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 that far ahead — and move my left nut out of my belly and into my sack.
My language, not my dad’s.
Not long after, I went to the Hopkinsville, Ky., hospital where my urologist, the reassuringly named Dr. Goode, performed the procedure. I don’t recall much about the stay aside from waking up in the night after the surgery with a sudden urge to puke and ripping out my IV trying to climb over the rail of the hospital bed to do it. What I do remember is finding out that my undescended testicle had actually been a benign, tumor-like mass that the doctor had to remove.
Turns out I actually was a little boy with a birth defect. I was literally different from all the other boys in a part of my body that everything in my environment and culture told me was central to being a man: my genitals. It was the first time I felt shame about my body.
From that moment on, the shame constantly poked and prodded me. I avoided ever getting fully undressed in front of other boys, meaning I always changed in and out of swimsuits in private. I obsessed with how my pants fit, convinced that the empty space on the left would give my defect away.
When puberty and middle school arrived with the looming experience of P.E. class with its locker room and showers, I kind of lost my shit. My dad came to me as I was crying in bed and between racking sobs I managed to get out my absolute terror. Mercifully, he comforted me and told me we would go to Dr. Goode and see what we could do.
And that’s how I ended up undergoing a gender-affirming surgery in the summer between seventh and eighth grade, having a silicon-based testicular implant placed into my scrotum. It wasn’t perfect as the implant was smaller and left me a little unbalanced. Dr. Goode assured me that they were giving me the largest available; I just happened to be packing a lot more in the natural one than most guys.
He also told me that the one I had was more than enough to get the job done with the ladies, which I already knew at that point was irrelevant but I kept it to myself.
So I headed into eighth grade and my P.E. class without feeling like I was a complete freak (just a partial freak, like every shy, closeted gay kid feels in the teenaged hormonal frenzy of a gym locker room). That one surgery made a world of difference to me and how I viewed myself as a boy, well on his way to becoming a man. I no longer felt less than male or partially castrated. The surgery was what I had desperately needed to feel whole.
To be clear, back in 1980 Dr. Goode and my parents weren’t referring to this procedure as “gender affirming.” I’m using that term now because that’s what it was and it’s important that people who’ve never gone through something similar understand that. And, yes, I’m making a point about young trans people and how important gender-affirming care is for them.
I’m sure some would read this and claim there is no similarity between cisgender kids, like I was, having surgery to correct a minor birth defect and transgender kids seeking medical care to align their bodies with their sense of self. But it is the same, in many ways. And it’s not a matter of cosmetics or aesthetics.
Our sense of self, for almost all of us, is deeply tied to our physical bodies, genitals, and secondary sex characteristics. There’s a reason men obsess about their penises and mercilessly mock those whose are judged less than or damaged, because we fear not being seen as a man. We don’t question the mental trauma that many women experience after mastectomies or hysterectomies (at least we don’t if we have a soul) because we know how deeply that connects to their self image and self worth.
My life would have been worse without medical intervention to make my body match my sense of self after an event beyond my control — a tumorous testicle — had damaged that sense. Not having the surgery would have left me to the whims of unnecessary trauma — and believe me, having even mildly deformed genitals as I did was hugely traumatic.
Trans kids and their parents should have the same rights and options for care and treatment as my parents and I did. No legislature pressed to outlaw hospitals from performing the surgery that helped me, no activists hacked my medical records to humiliate me in public, no court determined that my testicular implant didn’t actually have anything to do with gender and therefore could be outlawed, all because my gender identity matched the genitals I was incompletely born with.
We are being urged from all sides to ignore the plight of our transgender family, friends, and colleagues in the name of expediency and moderation. But it is neither expedient nor moderate — or moral — to shun fellow human beings and force them to suffer pain because some group of consultants has decided elections can only be won by indulging bigotry and hate.
My country did better than that for me. We should do better than that for them.
Thank you so much for sharing this very personal, inspiring, informative, and timely story. May your story inspire others to reflect on their positions with other challenging conversations on transgender healthcare and resources.