Nick Nack is transgender man who underwent top surgery. He spoke a little about the process and about the happiness and euphoria he now feels.
Alphabet Soup shares LGBTQ+ Missourians’ stories through portraiture and personal narratives.
Nick Nack: From the get-go, I mean, from the start, I knew that I wanted top surgery — having boobs has always been a problem, so I knew that that was gonna happen eventually.
Because I had a small chest, I had made the decision that I was gonna wait a few years. I waited two and a half years from the moment that I came out as trans to the time that I had top surgery. So, I did, I did wait.
I started hormones like a month after I came out, but top surgery came later. It was a lot of money. I had to save up.
I had a good referral to a good top surgeon, and we clicked, and the surgery went well, and so, there weren't really any hiccups in that part of it. It was more so just I had to save up; I had to wait.
After the surgery, I knew that it was going to be hard to sit still because I'm not somebody who sits still, and so, I did go into depression after the surgery for about a week and a half, and then, once I started to be able to move a little bit more again, I came out of it because I was able to do things for myself.
I went back to work after two weeks, which I work in mental health — so, all I do is sit and talk. So, it was, like, really not, it was not hard for me at all to just sit there and keep my arms down.
Once I hit that point where I could move around basically like I could before — I couldn't lift my arms way up — it took a few months for me to be able to have that range of motion, but once I could get to where I was functionally mobile, I was really, really, really happy.
And then, I was, you know, spending a lot of time with my shirt off in the backyard at night because I didn't want anybody to see me.
So, I would go outside at night and be shirtless — and you're not supposed to have the scars see sun for the first, I think it's year, or maybe more than a year, because it'll darken them. So, I have been trying to keep my scars away from the sun.
I think the biggest reason for the gender euphoria with the top surgery is knowing I will never have to worry about this again. I will never have to deal with this again, and that when I look in the mirror, my chest is flat. When I touch my chest, it's flat. There's nothing there that's causing distress.
And the amount of time and effort and consideration that binding takes is pretty great. It can be intense.
Sometimes I would schedule social interactions so I could get breaks to where I could take my binder off because I was having rib pain. I'd have to kind of schedule my day so that I wasn't keeping my binder on for super long, and also, I was in pain, like, it was normal for me to be in some level of pain just from having it on.
And at the end of the day, when I took the binder off — I still had boobs, and that was really distressing to look at. I wouldn't look I just wouldn't look in the mirror, but I don't have to worry about any of that now.
![David Hall sits on his couch on Monday, April 7, 2025, at his home in Columbia. “Even in Missouri there's certain areas that you still don't see that many queens of color. And especially in the bigger cities, how many of them do you see on cast in bigger bars that have, like, either a rotating cast or a main cast throughout weekends? I will give kudos to Kansas City because they've worked really hard on having that diversity within all of their cast, but still. Like, Columbia, one joke was like, ‘Kaycee can't work all the time.’ … ‘Kaycee can't perform in every show, so you can't really ding us on diversity.’ But I'm like, I still want to bring that representation,” Hall said. “Since [Nclusion Plus], one of the places I perform with, we go to smaller areas and perform. And I'm like, just to have one person look at me and say, ‘Oh yeah, I look like them. I can do that,’ makes me really happy. And it's like, ‘OK, what I'm doing, I'm on the right track for that.’”](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/e0b602f/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1750x1158+0+0/resize/260x172!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F7d%2F9e%2Fe25c27e04e9a9b2be4ca9cb307d6%2F20250407-bas-queer-joy-david-hall-0291.jpg)