Take It from the Top: Tranny Boys, Breasts, and Self-Determination

“Having breasts made me feel really masculine,” says 24-year-old Leidy Churchman, whose twinkling blue eyes and coy smile match her soft, raspy voice. An artist who grew up in Maine, Leidy knew she was queer and came out to her family and friends by age 17. But something didn’t sit right with her butch designation. She explains: “If you’re a tomboy—to have boobs—it’s like you’re this butch character. You become this masculine female. And I really enjoyed being feminine but I enjoyed being identified as a male or boyish. And so it was really hard to make those two things come together with breasts.”

Her solution: To start binding her breasts into a boy chest. It gave her a new freedom to express herself outside of the butch character that she never identified with in the first place. “When I would bind, I would actually feel way more happy to stand up straight and jump around and be feminine, just experiment more with how I was. With boobs I just felt like I was supposed to be tough or something.” In fact, the idea of wearing a dress with breasts is repulsive to her. Asked how she would feel to do such a thing, she pauses and then says emphatically, releasing a bit of uneasy laughter, “totally fucked up. Really wrong.”

So Leidy took the next step, a bilateral mastectomy, or what she calls top surgery. It seemed like the natural progression in Leidy’s pilgrimage to her own gender-bending, self-defining Mecca. She picked up the phone and rang her surgeon, who squeezed her in for a 10 o’clock appointment. Well, not exactly. After all, this isn’t wedging silicone implants between your muscles and glands, or filing the bridge of your nose down. Leidy, who had been meditating on the surgery every day for the past three years, was required, like all people who wish to undergo top surgery, to see a psychiatrist until that professional felt confident that she was of sound mind to make the transition, that she could maintain a stable work and family life while living out her Gender Identity Disorder (GID). After a year of bi-weekly sessions, he wrote the required letter of recommendation to her surgeon: Ms. Churchman was sane.

Implants Are OK, Removal Is Not

Actually, Leidy was fortunate in that she developed a close bond with her therapist, whom she called right after her surgery in California this past spring. But that is not always the case for most people in her position, and the fact that psychological evaluation is required at all brings up some disturbing issues about the rigidity of gender designations in the United States. Dean Spade is a 26-year-old attorney for low-income, transgendered people, and one of the founders of the controversial Gay Shame event that debuted in Brooklyn in 1998 and most recently made its presence known at this year’s Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco. Spade is concerned about the social and political implications of such blockades to identity expression.

“Why are some modifications accepted and others are not?” he wonders. Three years ago, he had the same surgery as Leidy and made the switch to a male pronoun and name. “Everyone does things to help them express their gender the way they want [to]. People change their appearances by shaving, dressing in certain clothes, dieting, lifting weights and having plastic surgery to make themselves comfortable in their genders. What results is an amazing array of gender presentations, some more ‘traditional’ and societally approved, others more non-traditional.” So what is the difference between say, breast implants and top surgery, besides the imposed psychological evaluations, relative inaccessibility, and higher cost of the latter?

While breast implants are used to enhance a traditionally female gender representation, top surgery is the disruption of a societal given and an exploration of the individual’s unique gender identity. Like Dean’s, it is a deeply personal quest: “I had an image of myself that was different from what my body was, and I felt I could be more at home in my body and look more like the me I saw inside if I made this change.” It’s hard not to wonder why it’s so important for us to make our bodies reflect what we feel inside. Dean says, “it’s like asking what sex would be like without a body.” Our culture, with its fear of differences, insists that certain of its members do the impossible.