Michael remembers the day he stopped taking off his shirt in public. He was 11. The family was on a fishing trip in Pennsylvania, and because it was so hot, the kids were hanging out by the creek, shirtless. “It looks like I’m going to have to get you a bra,” Michael’s father said to him, looking down at his son’s breasts. “You’re not a man. You’re a woman.”
Decades later, in his 50s, Michael, who asked that his real name not be used, turned to Google with questions about his chest. He figured he probably had gynecomastia—enlarged glandular breast tissue in people assigned male at birth—which, unlike regular chest fat, feels like a firm disk under the nipple. He floated the idea of surgical intervention to his wife, who was flabbergasted. It “was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard,” he says. When the couple eventually divorced, Michael decided to go under the knife.