Well, that’s a thing that happened.

This post talks about weight, and body image. A lot. It might be triggering for some folks (and some trans folks).

So – I’ve lost weight. Not a ton of weight. But some. I’m kinda weight wise both where I’ve settled (no more seems to be shifting and I’m happy with what I’m eating and how I’m exercising), and better (as in less mass) than I wanted to be / expected. Yes, all of that weight loss was intentional.

I’ve been eating healthier (less cheese, more fruit, mainly), continued my epic run of exercising every day (core muscles, jog in the morning; sit-ups in the evening – I actually feel the best I’ve felt physically probably since my 20s). I’ve also – obviously – just come back from a holiday with a lot of walking, and due to a last minute discovery that our local Kia dealer no longer has courtesy transport I accidentally walked four and a half miles home.

You may wonder how you “accidentally” walk 4.5 miles. Well, this was a case of me reliving my student-youth of “oh hey, this bus doesn’t come for 20 minutes, I can just walk to the next stop…” Rinse and repeat that endless times and you eventually end up hot, bothered and back at your house having singularly failed to catch a single bus. Despite the fact they’re free, have aircon, and it’s the middle of a heatwave.

Well done there Kate.

Anyhow, so, I’ve lost this weight and I was vaguely aware that not only were my bras getting ‘a bit sad’ (as in, my wife was gently pointing out to me that maybe I should get some new ones. I mean, several of them were getting on for ten years old and had kind of gone weirdly bobbly…), and also that maybe, having lost some weight they perhaps didn’t fit as well as they once did (or perhaps they’d just stretched?).

So I took it upon myself to measure myself. Grabbed the tape measure and wrapped it around my chest following the assorted internet directions.

And I thought “Nahhh, ‘m doing it wrong.”

See, I’d always been, either in reality or just in my head, a 38B. Broad chest, okay breasts. Being in the post-puberty HRT trans group I kinda never expected a ton of breast development and was fine with what I had, they seemed a not unreasonable size, but. Meh?

What I got this time was 34DD.

So then I got my wife to measure me, and she came up with the same answer and we both went “Naaaaah”.

Now it turns out that because of social conditioning, I think of DD as being “big”.

It’s not.

It’s actually well within the normal range for women. But men wrote a lot of the formative media that was around when I was growing up, and DD is media-coded-large breasts. I mean. Having now discovered that that’s what I’ve gone and grown, it’s… well, weird. Because it’s a bit of a dichotomy, right? I’ve got what I’ve heretofore thought of as ‘not great (size wise) breasts’, which I was okay with but kinda leveled out on “uh, that’s what I got”, which have now turned out to be very averagely sized breasts, on a frame which I’d previously thought was kinda on the larger size – with smaller breasts, and that’s actually smaller-framed-with-larger-breasts than I thought it was.

Which has had a weird amount of impact on the way I view myself. Despite the fact I’m still wearing the same size shirts, I’m still just and exactly the same shape as I was two days ago, I feel much better about my shape.

The things about me that bugged me a couple of days ago I can now slap with the justifiable science stick of “no, no, see, you’ve been measured and its fine”. Fuck knows if it’ll last, but the bit of me that likes to gnaw away at my self confidence like a little beetle on a rotting log? It’s been forced to have a massive dose of shut-the-fuck-up, which is kinda a nice relief.

So yeah. All in all, very affirming, annoyingly external validationy, and huh, odd.

I wonder how long it’ll last.