Avery Nguyen

Content warnings: gendered sexual harassment

Tops

Ninety-one degrees in mid-May is shirtless weather. It’s the kind of weather where if you’re stupid enough to run nine miles, you’re going to do it wearing as little clothing as possible. It’s short-shorts and sports bras and male-presenting nipples. It’s the season of comfort over courtesy, because it’s too damn hot to be worried about both your workout and the pearl-clutching people around you.

And I’m going to run nine miles, and for my own sake I’m not going to do it with a covered stomach, and I know that I’m making the right decision. But just to be sure —just to be sure!—I google “sports bra running okay” first. My eyes skim over a post from a woman who went on a run wearing only a sports bra to cover her nips. She says a guy riding one of those bikes with a kiddie trailer attached had screamed at her, “Are you fucking kidding me?” She says that she was self-conscious anyway because her belly isn’t exactly flat. She says that in the swelter of North Carolina summer she thought that people would understand.

I look down at my chest. I glance back at my phone. I lace up my shoes and walk out of the door.

5K in, this guy is walking his dog, a little brindle bulldog puppy. The trail splits here, one path running up a hill, the other winding around it. I’m heading up the hill, arms pumping, and dog guy is tottering around the base. As I’m coming up on the peak, I glance in his direction, and he’s just standing there, squinting up at me, leering up at my tits. His puppy shuffles anxiously while it waits for him to keep walking. I break eye contact as fast as humanly possible. I keep running. Downhill.

School’s just let out, too, and there’s a traffic jam all the way down Middlesex Road. I speed past two school buses, probably full of children. I imagine the bus driver glaring at me, and I think to myself, oh my god, am I a harlot? I mean, it’s ninety-one degrees, and there are bathing suits and Victoria’s Secret advertisements that are approximately infinitely more revealing than my ASICS-branded sports bra, but am I? Am I a harlot? Am I tainting the children? Am I going to scar them for life?

I crush fifteen kilometres the way someone at a party crushes a can of seltzer into an unrecognizable heap of glittering, jagged metal. Cooling down, I jog the last few strides to my front door. My neighbor, one of the ones who keeps calling my roommates things like beautiful and impressive and “such a strong girl,” is standing on the porch. He looks at me. He makes conversation. I fumble my key in the lock.

When the door closes behind me and I’m left alone in the kitchen, I’m thinking about top surgery again. I’m thinking about “It is this provider’s opinion that CLIENT is a good candidate for sex reassignment mastectomy and male chest reconstruction provided you find them medically fit.” I’m thinking about what it will take for the world to know, just as much as I know, that I am neither eye candy nor obscene. That I exist only for me.