BEFORE we met, my partner had changed names from a female-sounding one to a male one, and by the time we were together, everyone we knew either called him by this new name or spoke of him with male pronouns. He identified himself as a transgender man, woman to man. It wasn’t until two years after we began dating that he decided to have his breasts removed.

For him, chest surgery was the next step in transitioning genders, a symbolic and physical gesture of leaving womanhood behind. He wanted to replace his 34-C’s with emptiness, a flat manly chest to the outside world and scars to him and me.

Our relationship wasn’t perfect. But because he had limited contact with his parents, I was to be his primary caregiver, which entailed escorting him on the day of his surgery and playing nurse (not in a sexy way) for two weeks after the operation.

This was in San Francisco, land of blurry gender identities, where it’s common to pass as “other” gendered  neither male nor female but elsewhere on the “queer” spectrum. For my partner, that expression meant a cropped butchy haircut and preppy men’s clothing, usually a polo shirt and Banana Republic jeans. If his gender had matched his appearance  had he been born with a male body and joined a fraternity  we never would have followed the same orbits.