives with me every day. Like a sudden plunge into cold water, like a sharp reminder of my contested status. Two days after I got back to San Francisco, I was making an appointment for a consult with a surgeon7 about breast implants.
Something nobody ever tells you about getting breast implants, incidentally, is that you will be pushed to get them bigger than you asked for. I kind of wanted a C-cup, but I ended up with a D-cup because my primary care doctor and my surgeon both kept insisting I’d be happier with bigger. If anything, they said, I’d probably want to go even bigger in a year or two. People always want bigger and bigger, they said.
But even with all that, I do love my implants, even if I did have to toss out some of my favorite dresses that no longer fit right. That feeling I had gotten from hormones, of comfort and self-love, was heightened and intensified. Now that my ship had a prow, my prowess became undeniable. People looked at me differently: I was misgendered and harassed way less often than before (though to be fair, there was an increase in the number of random dudes creeping on me.) But all in all, I felt a ping of happiness every time I looked at myself in the mirror. To put it another way, my breast implants gave me that same happy-serotonin buzz that I got from having Robert Downey Jr. call me a lady.
And they felt like part of me — not at all like foreign objects. Wanna know how I know? I broke one of them, a few months after my surgery. My surgeon had encouraged me to massage my own breasts every night, to keep them supple. One night, I was stressing out about some drama in the local spoken word scene8, and I massaged my right breast so hard that I popped my implant9. I felt it deflate in my hand, and saw my suddenly-asymmetrical chest, and felt a disconcerting sense that my body had gone rogue somehow. It didn’t feel at all like my body returning to “normal,” but rather like the way I’d felt when I injured my leg running into traffic as a teenager. I had damaged a piece of myself, and I had to go get it fixed.
For a few years, whenever anybody asked if my breasts were “real,” I would respond that they were objects in three-dimensional space, and therefore were part of the fabric of reality. And you know what? They’re fucking real to me.
I did have a steep learning curve getting used to my new endowments. I had this one sparkly fairy dress that I used to love, which did not provide much support up there. I wore it to George R.R. Martin’s fancy Hugo Awards after-party in Spokane, where I think I accidentally showed my nipple to half a dozen people. Ellen Datlow posted a ton of photos of that night, one of which included my nip-slip, and she was very kind about taking it down immediately.
Sometimes, I do think about having these implants taken out, or at least replaced with smaller ones. I can’t sleep in the position I used to, which is annoying, and I pretty much have to wear a bra all the time except for special occasions. My shoulders were achy before I had large breasts, but maybe they’re a bit ouchier than they used to be? Hard to say.
All in all, though, whenever I think about downsizing my front side, I always decide to keep my sweater-puppies the way they are now. I like being able to make a double entrance into any space: first my breasts, then the rest of me. And I feel an intense sensation of what I can only call gender euphoria when I catch sight of my own frame. Basically, I have the body I was dreaming of when I wrote that article back in 2002, and it’s as good as I’d hoped it would be.
Music I Love Right Now
I’ve never really liked the song “Wonderwall” by Oasis, especially back when it was impossible to escape wherever I went. So I was kind of startled to hear a cover version by Aloe Blacc that knocked my socks off, featuring lush horn arrangements and a tender, soulful performance. Aloe Blacc has been covering a ton of “alternative rock” anthems by bands like Oasis, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, Green Day, Soundgarden, and No Doubt. It’s music that I’ve never gotten into, despite marinating in it for as long as I can remember, but I really love his versions of these songs. He turns “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes into a total bop, with beautiful shuffling drums. It’s all super magical, and well worth checking out.
My Stuff
I’m going to be at Readercon in Quincy, MA, in mid-July! And then I’ll be at the Celsius Fest in Spain.
My latest book review column at the Washington Post covers amazing new books by Nicola Yoon, Leslye Penelope and Sally Wen Mao.
The new episode of Our Opinions Are Correct is all about dragons, featuring an interview with Moniquill Blackgoose, author of To Shape a Dragon’s Breath.
The Hugo Awards voter packet is available, and it includes all three books in my three-time Lodestar-nominated Unstoppable trilogy. Also, the third book, Promises Stronger Than Darkness, is out now in paperback!
I also have some other books! There’s New Mutants Vol. 4 and New Mutants: Lethal Legion. Not to mention my writing advice book Never Say You Can't Survive and my short story collection Even Greater Mistakes!
Newspapers used to be awesome.
This is one of those terms we don’t use anymore. It stands for “male to female,” putting a lot of emphasis on who you used to be instead of who you actually are. I’m very glad we’re just saying “trans woman” instead now.
So glad this is no longer the case. Now California says “you do not need a court order or medical certification” to change your gender on your driver’s license, because we’re not sadists.
I have no idea who these dudes were, and I doubt anyone’s heard of any of them now — but at the time I thought they were the cool kids that I, as an aspiring SFF author, should be cozying up to. I’m pretty sure Kelly was a better writer than all of them put together.
I had some other surgeries during that time, but they’re not part of this story.
Before anyone says it: passing is bullshit. As I wrote a while back, trying to manage other people’s perceptions is a matter of trying to control something fundamentally uncontrollable. And yet.
And here’s where I acknowledge the massive privilege that allowed me to get this surgery in the first place. I’m incredibly lucky to have this level of access to healthcare.
It’s a long story, not worth getting into, but basically I was trying to help organize a huge superstar literary night to raise money for famine relief in West Africa, and it kind of blew up in my face because everyone else was too busy to help and I was way too overcommitted myself.
So glad I went for the saline implants instead of silicone!