Junk

Two weeks ago, I decided to stop packing. For the first time in about four years, I have decided to stop wearing my packer and just walk around relatively bulge-less.

I felt very torn about it as I considered discontinuing the use of a packer, which made me think back to why I started wearing one in the first place.

I was about 9 months through my 18 month MBA program. I was gearing up to make a career change into working for a professional services firm after having worked in retail and operations roles. Although I had successfully transitioned and had been passing full-time for approximately five years when I started my MBA program, interviewing for new jobs and starting a new chapter in my professional life prompted additional self-scrutiny about my appearance. Starting this new career in my early thirties was a gamble and it absolutely had to pay off.

Whether you are a transgender person or a cisgendered person, we all decide every day how we are going to present our gender to others. Short hair/long hair, skinny jeans/cargo shorts, high heels/flats, facial hair/no facial hair, make up/no make up, the choices we all make on a daily basis are too many to be captured in a succinct list. Not all transguys want to wear a packer, just as not all transguys want to have bottom surgery (aka GRS). Like the other choices listed above, it is up to an individual’s preferences and tastes.

Packing was never important to me when I began my journey of transitioning. I just didn’t care: it was not an important part of the maleness I was out to realize for myself. I am not a size queen and have never been the type of person who checks out a person’s crotch instead of their face. While I have had some people suggest to me this disqualifies me from (among other things) identifying as a gay man, I refuse to give such lines of thought any creedance.

So given all of this, how did I end up packing regularly? My ex-husband talked me into it. His two-pronged approach combined the self-doubt which I was confronting in my professional life with his own expectations for me. The professional self-doubt came in when he assured me that, although I didn’t regularly stare at the crotches of people who were presenting as male, everyone else on the planet Earth did. He assured me people everywhere, particularly in the conservative institutions I would likely be working at, were writing me off for my lack of bulge. For his own expectations, he told me, “Wearing a packer is part of you becoming the man I picture you being.” If I didn’t do it, I was disappointing him. Period. And then he topped off this one-two punch by hassling me about it constantly for a month or so until I caved in.

It has been two years since left my horrible ex and have been blessed to find a husband who loves me for who I am. So what kept me from kicking my packer to the curb the same way I kicked a relationship with a person who clearly didn’t value me for who I was? This was the question I asked myself over and over again, nearly every morning when I got up to dress myself for the last several months. If it wasn’t important to me, why the hell was I doing it?

I had to admit I was still paranoid about the picture painted to me by my ex and some other people I have encountered, of this world full of people who are pointedly assessing male-presenting crotches to determine how manly someone is, which by extension could also imply how good of a professional they are, or how gay/butch they are, or any number of things. Regardless of how prevalent this actually is, it is a vision of a world I do not care to live in. So why should I be a slave to the expectations of such a world?

So I decided I wouldn’t be. And I retired my packer the next day.

My decision is what is best for me and my affirmation that I am still a man, with or without a bulge. It should not be confused with the notion that I am dictating what others should/can value for themselves, whether that be visible bulges for themselves or their partners, what size a bulge should be, and/or how they choose to obtain those bulges.

Part of what we fight for in the battle to present our chosen gender in the way that is most meaningful to us is the ability to destroy the old, tired expectations of what is means to be a man or a woman. Giving up one set of gender constraints just to be saddled with another is just a bunch of junk.