A Negative: The Shirt Of Destiny

Details: Category: A Negative; Published on Sunday, 08 April 2012 18:53; Written by T. Henrik Anttonen; Hits: 716

I don't usually go with very personal stories in this column, simply because I want it to be about issues and the community rather than some egoistic expression of my personal human experience. But sometimes there's just something out there that I can't help but write more from my own perspective and my own life.

Because, you see, this is the story of how one single shirt changed the direction of my life in a fundamental way.

This requires some setup. My gender identity is something I've written about before and it's always been pretty non-existent. I've never understood the artificial roles and barriers that the society places on the different sexes. After all, if we look at our daily lives, there's very little that's different between our approach to life even if our particular dangly bits are different.

Even so, society has placed extremely rigid gender roles on people that are pounded to our heads almost from the date of our birth. Girls play nicely and cutely with the other girls and boys have their own toys they can smash against the walls with other boys. The traditional gender roles are forced on you in schools and deviating from them will cost you dearly.

I've always simply said no. I played with whoever I wanted to play with and to be damned with how we happen to pee. I've always had friends from all genders and even though I've had to suffer from it in the form of relentless bullying, I've never even considered having it otherwise. Therefore I've always felt that I don't belong to either of the two predominant genders and I haven't ever cared if I get artificially pigeonholed into some gender role because of how I look.

But I didn't know how far my genderlesness had gone before this particular shirt revealed it to me.

Springtime is always a difficult time for dressing yourself here in Finland, because the mornings tend to be rather cold even though it might get very warm during the day. Therefore I put on two thick shirts, one of which I would take off during the course of the day.

The only problem with this arrangement is the sudden drop in the number of usable pockets when you leave out the coat. One morning the only shirt I had clean had breast pockets and therefore, without thinking anything of it, I just stuffed all my stuff to them. It didn't really create any kind of an effect while I had just the one shirt on, but things took a dramatic turn when I pulled on the other one.

Suddenly, I had breasts! And they looked remarkably real at that.

At first, I was a little shaken by this and tried to hide them when I went outside. But I couldn't help but notice the primary feeling of how right it felt. It felt like these were something that I had always been supposed to have and was missing them and only now my exterior image looked the way I imagined myself.

Naturally this didn't come entirely out of the blue. I had been giving these things quite some thought, but had never gone beyond the surface. And I had never even taken the time to try and find out what these thoughts would mean until the incident revealed to me how strong my reaction to it was.

Suddenly I was obsessed with the notion and finally took the time to read about the subject. And I was almost as dumbstruck as I was when I first found out about the Asexual community. The effects of hormone treatments would be exactly what I always had wanted my body to be, while the things I didn't want to change wouldn't be affected.

And I made a decision that this is something I would pursue with a passion. The road ahead is long and hard, especially since I have no intention of changing my sex completely. But the decision had a dramatic effect on my mood. Suddenly I didn't feel as out of place in my body as I had. I had even been rather cruel to my body, abusing it with sugar and fat. I decided that that would come to an immediate end.

And to top it off, I had gotten the shirt from my mother's girlfriend. So that's how traditional our small family suddenly turned out to be.