Yanking at the placket of yet another men’s dress shirt, I tug until I’m able to close the last three buttons around the apex of my chest. Even in a TomboyX compression bra, which works better for someone my size than any binder on the market, the buttons gap and strain. To find a shirt my breasts will fit in, I have to size up and up until the collar of the shirt looks like a gaping, cavernous ring around my neck. The arms sag and cover my hands, and the length guarantees I’ll end up with wads of material bunched up under my waistband when I tuck in the shirt.

You don’t have to be trans or non-binary to have an awkward or pained relationship with your breasts but trying to force mine into shirts meant for people without them in order to present in the way I prefer to be seen brings a new dimension to the struggle for acceptance.

One of the first vivid memories I have of my breasts was someone telling me, “You should wear low-cut shirts because showing cleavage will distract people from your fat stomach.” Indeed, I learned that being fat meant leaning toward extra-feminine because slouchy jeans, baggy T-shirts, and men’s jackets just made me look sloppier and fatter.

As my breasts, and my body, got bigger through yo-yo dieting, periods of starvation, binging and purging, I came to view them sometimes as sacrificial pawns, put out there in front to keep the world from noticing, or commenting on, my fat body. Or maybe they were tools, designed to ease my passage through life as a queer, fat woman with depression and social anxiety. My breasts, at least, were an entrance to a club of sorts. “Hello, fellow women. I too have breasts and hate shopping for bras.”

And still my breasts got larger and fatter and more uncomfortable. Bras were more expensive, and the straps dug into my shoulders. By my twenties, I had chronic neck pain, back pain, and shoulder stiffness. Perhaps my relationship with my breasts was built on a foundation of physical pain.

And sometimes emotional pain. How much of what I feel about my breasts came from other people, from a mosaic of comments, some repeated so often, I can barely remember who said them?

Put your sweater back on; your bubbies are showing. Hello, Dolly Parton. Great cleavage goes a long way to making a fat woman sexy. Your big boobs make your stomach look smaller. You need a better bra—you’re sagging.

Perhaps the hardest comment came in the form of a dear friend who had come out on the other side of breast cancer with a double mastectomy. “I had no choice, and you want to remove yours on purpose?”

Because sometime between forty-five and fifty when my periods started coming with less frequency, when my hormones shifted from the biological urge to procreate to the biological compulsion to stop soliciting approval from others, I began to look at myself and my womanhood in a different way. And the feelings I had all my life of wearing a costume, of trying to appease other people’s ideas of what I should be or how I present myself to the world began to morph into this crazy idea that I can and should be whomever I choose.

And when I realized that non-binary, masculine-presenting and, dare I say it, dapper, described me, my relationship with my breasts became more than an awkward lifelong battle with misogyny and internalized fatphobia, but also a very real barrier to the world seeing me as I want to be seen.

And after a few years of study and research, soul-searching, and deep conversations, I realized I wanted to be rid of them. But it turns out people can’t have elective surgeries unless they’re under a certain BMI. And breast removal for gender dysphoria is considered elective surgery.

So here I am in this men’s dress shirt. Too fat to fit into the shirt, too fat to have top surgery. At fifty-one, I’m faced with a new problem. Coming to terms with my breasts—not as a prepubescent girl who wanted to hide them, or a thirty-something woman who used them to be seen, or a middle-aged person who basically ignored them—but as a fifty-something non-binary person who is yet again facing the dilemma of how to live with them.

This time, though, I have something all those other iterations of myself didn’t have—a clear and deep understanding of who I am, regardless of how the rest of the world sees me. So maybe my breasts and I can come to an understanding and maybe that new yoga routine will help ameliorate the physical pain of carrying them around and maybe, if all else fails, this fifty-something person will take these men’s dress shirts to a tailor and turn them into my own.

-Finnian Burnett

Finnian Burnett is a writer, a teacher, and an eternal grad student. They’ve been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, National Flash Fiction Day award, and the Ekphrastic Review Blue Contest. They have stories in or forthcoming in Visual Verse, Reflex Press, Friday Flash, and more. Finn lives in British Columbia with their wife and Lord Gordo, the cat. They can be found at www.finnburnett.com and on Twitter @FinnianBurnett