"Earnestly: Becoming Myself Beyond the Binary"

2004

In high school, I was a powerlifter. I loved the strength it gave me, the feeling of power in my body. But peers—crude and immature—joked that my "tits would get hard." I knew what they meant: my chest was small, flat, shaped more like pecs than breasts. Defined. Muscular. Masculine. In their eyes, that was something unfitting. Disgusting. Unwomanly.

My irreverence toward gender expectations bristled them. It disturbed some. It excited others.

One boy told me, with complete sincerity, that he couldn’t wait for the day we were all grown up and he saw me on the street—me and my “hard tits.” He said he’d be proud. His fantasy was strange, bordering on fetishistic, but oddly, I found his comment affirming. There was something about his pride that stayed with me.

I often wonder what he would say now—what he would think of my flat chest today.

Would he still be proud? Or angry, like some other straight cis men who no longer see me as sexually legible, as "fuckable." To them, it’s a pity. A waste. Something lost instead of found.

2022

When I scheduled my top surgery, I told my friends and family.

Most of them supported me. The ones who truly knew me—who knew I bound my chest every single day, who watched me flinch when someone got too close, who knew I avoided pools and beaches entirely—those people celebrated with me. They understood this wasn’t a whim. It was liberation.

Others didn’t understand. Mostly cisgender women I wasn’t particularly close to. They hadn’t seen the dysphoria. The pain. The quiet ways it chipped away at me.

To them, my decision seemed... extreme.

"Mutilation," one said.

"Could never be me," another remarked, as though I had asked her to join me in surgery.

"How far do you plan to take this?" asked a family member.

Her voice was calm, curious. But the question wasn’t innocent. She wanted to know how far I'd go in rejecting the gender binary, in challenging her understanding of what a body—what my body—should be.

I didn’t answer. Because she couldn’t know. Because that wasn’t what she was really asking anyway.

2018

There are certain questions you expect only in doctor’s offices.

What are your pronouns? What medications are you on? Have you had any surgeries?

But when you don't conform to binary gender expectations, strangers feel entitled to those same questions—and more. Privacy becomes a privilege you surrender without consent.

We were standing outside my brother's wedding reception, smoking cigarettes. She was a bridesmaid. The wife of someone in the wedding party.

She looked at my slacks and asked, "How do you have a bulge?" Her tone was playful, but pointed.

I blinked.

Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she reached toward me—toward my crotch—and the cigarette in the same movement.

I stepped back and laughed, trying to defuse the tension.

"What's down there?" she asked, teasingly.

"A silicone packer," I replied.

Without hesitation, she reached out again, touched the zipper, rubbed downward.

Her husband laughed.

"That’s fucked up," my plus-one said, yanking me away.

We left the wedding early. Ended up at a gay bar. We danced with our people, sweating and spinning in the lights. We shook off the violation with laughter and movement.

But the memory lingers.

2023

When my post-op bandages and drainage tubes came off, I cried.

Some of it was pain. My arms ached from lack of movement. My skin was tender, inflamed from the tubes that had irritated me for days.

But most of it was relief. Alignment. Recognition.

I saw a flat, bare chest in the mirror. For the first time outside of my dreams.

It was mine.

And in that moment, I understood a deeper truth:

What incredible pain we must sometimes endure to feel such unrelenting joy.

Perhaps because it was so painful, it was so joyous.

I looked at my chest and felt a stillness settle over me. A knowing. A quiet triumph.

This body, this version of me—it had been aching to exist.

Now it did.

2017

When I tattooed the word "earnestly" on my thigh, it was a tribute to a friend who had passed. But more than that, it was a promise to myself.

A vow to live earnestly. Authentically. No matter who misunderstood me. No matter what it cost.

This journey I’m on has no endpoint. There’s no final gender form I’m trying to become. No finish line.

Only an ongoing unfolding. A lifelong act of becoming.

My only goal is to keep being me—whatever that looks like today, tomorrow, ten years from now.

I have lived earnestly. I will continue to.

I have built myself—piece by piece, scar by scar, truth by truth.

And every day, I get a little closer to home.