Binder

My first, real binder was a secret. A deeply shameful thing I prepared for months in advance. I remember the sharp chill of the tape measure when I wrapped it around my chest, and the frantic scrambling for the pencil as I jotted all the tiny, scratchy numbers down. I remember the hushed counting under my breath, and the faint tok-tok as my father ascended the stairs. Later, I had a friend order it for me, slipped the money to her in an envelope in class, then ripped open the package in the park near uni when she passed it back.

My first binder was a mystery. It was two layered-on bras a pair of tights I cut up, and a piece of fabric I had sewn together. The videos I watched were deleted before the hour was up. There was nothing there to hide, there was nothing there to see. The binder was a fanciful delusion of a young, troubled mind, you see. There was nothing there...

Then came summer camp. I was freshly sixteen, and to the entire group we looked like a pair of girls, two giggling besties. I don’t want to say we were in love, but I cherished their scent that permeated the fabric for years to come. They were older than me, it felt like, more mature, the Trans elder in this situation. Their makeshift binder was a corset they wore wrong on purpose, and they seemed like the smartest queer alive to my young mind.

My first proper method of binding was a second-hand corset I never washed, to retain a piece of them. Their sweat and body odour stuck to the fraying threads like honey and żelki to the roof of your mouth. The corset was mine, but I was theirs for years, and I was theirs for no more than a month.

I still wish we had gotten the room to ourselves, when the camp counselors split us apart because it was just obscene for two girls to be that intimate with one another. And the handholding was so much less intimate than me wearing their scent on my own body all summer.

The next year I was diagnosed autistic, a different kind of crazy to the fawning, fantasizing sickness of the prior summer. My mother began to understand in inches and increments, but she never really fell for it. Never really resolved to understand. Not when the first diagnosis had proven false, when the doctors in our quaint, country town said I was the healthiest baby girl. How dare these English monsters tell her that her daughter is so wrong?

If she had known, we never would have made the flight home, away from where I was born, to a country so accepting that I don’t need permission as an adult to change a name I never felt the comfort of. We would have remained where I began, living as a girl should, as an autistic girl should, and would that have been a crime? To deny me what we never would have known I was missing, if we had remained?

My mother never quite understood, never wanted to understand from the bottom of her ailing heart. Never wants to understand why I never wish to go back.

The binder, my memory of the scent of them, was the reason she relented, for the very first time.

My weighted blanket was a symptom of my routine mind and the changing times. She saw the binder, the corset, the fateless symbol of a failed summer love. And I told her I was autistic, that I craved the pressure, that I craved the feeling of something wrapping tightly around me like a warm hug. And I would be spitting out those words five years down the line. But, for now, I had a weighted blanket, because it was touch I craved, it was pressure, and it was love.

And the lie worked for a year.

When I came out as bisexual, fresh off the press of my first relationship, barely a ‘teen’ in my title, I was asked, directly: "but you don’t think you’re a boy too, right?" It was spoken in a different tongue, so excuse my fumbling translations of conversations I am unable to repeat verbatim to anyone.

I lied, in a language my ancestors fought to preserve, once upon a time: no. Of course not. I’m not a boy, mama.

I am not a boy, mama. I hate the feeling of skirts and tights, for claustrophobia is not an ailment but a symptom for me. I have sensory issues and autism, you know, so allow me the trousers and shorts, save me from the meltdown.

I am not a boy, mama. The research shows autistic girls do not like makeup. This you already know, when you powder my face and I feel ill, and I refuse to redden my lips with anything but blood.

I am not a boy, mama. I am not meek and sweet, I am cursed, I am sick, I am diseased with a thing you cannot cure me of. This, you know.

My first, real binder, that I lied and snuck around for, was my last. It held onto the scent of the factory that meticulously sewed its every stitch under the watchful gaze of metallic faces and LED eyes. It squeezed and it crushed, and there was no love behind it like a weighted hug.

Ten years after the lie that I could never be a boy.

Seven years after the summer love of camp that forced us apart. Six years after a pandemic-time diagnosis.

