Alex's Top Surgery

WE DID IT!!!!! Words cannot describe how incredibly grateful I feel by the love and support I am blessed with. In less than 24 hours we have reached the goal!!!!! Wow. What heart and compassion you all have to offer! I cannot thank you enough for your support. In the meantime, I'm going to keep the fundraiser open if you still wish to donate. As I am taking off a month of work for recovery, and we will be traveling a long ways, anything you can still donate will help immensely! Any funds leftover from my surgery expenses, I will donate to Dr. Mosser's office in San Francisco to fund another person's gender confirmation surgery. 


Hello Everyone! 


My name is Alex Hardesty, some of you know me as Hardy :), and I am a 25 year old nonbinary transmasculine identifying human. I was born and raised in Boise, ID and went to Whitman College in Walla Walla where I studied Music and minored in Geology and French. For those of you who don’t know, I am now living in Denver, CO pursuing my Masters of Architecture at CU Denver. 


I moved to Denver for many reasons. I had the incredible opportunity to play on Molly Brown for a season, start graduate school, and be just an hour away from my two younger sisters who I love and adore. Colorado has given me adventure, challenge, love, and beautiful sunsets. It’s also given me something else I would have never expected; the space, community, and resources to discover a part of myself that I have kept hidden since childhood. When I first got here, I started therapy with an incredible person who has helped me uncover and embrace this piece of myself . On my first day, I remember her asking me why I was there. I responded hesitantly, and shamefully with “I am very confused about my gender.” That was nearly two years ago, and since then, I have done long, hard, and emotional work to accept and love myself as a nonbinary transmasculine human. I am proud of myself for this, and forever grateful for the people who have supported me in this journey. 


For some of you who I haven’t seen in a while, this story may come as a surprise to you, along with my deeper voice, more square jawline, and the small hairs coming in on my chin from my testosterone therapy. I’m shy when it comes to taking up any space to talk about my identity or experience, and I am active on social media. As a result of this nature, I have only come out as transgender to a handful of folks in my life the last two years. But for those of you who are hearing of this for the first time, since I started HRT, I have lived my happiest self and feel blessed that the world has the tools to offer me the body features I’ve always dreamed of having. And now, another opportunity to literally change my life for the better has come into being during these tumultuous and uncertain times, TOP SURGERY!!!!!!!. For any of you that are familiar with gender affirming care, you know that nearly everything takes a LONG TIME, sometimes years to get the care you desire. I started the process of finding a surgeon and planning this procedure over a year ago, and was just notified the other day that they had a cancellation on September 8th, and offered me the surgery date. 


I’m nervous for surgery and going under anesthesia, but I am counting down the days until I can burn all of my binders and swim shirtless in the cold mountain lakes with my new, strong, flat chest that I have desired since I started puberty at age 12. Every day since I can remember, I have been aware of my chest. It’s been there like a nagging headache: through schooldays, sports practices, orchestra concerts, presentations, and at night when I fall asleep. It wasn’t until recently in my life that the word dysphoria was given to me to describe my experience. And when I found out about the existence of top surgery, not a day has gone by without me thinking of it, and wishing I could get it. Some may think it’s not a necessary procedure, but for me it’s crucial. This opportunity will give me the freedom I’ve desired in my own body since puberty. (I’m going to include a letter  at the end of this I wrote a while back to my Ultimate team when I decided to start hormone therapy for those of you who want to get more understanding on the body dysphoria I have experienced my entire life and the toll that has taken on my mental health).


So, wonderful friends, family, and anyone else who has found themselves here, I am asking for your support to help pay for my surgery expenses. Some is covered by insurance, but $5000 must be paid out of pocket. This is not including the travel expenses that I will need to go to California, where the surgeon is located. Staying in a hotel for one week before surgery and one week after surgery while I recover will add a significant amount to the cost paid out of pocket. As a working graduate student, I don’t have the means to make this life changing surgery happen on my own, I need your help. My gender transition and the steps I have taken to become more myself has been a long, arduous process marked by year long milestones. Top surgery is one of those milestones; an incredible opportunity to create the life and body I want, and to continue to align my mental self with the physical world. If you don’t have the financial means to support me in this journey, you have done more than I could ask for by just reading this story with an open heart and mind. A little goes a long way.  I also would like to encourage donations to any organization that supports black lives, indigenous people, and immigrants, before donating to my top surgery expenses. 








This is a note to my ultimate team I wrote a while back when I decided to start HRT. It might be helpful to any of you who are curious about my process, body dysphoria, and how that impacts my mental and physical health. I thought it was a good explanation of my process the last couple years, and how I have arrived at the place I am at now. 



Dear Molly Brown,


This email is long overdue. Although I know apologies are not needed to compensate for personal situations, I do feel sorry for not having the confidence or mental state to send this email before now.


It saddens me to say that my ultimate career is going to take a break on the backburner for this season. This decision requires a fair amount of explanation, so bear with me through this long personal email.


