Dad Used To Have Boobs (And They Were Kind Of Big)

hey kid, this one's for you.

June 11th, 2021.

I don’t have any rubbing alcohol. As I sat half-naked on a dishcloth, pants pooled around my ankles, hunched over my laptop at the kitchen table, it dawned on me that I had not purchased something with which to sterilize my left thigh. I ransacked the cupboards--no dried out little wipes from ordering takeout, no cheap first-aid relics from road trips past, no sprays, bottles, or oils--nothing. I was exhausted from the day’s anxiety-ridden goose chase from pharmacy to pharmacy; sweat had most certainly beaded beneath my thick cotton chinos and dried on my famously irritable skin. I needed to sanitize my leg, and a sex change is hardly the time to cut corners. If you’re going to pull a queer MacGyver and stab a big needle full of hormones into your own leg, you at least need it to be clean.   

I waddled to the bathroom and awkwardly perched in my shower in a t-shirt and boxers, holding my leg under the stream of scalding water. It’s relatively hairless, despite a year of not shaving. I stared intently at my skin and scrubbed it practically raw, burning the image into my mind, wondering if it would be carpeted with hair a year from now. It’s a silly thing, it’s a seemingly little thing--a hairy leg--, but everything feels monumental when you’re about to reorient the rest of your life with a tiny vial and pointy little blue syringe you bought an hour ago (along with some peanut M&Ms). I don’t want to miss anything, I don’t want to forget anything, and so here I sit, writing something resembling a letter or essay or confessional journal entry to my future child, on the day I start my medical transition.  

I bet you’re wondering how your dad, a gangly nerd in faded chinos who burns the pancakes and made you watch Dumb & Dumber, could ever have looked like anything remotely resembling a woman. You would have recognized me, though. If I showed you photos, I bet I’ll show you photos--you’d recognize the me of right now, of June 11th, this awkward in-between period in which I’ve chopped off my hair and gained some much-needed weight and dress like a boy, but still possess the softer edges of a woman. The me of three years ago? He’d be a mystery to you, I imagine. He looks like my anorexic sister in shimmering clothing and cheap eyeliner. He had a string of bad girlfriends and the kind of incapacitating depression that is simultaneously dangerously impulsive and debilitatingly stagnant. You know, I’ll probably keep most of those photos to myself. Highlights only. 

Today--June 11th, 2021--today became about my parents, as I never intend and it often does. I went to a wonderful queer-focused medical center for my prescription. That prescription was sent to my local CVS down the block from me. That CVS, as I learned through my anxious and impatient calls, was out of the testosterone vials I craved so desperately. They wouldn’t be getting more until Monday, the woman apologetically explained. 

That’s good, though!, she sputtered, her voice lifting with hope. I was appalled, I was devastated, I was so ready to start this next step I could hardly bear it--

Hm? I choked out. She responded excitedly--

Your insurance doesn’t cover the prescription, so we flagged it and sent them a notice. Maybe you can talk to them on Monday. 

I panicked. I wasn’t paying with insurance, you see. I was paying out of pocket, I was paying with cash I’d been slowly taking out of my bank account and coupons I’d painstakingly bookmarked and printed from the internet. I’d carried those coupons around for so long, the paper was yellowed and curling in my wallet. I wasn’t paying with insurance because I was 23, still on your grandparent’s healthcare plan, and they were very opposed to me transitioning. If they had seen a prescription for testosterone billed on their insurance, that would’ve been it for me. Of all the bad days--the fights we had, the awkward family dinners while I was stuck at home, the explosive group texts and icy therapy sessions--of all the nightmares, this would reign supreme. My doctor had flagged this prescription, this sacred prescription, as *PATIENT PAYING OUT OF POCKET*,  as *DO NOT RUN THROUGH INSURANCE*; had made it clear for whichever blasted pharmacy tech received the memo that they were *not* to do exactly what they did. 

The woman at the pharmacy hung up, and your grandparents called me immediately. I’m not kidding--ten seconds later, my phone rang. Insurance had, surprise surprise, informed your grandparents that they did not cover one certain prescription for 0.25 mL of testosterone cypionate, but were looking into it--that we would be taken care of. Hah! Insurance had no idea, insurance didn’t realize they were dropping a match into a kerosene-soaked pile of tinder, fanning the flames and fueling a very ugly conflict between your grandparents and I. 

“I just want to talk to you before you go from beautiful to ugly”, your grandfather barked, his voice barely restrained to an acceptable volume level. Your grandparents were vacationing in Florida at the time, something they rarely did, looking to relax and romance in the sand. They were hurtling down some freeway or another when they learned their son was now undergoing a medical sex change, promptly sparking a call. Your grandmother held the phone far away from grandpa, whispering sweet nothings into the speaker, carefully mediating this battle between the two men in her life. Whether she saw me as one or not, that was undoubtedly what was happening--the two men closest to her were duking it out, and she was crouched in the passenger seat, phone in hand, attempting to prevent WWIII. She had her own ugly and disproving thoughts on my medical transition, of course, but they were communicated in short bursts high in emotion and decibel, or in angry emailed articles. My father preferred lecturing forebodingly in moments of tension. 

