Praying for Pieces: A Practice in Building the Trans Body K. J. Cerankowski As you practice building a home in yourself, you become more and more beautiful. Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love My prayers take the shape of love letters. Not directed toward any one god, they reach toward flesh. My letters call to the body of the other, my hands and heart reaching out in words to touch and hold, to bring flesh to flesh. A reminder that we live. In these bodies, in this flesh. My flesh is its own prayer, molded and reshaped into this body I inhabit as a home. I am building this home in pieces of flesh removed here or there, added here or there—a body, a home of myself. The body is a prayer, always becoming more and more. Beautiful. What do we lose when we remove pieces of the body? In The Wounded Body, Dennis Patrick Slattery recounts an evening before he is to undergo hip replacement surgery. A nun comes to pray with him, over him. She asks him if he wants to speak to the bones in his hip that will be removed in the surgery. With some coaxing, he begins to speak to his bones and soon finds himself weeping at the loss of them. He notes the longstanding traditions across religions to pray over bones. He ponders this practice, speculating on the soul's connection to the body: “Perhaps something of our own soul is permanently in our body, in each of its parts. To lose something of ourselves is to lose something of psyche, even of a memory that is embedded deep in every organ.” As I read, I press my hand to my chest. Beneath my shirt are two arcing scars where my breasts used to be. Several years ago, I received a diagnosis of “Gender Identity Disorder” (now reclassified as “Gender Dysphoria”), so I could access the surgery that would involve the removal of my breast tissue and the reconstruction of my nipples to more closely reflect a typical “male” chest. Having never had a major surgery before, I was filled with fear and anxiety the night before the surgery. There was no one to pray with me or over my body, but I sent some little prayers into the heavens, small wishes that I would wake after the procedure free of complications, free of breasts, free of regrets. I did not for a moment mourn the loss of my breast tissue; never did I grieve it. After years of fantasizing about the cutting of my own flesh and the pulling away of tissue, I was eager to finally have them gone. I never considered that I was giving up or losing a piece of my soul or psyche in the severing of flesh. I wonder now what other parts of myself were carried away that morning on the operating table. What bits of my being were stored in the tissue that was subsequently packed into a biohazard container and sent off to a pathology laboratory before it was disposed of as hazardous waste? Where has that part of me gone to? What part of me has gone? Still, I refuse to linger on the loss. To the converse, I had always thought where I lost flesh, I gained a wound, a scar. So many elements of gender transition are imagined in the valence of loss. In August 2006, The New York Times published a feature story on transgender men, following the ways in which transition abrades the ideals and sensibilities of lesbianism, such that for these men, their relationships are the cost of their transition. In giving up their breasts, they also lost their relationships with their lesbian partners. With so much lost, it is unclear what, if anything, is gained. Gayle Salamon is critical of what she perceives to be a preoccupation with loss in the article. Analyzing the caption to a photo of Shane Caya, standing shirtless, smiling slightly as he looks somewhere outside the frame of the camera, Salamon writes against the fixation on Shane's scars. The caption reads, “Shane Caya displays his mastectomy scars.” In the context...
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