Okay.

I apologise if anyone found my terminology confronting, however it’s a little deeper than just “men have them too” or “being able to call his breasts what they are/were” or them being “just bigger than [I] liked”.

While yes, cisgender men can have breasts, there’s an automatic connection between the use of the word “breast” and female people. If you say you are a man with breasts, unless you are proven in other ways to be a cisgender man, the vast majority of people will say “oh….so you’re /actually/ a female?” And people use this connection to femininity as an excuse to call me female because “that’s what you were, right?” I’m not a masculine-looking person, even with HRT.

I can understand where you’re all coming from. I can. My relationship with my upper-body region has been the topic of many, many, therapy sessions. If y’all have a good relationship with it, that’s great. I do not. And I’ve had to develop other ways to refer to them in order to get to a place where I can relate to them, in some fashion.

While I don’t feel like I should have to explain my reasoning for my own terms to refer to my own body, I’m going to so y’all can understand on a base level at least, why I chose the terms that I did.

In blatant terms, breasts are a growth of fatty tissue covering a network of ducts that join at the nipple. At the ends of the ducts are lobules wherein milk is produced and stored when it is needed after childbirth. They were, quite literally, lumps of fat on my body as I did not have the needed hormone response that would require the use of the lobules. I found that describing what I had in these basic terms a much more comfortable way to come to terms with what I had.

There is, inevitably, going to be some negativity when I think about what I had. It’s something that is tied up in a lot of negative experiences. That’s not going to change, except with time passage and distance from that period in my life. The fact that they are gone, ironically, doesn’t simply remove it all from my life.

I’m sorry if you found this description misogynistic. Whether or not is was misogynistic did not come up in my therapy sessions where we developed this terminology. If it would make you all feel better, I can simply just not mention them in future posts?