How and Why to Keep Your Boobs After Wanting Rid of Them for So Long

I was only given nine days to prepare for my top surgery. At my pre-op appointment, I went through all my questions with the nurse. Am I allowed to have anyone come in with me? How long do I have to wear the post-op binder? Do I have to take my piercings out? Oh, and what’s the procedure for keeping the tissue afterwards?

The nurse was horrified. I’d almost completely forgotten that this wasn’t a particularly normal thing to do. She told me this wasn’t possible, so the next day I called the surgeon’s secretary, who seemed slightly less distressed. I had to send her an email with all of the information about what I would be doing with the breast tissue and why I wanted to keep it. The email ended with “Plus if I grew them on my body surely I have some legal rights to them?”.

After seemingly everyone in the hospital being consulted, I was told I would be allowed to keep my breast tissue. On the day of the surgery I had to sign a hastily put together document that essentially said that I couldn’t blame my surgeon if I got cancer (as the usual procedure is to check the tissue once its been removed from the body).

I wanted to write a guide for anyone else planning on doing this, because you can’t really google ‘how do I preserve my own boobs in jars’. Most of the information online about preserving anything similar is either from amateur taxidermists or very jargon-y academics. So I wanted to compile the information in a more accessible and direct way for anyone who might be interested in the process.

However, it turns out the real secret to preserving your breast tissue is to send a lot of emails and eventually find someone who knows someone who can do it for you. It also turns out that the exact method necessary for the preservation of human breast tissue isn’t actually all that helpful to many people, and that most of the people who consume the work I do are more interested in why I chose to keep them, rather than how.

The issue there is that I’m not really sure why I kept them.

I’ve been the Assistant Curator of the Museum of Transology for nearly four years. One of the most infamous items in the collection is the Curator E-J Scott’s breast tissue in jars. A few years ago, I promised E-J my breast tissue after I had top surgery like he did. At the time it was a throw away comment. Even then, top surgery was something I knew I wanted, but, despite having wanted it for at least three years, it also felt a very long way away.

It wasn’t until after I had my breasts removed that I realised how much they bothered me. My chest had been in the back of my mind at every waking moment since before I came out in 2014. Now that they’re not there, I feel in this constant state of relief, like there’s more space in my brain, and the whole world is just a tiny bit less overwhelming. Not everything in my life is suddenly fixed and easy, but there is at least a literal and emotional weight off of my chest.

My boobs were also a huge part of my work for many years though. Above our kitchen cupboards live the many casts that my collaborator, Jo, took of my chest. My hard drive is full of photos and drawings and collages and ramblings about them. My chest informed my transness and my fat politics and my feminism and the way I dressed. Even if I didn’t want them on my body, those boobs were and are incredibly important to me.

Plus, as trans people, we’re expected to transition in a certain way. It’s presumed that we want to be cis, that transness is a dirty secret we should be ashamed of. Keeping my boobs feels like sticking two fingers up to the expectation that as soon as I got rid of them, I should want to pretend they never existed.

I want them specifically kept in a museum collection for a reason too. Firstly, I think disembodied bits of human tissue are kind of gross to look at, so I don’t really want to display them on my mantelpiece. Most importantly though, this procedure is a huge part of the 21st century trans experience (no matter whether or not someone has it). Who knows what top surgery will look like in 100 years, or if it will even exist at all. Collecting human tissue in jars was historically used to document “medical marvels” in a voyeuristic, and often discriminatory way. I’ve chosen to reappropriate this by using the preservation of my breast tissue as a celebration of my trans experience that will hopefully last even longer than I do.

Keeping my boobs in this way is not expecting any other trans people to do the same. It’s not an admission of regret or an insurance policy so that I can get them stuck back on if I change my mind later. It isn’t a declaration of love for my breasts. It’s a documentation of the performances that are gender and top surgery. It’s a nugget of information for future researchers. It’s a declaration of love for my ever-changing, trans body, and it’s also a bunch of other things that I haven’t quite realised yet.