As a lot of you may know, I struggled last year for mental health reasons. This was mostly because of an overarching theme that has been present in my entire life, and am now just gaining the confidence and awareness to acknowledge and love it. What is this strange phenomenon that affects me every day when I wake up, put on clothes, every time I work out, interact with anybody, introduce myself, eat food, and everytime I fall asleep at night? You guessed it, GENDER. Everyone has a relationship with gender. Although a social construct, a person’s gender is an important part of how they see themselves and how they interact with the world around them. At least for me it is. A lot of people who have lived their entire lives in the comfort  of identifying with a gender that our world declares as OK and acceptable (cis men and women), probably rarely think about how tolling it can be for someone who doesn’t fall on the binary to simply exist. I used to be pretty fearless, but recently I’ve felt the weight of more and more micro aggression and full intolerance the more and more I become my full and true self. This makes me scared.


I’m scared to take my clothes off and get in a hot tub with teammates because I might be wearing a binder and boxer briefs. I’m scared to go into the locker room at my gym to grab a sweat towel for my workout because someone might get angry and kick me out, which has happened to me on multiple occasions. I’m scared the old sweet man who gendered me a young male and talked to me about when he was my age will discover my chest and turn away abruptly, no longer seeing me as fully human. I’m scared to go through airport security because sometimes I’ve had too hard of a day to deal with them yelling PINK OR BLUE?? PINK OR BLUE?? At me. I’m just a person, I’m just Alex. I’m scared of worse things too, violent things that happen to people like me.



So, where does this leave me? I still identify as genderqueer, nonbinary, and use they them pronouns. But, I’m starting something that I’m really excited for. Something that will help me feel more myself. This beautiful thing is a hormone called testosterone. With a low dose, I will start to notice changes gradually, such as facial hair, body fat redistribution, and a lower deeper sexier hardy voice. As mentioned before, this step I am taking to feel more myself will inevitably result in more aggression from people close to me and the world around me. Right now I sit in a position where people are chill with the whole “queer thing,” “gay thing,” etc, because they can sit comfortably with the fact that I have a female body and that is what is “biologically right and true.” But making physical changes to a body takes on a different meaning for people who hold judgement.


Since I was little I’ve had dysphoria about my body and the way I was supposed to carry myself in the world because I was born with a vagina and XX chromosomes. I remember being confused when I wasn’t allowed to take my shirt off whenever I wanted to, confused as to why I had to do ballet, confused why I couldn’t chop all my hair off like the raging 8 year old feminist I was. Mostly, I was confused with puberty. It felt like the worst thing that could ever happen to me: transforming into a woman with breasts. It felt like the world locking me into an identity I didn’t feel was mine, and only at age 12. Since then I’ve developed a plethora of coping mechanisms to be a functioning human in society: plenty of therapy, sisterly support, teenage angst, and antidepressant medication, that has helped me live. In full vulnerability and honesty, other times I’ve reverted to coping mechanisms that are unhealthy and come from a place of self hatred: drinking alone, binge eating, starving myself, distancing myself from friends and family, and others. I used to think it was just the gay thing that was making me feel this way, dysphoric. But it’s more than that, these habits that hurt me are because I don’t love my body. More recently I’ve become a pro at self care, and I have good days and bad days. No matter how much self care I  do, how many miles I run, how many vegetables I eat, how many vinyasas I go to, at the end of the day my body doesn’t feel mine, it feels like I’m forcing everything. Even something as simple as standing up and having good posture is difficult. I want to hide myself, make myself small, disappear so that my body becomes amorphous. So the decision to make physical changes to my body, starting with T, comes from a place where I truly believe that I deserve to love myself, and I think this will help me get there.


Alright, now on to ULTIMATE.


Ultimate has been both revealing and constricting in the case of my body awareness. I’ve noticed myself since high school consistently wanting to move like the people I see on open teams. I’ve wanted their strong chest, the way their jersey fits around their waste, and the way they move and interact on the field. This does not mean that I don’t absolutely LOVE watching female bodied players, it’s just that I’ve envied the more masculine qualities of open players that have little to do with their athletic capability. At this point you should probably realize that I LOVE BOYZ.  On the other hand, I’m good at ultimate and playing as a “female” player has allowed me to make so many friends, and compete at a high level. But the reality is how I see myself on the field and how I imagine I look isn’t how the world sees me. (This might be confusing and calls for a much longer conversation, but I’m gonna leave it at that for now). So my options moving forward is to continue as a player on a women’s team, and deal with the constant dysphoria, or take a break, start testosterone, and then with patience see what my ultimate career will look like in the future. This is scary for me too. I don’t know what my body will be capable of, what level I can compete at, and what sort of  social  bullshit I will have to navigate. Everyone’s body is different, and hormone therapy looks and feels different on everyone (which is actually kind of beautiful I think). One thing I know is that after my first shot of testosterone I will be ineligible to play with Molly Brown. (I know, I know, the starting O line will have to do without me this year @liza). Like I’ve expressed, this really saddens me, and I’m scared to lose the friends I’ve made here, but I want to feel at peace with my body so I can enjoy simple things like standing tall with good posture.