Something Off My Chest 11.08.17

I've been on hormones for a year, and perhaps it's time to say something about the way my body's changing. How to do so without sounding crude? But I'd earlier thought a suitable title for this post might be Tits Up, so already this post is better than it could have been.

For a few weeks now, I've started to go out without my artificial, silicon chest (with adhesive underside). This makes me less worried than before, now I'll never need to face the scenario of a man confronting me in the street or in my place of study, holding a blancmange-type substance in his hands, with some surreal conversation unfolding (Excuse me miss, are these your breasts? Etc).

This is not to say I have developed like I'd hope to. My bra is strongly cupped and would create its own shape regardless. But still, having in these past weeks updated my passport and bank details, I can say my development isn't only bureaucratic. I would call my chest area at this stage Early Adolescent (rather than late Cretaceous, for example), and it's strange to think I'm simultaneously going through adolescence as I approach the menopause, if my age is anything to go by.

Well anyway, here I sit another day without some weight strapped upon my chest, and it's liberating. For nearly a year I increasingly wore a basque to hold the shape and pull that stomach in. Now I have a lighter exo-skeleton; occasionally in mornings I even forget my bra and throw my T-shirt on, then remember what I've forgotten, in a fossilized act from an earlier life. They say it can take years for your chest to develop properly and I believe this. I may even need an operation eventually for this area – something you have to wait years for, to see whether the hormones can do the work alone. As a six-foot transwoman not looking to be stared at, though, I'm happy to coast along for now, everything gradual but getting there eventually, like the story of my life.