Disappearing Butches: Butches and Top Surgery

So, it looks like by having top surgery – breast modification to make my chest more male and flatter – that I have broken some old school rule in some minds. Sees that some people enjoy a Butch who has dysphoria (yeah, try living with it daily) and who hide their breasts under layers of clothing, no matter how uncomfortable that is for them. At least they still have all of their designated “woman parts” i.e. tits and a vagina. Yes, that is the older school Butch way of existing, and some like it that those Butches didn’t change that. I wonder…if those Butches could have or could now change – have top surgery – would they? Or wouldn’t they? I have to believe, being Butch myself and knowing how it feels to have the outrageous angst with my own body image, that any Butch who could change it for themselves would do exactly that. Now I am sure there are some that can’t for a wide variety of reasons, from financial and insurance, to health considerations, to fear of pain or of what their families and friends will think of them. Evidently some think that by my having had chest surgery that I am less Butch and more Trans now. I beg to differ.
All my life I was uncomfortable with my chest/breasts. I hated them from the day they started to grow. I hated how my clothing fit, how I couldn’t wear a well fitting shirt because of my proportions and I hated that it was the one thing that men would find feminine about me. Believe me I was anything BUT feminine, no matter what body parts said.
Just because I was able to modify my body and have a nice flat male chest doesn’t mean that I am not still Butch. I am still very Butch. Butch is an attitude, not a body structure. I was tired of binding and wearing ill fitting clothing, like I said. Binding isn’t healthy for the other structures of the body like the ribs and lungs! It made it hard to breathe, and hard to move sometimes. Binding was a temporary fix for a long term problem. Binding was like putting a bandaid on a broken leg. And when I was binding I was also hyper aware of it for all of the discomfort it was causing me. I would wish and wish that I had a flat chest and there would be no more need to bind.
It’s only been a couple of weeks since I had the surgery to give me a chest that I am now comfortable with. Even though there’s still some swelling, I am really happy with the results, estatic even. I run my hands over my chest, tenderly across the still bruised areas, and I marvel at how modern medicine and a very artistic surgeon have changed my body into something far more comfortable and pleasing to me – scars and all. I feel my nipples now and like how they are a bit smaller and will look great pierced once things are healed up completely. I look in the mirror and I like my reflection much more than I ever did before I made this change. And I am still very very Butch.
Sure, Butch has a “style” attached to it, but it’s a widely varying style too. There are dapper Butches, there are skater Butches, there are soft Butches and sporty Butches. Of course there are the quirky geek Butches and lumberjack Butches. Personally, I have never found a “style” that I fit into completely. I don’t pay much attention to the fashion magazines and websites now out there for Butch styles. I do my own “style” of Stone Butch and I own a couple of decent suits. The one thing I do notice in all Butch fashion is that everyone is flattening their chests. Everyone is either binding, has small boobs to begin with or is wearing 3 sports bras and a oversized frumpy shirt. And beleive me none of them are very comfortable…but they do it because they don’t care for their breasts and try to minimalize them as much as possible. And because they are encouraged to do this!
Most of our femme counterparts don’t go through this body dysphoria that we do. Thank God, because I do love breasts on women who wear them well – like my girlfriend. I’ve never had a woman I have been with want me to have boobs. They would like it when I bound and flattened my chest and looked decent in my clothes. So why would any of them care if I took it to the next level and had this surgery? I’ve gotten more support from my femme friends, and also a lot of support and admiration for being able to do this from my Butch buddies, while I’ve been recovering. I don’t hear any femmes complaining that they are going to miss my boobs….omg, that would just be wrong on so many levels! (the mere thought of that is wrong). I didn’t have one Butch buddy try to talk me out of top surgery, for any reason whatsoever. I had quite a number of them say that they wished they could have it done; they wished they had insurance or the money to do it, and that they would do the same thing in a minute if they could.
Then I see blogs that are shaming Butches for seeking out top surgery. Saying that once we do the surgery we are no longer Butch, but are now Trans. I am not Trans. I do not wish to be a man nor am I a man in any way. I am fine with my other parts, although I don’t wish to have them messed with either. I consider myself a Butch woman. Although, I also consider Butch to BE my identity, so I identify less with the woman parts and more with the androgenous side of me. I am fast developing an aversion to pronouns. I don’t care about being called sir, or about being mistaken for a guy…but I am fine with female pronouns for the most part too. Our society forgot to install a pronoun for us that fall between the binary. And I am not enthused about the hy / hys pronoun sets as they seem to refer to those who are Trans identified, maybe I am wrong. They just don’t feel right to me.
It makes me sad that some now wish to strip me of my Butch identity all over a lousy set of boobs. Doesn’t make sense to me. There is so much more to Butch than body parts. Next thing will be feminine looking Butches…ewwww….they’ll want us to wear tutus and lingerie. Nope. Not this Butch. I’m going to continue to do Butch MY way…I think I’ll call it Butch 2.0