After 6,935 days of putting on a binder, a trans writer explains her decision to remove her chest once and for all:

Lying in bed now, I look at my chest. The tissue has been broken down by nineteen years of binding. I have a birthmark just below my left collarbone. It vaguely resembles the shape of the United States. It’s visible in all the shirtless pictures of me as a kid, and I think it is high enough that it will remain on my body after surgery. I hope it does.

I never hated my chest. It’s a perfectly fine chest; a good one, and I’m fond of it, even. It’s been with me for some 21 years. Everywhere my body has traveled, it has come along. Everything I have done, it has done too. It has been a part of me, and in some ways, it always will be. It needs to go now, not because it is wrong, or something worth despising, but simply because it is standing in the way of a life I can no longer postpone.

Read the story