QUICK NOTE TO SAY: content warning for some gender surgery related chat, I've tried to highlight the gory bits but that's what this newsletter edition is about if you don't want to hear about it for whatever reason!!! There's no mention of transphobia or anything like that though. Or even GIC bullshit. Just pure surgical japes.

A few weeks after I had top surgery, I realised that my right nipple had taken the opportunity to, in gender affirming healthcare terms, begin to live in the ‘left’ role (and vice versa – I don’t want to steal the gender reveal thunder from the other nipple, for the purposes of this very tenuous bit). They got switched around during the operation, in other words. This has been a fucking godsend while adapting to life after covid restrictions. I stopped drinking just before the pandemic, and it’s been hard knowing how to interact at social gatherings. As a result, I’ve told this story literally every single time I’ve been to a party since restrictions eased. Even to people who already know about it.

Mostly, it gets a good response and I love telling it. Having had surgery to transition is a strangely particular life event; for me, it’s parallel to getting married, or having a baby. It’s a huge milestone and I want to be able to share it with people. But because it’s not as commonplace, there isn’t really a widely agreed social script for talking about it, apart from earnest personal essays. Despite the total acceptance of trans people in the predominately cis social circles I spend time in, it still would be a strange thing to bring up. We have to spend so much time telling cis people to not ask whether someone has had THE SURGERY that I imagine it’s probably difficult when someone (me) effectively goes up to you and says PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT THE SURGERY, I BEG YOU, THE WORLD SHUT DOWN AND FOR MOST OF THAT YEAR GETTING SURGERY WAS ALL I THOUGHT ABOUT AND I DON’T KNOW HOW TO TALK ANY MORE.

But everyone can enjoy an ultimately harmless surgical oddity!

The reason I noticed at all was that when I was 19, I had an existential crisis and decided to get my right nipple pierced. Other things that happened during this time were that I cut my hair short, dyed it bright red, and started listening to post-hardcore instead of twee pop. I also voted Liberal Democrat in that year’s general election and got really into attending electoral reform protests, because there might have been two wolves inside of me, but both of them were fucking terrified of being kettled. Anyway, the voting part is the only thing that happens in this piece of writing that I'm genuinely ashamed of, and I also realised that post-hardcore and twee pop can co-exist in the same record collection very nicely. I digress.

HERE’S THE GORY PART

Anyway, the thing about having had a metal barbell through a nipple for over a decade means that the nipple’s structure changes a fair bit when it’s removed. During double incision, the method used for most top surgeries, the nipples have to be taken off and reattached because the cuts take place above and below them. I opted to have them grafted back on, and when that happened, the formerly pierced nipple ended up losing a lot of shape. And like I’ve already said, it ended up on the other half of my chest. When the nipples are healing back into place, they scab over – on the left nipple, the scab curved around the nipple, and then on the other side the scab was totally flat. I found this weird, and then when it came off I saw the imprint of the barbell ON THE OTHER NIPPLE. And then I worked out what happened and got on WhatsApp immediately to 12 of my closest friends / acquaintances / people I had met five years ago at a queer indie club in East London.

Too gross didn’t read version: because one nipple was pierced and the other wasn’t, they healed significantly differently, which meant that I could tell that they’d been put on the wrong way round. Yeah, I guess that probably means people with less distinctively different nipples who have had nipple grafts might have had them put on the wrong way round too! But sucks to be them, they’ll never know.

I’ve taken a long time to write about this, despite at least two of my friends telling me I should make something out of the story. It’s hard for me to write about anything to do with transitioning without feeling like I have to force some Ultimate Point into it. I can recognize how innately crushing this is for creativity, but it’s still hard to let go of it. Frustratingly for me, though, I think there’s actually a really obvious point: you cannot account for all possible futures when you seek out a physical intervention like piercings or surgery, and it’s unfair to expect consenting adults to defer whatever action they feel like they want to take.

Like I said, I love this silly little surgery post-script, but it would have been nice if my nipples looked basically the same; my old-right-new-left (what a horrible sounding political philosophy) nipple does resemble more of a lump of chewing gum than I’d like in an ideal world. I’m actually very lucky and both of my nipples can still soften and harden, which isn’t always the case - but with that nipple it does look basically like it goes through the process of, um… okay, you know how chewing gum hardens over time? If it gets erect it looks like how a bit of gum on a desk placed in September will change over the course of a school year, but in like, 10 seconds. The other one is a platonic ideal of a nipple. If it was a student, it would get a commendation for not being the sort of little shit who would ever stick gum on a table.

If I hadn’t got my nipple pierced back then, this wouldn’t have been the case. But what was the piercer going to do? Throw a handful of captive ball rings over their shoulder to see if they spelled out ‘lol trans’? Probably not, that sounds both metaphysically impossible and like a legal nightmare.

Maybe a different world exists where I had enough self-knowledge to start transitioning in my teens, so I had top surgery instead of getting one nipple pierced for some sense of connection to my body. But then another world would exist where I had both nipples pierced, and my post-surgery chest looks even more like the underside of a school desk. Impossible to know. I’m in this world, anyway, and I’m approximately 5% more fun at social gatherings because of it.