The phone call ended when your grandfather said that ‘ugly’ line to me. It hurt a lot, understandably. The fact of the matter is that I don’t care what my resulting physical appearance is, after my transition is well underway. I don’t care about the nuanced aesthetics of my appearance, so long as I recognize them as my appearance. MY appearance. Kristofer Thomas, not the conceptualized daughter my parents felt so deeply betrayed by and scared for. 

I want to tell you why I’m writing this. I’m writing it because you, you, you were my catalyst for coming out. You were the reason I looked deep within myself, shined a flashlight on all the ugly parts I’d been pushing away my whole life. I stood there on the sidewalk, sitting on a stoop, muttering into my phone at two very angry and terrified parents, and thought of my own parenthood. I thought of my own future, of the moments and experiences I wanted for myself. The ones I know I deserve, despite the bouts of self-hatred, the very ones that undoubtedly kept me in the closet so long. I thought about lots of things; about everyday encounters and work and life and sex and everything in between; and I thought about you. Specifically, I thought about being ‘Dad’. About being your dad. 

My aching longing for fatherhood was an amorphous blob of existential pain and longing that lodged itself deep within my ribcage, and it festered there for the better part of a decade. I couldn’t ignore it anymore, I couldn’t make it go away. I tried to make it go away. I did so much to forget. I did so much to replace. I did so much, and I still would lie awake at night, staring up into the darkness, blinking at nothing, flickering visions of this other life, this man, dancing with tantalizing closeness in my mental frame of view.  

It’s June 11th, it’s June 11th. That man feels just a bit closer. I take a deep breath and plunge the needle into my thigh. It didn’t hurt; I hardly felt it all, actually, although that might have been the adrenaline. I pushed the plunger and watched the clear liquid drain into my leg and felt a cocktail of emotion I can only call ‘exhilarating’. I felt like I could cry, laugh, sing, and scream all at once, but I didn’t. I took a swig of a lukewarm grapefruit seltzer, sat on the couch, and opened up a blank word document. I started writing this. It poured out of me, almost too fast for my hands to keep up.

I’ve always been your dad, but the world hasn’t always treated me like your dad. Doesn’t always, I should say, but I mean more on a day-to-day level. As I write this now, I still have a chest. It’s not the largest, but it’s there, unless I actively and painstakingly conceal it. I definitely won’t have one when you and I meet. You’ll think of the two long-since faded scars, if you think of my chest at all, and I’m sure it will be hard to conceive of a time when there was something there. The way my body holds its weight will definitely be different. I’m not exactly curvy now. If I’m wearing the right thing, and binding (and especially masked--one morbid benefit to the pandemic), I can pass, but my voice often gives me away. I’ve always had a low speaking voice--I’m impatiently itching to know what it sounds like when you’re reading this--but it’s a different kind of low right now. It still has the unmistakable falters and cracks of someone that some would label a woman, if you heard it in public and out of personal context. 

I want to be able to carry you around, march you through the park strapped to my chest in some little baby bjorn, and offer not a shred of ambiguity to passing strangers. That’s a father and his baby, I want them to say. That’s right--that’s the two of us. I want to exist safely with you, not bask in worry about the shape of my arms or the angle of my torso or the sound of my voice or the shape of my fingers (too thin to be a man’s, my brain says now, as I watch my fingers pad the keyboard) or if my nose is too slender to possibly be a father’s nose. I want to relax and sprawl on the green and watch you march in the grass with your chubby little baby legs and not pay my body a second thought. I want that time to be ours. Body dysphoria can’t rob a moment of my time with you, it just can’t. I don’t know much, obviously, but I know enough to know parents must be on to something when they tearfully express greeting-card isms like “it goes by so fast!”. Hell, I’m sure I’ll have long-since expressed as much, whenever you’ll be reading this. You’ll be a teenager, or something. I’m sure I’ll have cried multiple times driving you to school or something, to your embarrassment. I’m sure I’ll have filmed a million recitals and games and first steps and second steps and Christmas mornings. I’m sure we’ll have had a million fights and shared a million laughs and existed together, just hung around.  

As for the shot? The actual hormones, the testosterone? I hope it isn’t something you think about at all. I hope it’s that little ritual you ever so often catch a glimpse of, the five minutes once a week I take aside. I hope it annoys you, even. Maybe there will be some moment when you want to use the bathroom I’m in (in this little daydream, I’m picturing the master bathroom, the one your other parent and I would use) and I’ll be crouched over the tub flicking air bubbles out of a syringe. I picture you banging on the door, and rolling your eyes when my aging ass calls out I’m doing my shot! That would be pretty bratty of you, actually, but I’ll give it a pass. Isn’t that very teenager, to feel fury at an occupied bathroom? Yes, for that, I think you’d get a pass. 

I feel better now, having catalogued this. I’m going to go make my famous poor man’s take on chicken shawarma--you know, the one I make when we’re feeling lazy by dumping stuff in the crockpot. 

I fucking love being your dad.