Breast Stories
Topless for the First Time
After being topless for most of my life…
I went topless last Sunday on the roof deck of my house. I made sure that no one saw me. I felt, strangely, a powerful sense of modesty.
It felt very odd.
I have lived in Europe where women go topless all the time. The concept seemed totally acceptable. Even I was topless on European beaches and every other beach I had been to…
…but back then I was a flat-chested guy.
I am a transgender female. I have always been one but Society required that I build such a massive wall of denial that it took panic attacks and suicidal thoughts to finally break through that wall. I was medically diagnosed by six different medical professionals as female. This came after 60 years of burying my gender under massive layers of male socialization and the poisonous effects of testosterone.
Back then, I had no issue with my chest. I wished I had more muscle like any lazy guy side-checking the cool muscled guys on the beach but beyond that, women dominated the breast world for me.
Passing as a guy, I was dragged to strip joints that I always hated (and now I know why). I never admitted it to my male colleagues because that would be “guy social suicide.” When I went, I paid for back massages, politely tipped the female dancer, bypassed the champagne room, and secretly felt intense jealousy of the half-naked women dancing. No one ever knew.
I wished I was them.
I was still clueless about being transgender. I had been trained by a lifetime of male socialization to suppress those thoughts and bury my life-long wish to wake the next day as a girl.
Therapy and hormones finally granted some of my wish.
Therapy gave me the courage to start the hormones and the hormones gave me 40D breasts.
For the last two summers, I hid my breasts under a t-shirt but two weeks ago I wanted to even out my tan but I didn’t want the world to see my naked breasts.
The Catholic nuns who taught me in grammar school may have rejected my claims of being a sinful gender pervert but they would absolutely have applauded my sense of good Catholic modesty.
I didn’t want to be indecent.
I felt self-conscious.
I was being beaten by the same prudish baseball bat as most American women. The realization stunned me. I was thinking like a woman. I then realized why…I was a woman, buried under layers of “guy.” I felt like a gender archeologist discovering a shocking reality buried under years of misgendered social debris.
I refused to be intimidated… I chose to bear my breasts as a sign of a radical demonstration of my feminist power. I did it on a roof deck hidden from public view.
So much for my militant protest for the right for women to go topless.
As I lay in the sun I realized my proudly naked breasts were getting sunburned. I decided I really didn’t care if I expanded my tan.
Who was I tanning for?
As I put on my t-shirt I did do one final act of defiance for my female sisters. I stood up for the world to see and slowly put my shirt back on.
The seagulls, the only ones observing my protest, cawed out their disapproval of my nudity as they flew overhead on their way out looking for fish.
They must have been Catholic seagulls.
Hey, I gave going topless a shot but I refused to get mocked by a bunch of prudish seagulls and get sunburned to make a point, only for me.
There is always next year.
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Emma Holiday
Thank you for reading my work.
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Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.
My writing has three specific goals:
1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.
2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.
3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.