Four years after the hidden deals beneath university tables. Four years after the tearful truth, to which she told me "you scared me, I thought it was something worse."

I have not worn a binder in two years. I am not free, or safe, or loved, or protected. A new diagnosis arrived while I dealt with death and rebirth, with the inadequacy that only a university could impart upon its youngest and brightest. What once brought me comfort now brought with it pain, building up over the years like a single drop of water, constantly dripping away at the rock that it doesn’t know it harms along the way.

Having a disorder of the mind that constantly forces your body out of homeostasis is a chore. But it was the realization that I had a disorder of the body that made my bones crack and shiver at the simplest movement that really did me in. Because I cannot wear a binder with hypermobility, and a connective tissue issue that forces my ribs out of place without so much as a ‘bless you.’ And I find that there is a balance between happiness and pain that I cannot find the middle ground of. It is a tightrope I am not skilled enough to walk, and the fall beneath me isn’t into nothingness, but into a tumultuous water that has no care for the way it erodes my resolve.

I wore my first binder with the hope of feeling like myself. I wore my second with the hope of holding onto a love I knew I would never meet again. I wore my third with the hope of time passing quickly, and three years wouldn’t turn into eternity.

I have waited so long for a chance at being myself that my body has rebelled against me.

I believe we do harm to the kids by making them feel like binders are the only way. Weighted blankets are nice too, and hugs reign above all else.

I think we do harm to those most vulnerable of us, who we persuade into harming themselves for our own selfish wants. Because there is a whole world out there with people as numerous as the blades of grass upon your lawn, and as unique as the leaves that fall in Autumn. And putting all little boys into one box tells them they are not allowed to be leaves, they are to be the bladed soldiers of the lawn, so uniform and numerous, that you only notice their differences once they are gone. And what of the boys that wish to be dandelions instead?

I believe it is violence to only ever show images of a man who is just like the rest of them, flat chested and muscular. There is no healing in reusing the same model for every single iteration of the character, no matter the genre.

If boys aren’t told that they are allowed to be without binding, without chains to hold them down, how will they ever reach the stars?

I did not always know I was disabled. I did not know I was trans until puberty, the dread of every teen around. I did not know my mind and body were different until the damage was done, until the pain overwhelmed a spark I fought so hard to keep alight.

I am, at the end of the day, an autistic man with hEDS. Whether I am trans or not does not change that fact, neither does the country of my birth or the languages I speak.

I am proud, in some small sense, of the way my body and mind work, and I am proud of how far they have brought me. I mourn for the secrets I couldn’t spill without tears, and I mourn for the pain I couldn’t deal with sooner. Because there were moments when my binder saved me, when it protected me. And those moments are gone, smeared with the pain that I can’t shake away now.

I am happy with my chest, however long it took me to get here, however much my body forced my mind to accept it. If I received a million pounds tomorrow, I wouldn’t go straight to the operating table to bid the boys goodbye. I fought too hard to see them gone, now.

But there were moments where I wanted to see them as nothing more than pinhole scars, not from hatred but from the love for my mind that my body didn’t share.

And that scared, young boy searching for a hug from a blanket isn’t me now, and I’m fine with that. That scared, young boy who took comfort in the scent of another, and the promise of ‘one day’, has lived his due. He does not live on, in the same way a caterpillar does not continue to exist once it has melted and fused into the shape of a butterfly.

And I know he would be proud of me, of how far I have gone, despite the anger and the fear and the pain.

To be disabled is to make sacrifices, and to be yourself there need to be compromises. My sacrifice was the binder. My compromise was the binder.

Today, I find joy in the ankle-high boots I must wear for ankle support, and the blue, metal cane I swing around like a maniac. I take joy in the backpack I have covered in pins of my Special Interests, and in the way the short hairs on the back of my head feel under my fingers.

Tomorrow, who knows what will bring me joy, and what will bring me pain. But I know, for a fact, that never again will it be a binder.

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BINDER

WRITTEN BY BOOKER G. A. FENIKS - EDITED BY REMI STAMATELLOS

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