Ball Game

How a gender-affirming surgery changed my cisgender life in middle school (and long after)

I was in the third grade when my dad brought me into the bathroom to show me how I was different.

I might have suspected something was up because of a visit to Dr. Settle the year before that involved a fairly intimate physical examination but I was six and wasn’t picking up on anything being out of the ordinary. So when Dad had me pull down my pants I no idea what was going on.

“See, here,” he said. “You’re supposed to have two of these.”

Now that was a surprise. Turns out I had only one testicle in my scrotum and I had no idea that situation wasn’t as genetics intended. To me, I had just gone from being a normal little boy to being a normal little boy with a birth defect.

Dad assuaged that by letting me know that I wasn’t missing one, I simply had an undescended testicle, a fairly common thing for young boys. Since it hadn’t come down on its own, my parents had scheduled me for an operation to repair the inguinal hernia — Dad didn’t use that language, I was ahead of my class but not tha…