The first time I read an article about binding, my mouth went dry and cottony. I could feel my heartbeat in my ears every time I thought about it, and I didn’t know why.
It took me a long time to get comfortable with the word nonbinary. I played with genderqueer for a while, once I summoned courage, and it still works for me. But nonbinary felt different, definitive. Like you knew something about yourself. I didn’t think I knew anything about myself.
“When did you start thinking about gender?” a friend asked.
Six months ago. Wait, no. Twenty years ago. Wait. Shit.
I didn’t think I experienced dysphoria. I just hated growing up. I liked girly things as a kid, but I felt profoundly uncomfortable with the accoutrements of puberty–bras, tampons, anything that an enlightened seventies mom might point to as evidence of me becoming a woman. It was mortifying. I didn’t want to become a woman. I hated that word. I didn’t really even like girl. I mean, I wasn’t a boy, either (although tiny!Fin once declared, “When I used to be a boy, I could fly”).
But dysphoria? I had friends who talked about actively hating their chests, about wishing they had one set of body parts or could get rid of a different set. I couldn’t relate. I didn’t hate anything about my body, really. It just felt increasingly like something that belonged to someone else, a different beast from the neck down. Chimeric.
A year and a half ago, I went to a wedding in Cleveland. I packed a femme set of clothing and a butch set of clothing, just in case. I wasn’t sure what I would feel like. Who I would feel like.
I opted for the butch set. I’d worn the outfit many times: white button-down shirt, charcoal vest, black necktie with a silkscreen pocketwatch design, khaki pants, black blazer. The queer-obligatory Vans. It should have been ordinary. But it wasn’t.
I had known I wanted a visibly queer haircut, but while I dithered about what to get, my hair had grown halfway down my back. I hadn’t had hair that long since I was a junior in high school. My obliging stylist shaved a patch into one side for me while I debated. Finally, finally, I had made the chop. It was asymmetrical, longish on one side, lines shaved into the other side, queer no matter how you looked at it.
My fingers worked shirt buttons in the mirror, and then I slicked my hair down before reaching for the tie. A sideways glance caught me, breath and all. I looked like something out of Gatsby. I looked … masculine.
And I began to cry.
Because I didn’t know I could look like that.
I didn’t relate to dysphoria. But now, suddenly, I understood gender euphoria.
I’m watching football on the couch as I write. It’s a cozy day. I had spent most of it in pajamas, snowed in, no plans except one.
A bit ago, I reached into a shopping bag and pulled out a binder. A close friend lent me a full and a half tank, experiments to help me decide whether I want to bind when I get fitted for a suit in the next few weeks. I tried on a different friend’s binder several months ago and immediately wanted to rip it off my body–it was too close, I felt claustrophobic, I couldn’t do this.
I was ready to try again.
I pulled the half tank over my head and tugged it down. A couple of adjustments, and I appraised the resulting reflection. Better than I thought. The binder was almost certainly too big, but it didn’t feel like a trap anymore. More like a thundershirt. Comforting. A hug.
Time to try a shirt. I grabbed the tee I had on earlier and shimmied into it.
Crying again. Euphoria.
I removed the binder and put the shirt back on. The difference was apparent. I’m not what anyone would call well endowed, but the binder had done for me what no sports bra could quite manage. I thought about all the times over the past year I’ve smashed my chest in with the heels of my palms, trying to envision what I might look like.
Now I’m wearing the full tank under a button-down, watching football, writing. I want to see what it feels like to wear a binder for more than a few minutes at a time. I want to see if I can do this.
Called 