Justice

The Answers to Your Questions About Trans Top Surgery

November 28th 2015

Gay YouTube personality Davey Wavey is known by his 1.3 million subscribers for his often shirtless fitness and travel updates, but recently he focused on a different topic: top surgery for transgender men.

“[O]bviously there’s a lot of shirtlessness on my channel,” Wavey begins. “But shirtlessness interestingly enough is one of those things that cisgender, or non-trans guys take for granted."

"And this is a topic that a lot of us, myself included, know very little about,” he contineud.

So what did Wavey do? He invited three trans men—Ryan, Doug, and Christina—to do a top surgery show-and-tell for cisgender audience members.

Their conversation is wide ranging, covering questions from how they would describe top surgery to what each guy’s relationship is to his chest.

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“They just never felt right on me,” says Doug of his chest before surgery.

His sentiments are echoed by Ryan, who tells Wavey that after top surgery he feels complete. “When I look in the mirror now, I know that this is who I am and this is normal,” Ryan tells us.

The best part of the video, however, is when the YouTube star encourages each of them to “free the nipple” and go shirtless for his viewers—including Christina, who bravely busts stereotypes around what trans men should look like by going topless even though he has not yet had surgery.

“It always felt like it was somebody else’s chest on me,” Christina says of what he calls his “chesticles.” “Like there’s this chest underneath the chest that I do have that people are never able to touch.”

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Although all three men that speak in the video either have had or want to have top surgery, Wavey reminds us that “[h]aving top surgery is not what makes a trans guy a man.” There are many trans men that are either unable to afford the procedure or are happy with their bodies without the change. (It took me more than eight years to make my top surgery financially possible, and I certainly wasn’t less male before I had surgery. And I’m not more male now that I’ve lost some breast tissue, although I am certainly happier.)

To hear more answers to your top surgery questions, watch the video below. Just remember, as Wavey so fabulously articulates, it is “totally not appropriate and really not cool” to ask random trans people unprompted questions about their bodies.

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