I was as gender dysphoric child. Here’s my story, ask me anything. If I had been “treated” with Puberty Blockers, I’d be dead today. Blogs seem to do best with Daily Kos when they speak from personal experience, so I’ll give a reveal I’ve very rarely shared with anyone. I have an unnervingly precise, geometric, emotional and visual episodic memory, so let me share exactly what I remember, with significant editing for readability, it’s long.
I was a precocious child. Early speech, early reading, immense curiosity. And by age 5 in 1967, living in the American Southwest, I had declared to my best friend Virgina that I would get married to a man when I grew up, and described in vivid detail his beard, his muscles, his… maleness. I recall the specific language that, as opposed to a Tom Boy (Virginia), I said quite literally that I was a Jane Girl. Of course once I was socialized in grammar school starting at age 6, I quickly grasped that that such a marriage and destiny was not going to happen because I was a boy, something was out of kilter, and I began being punished for being effeminate. Also, in grammar school, I wanted to play only with girls, I had a small doll collection, and I was also starting to be singled out by children and adults because of my intellectual development. I had zero interest (or perhaps revulsion) in boy pursuits, except for perhaps science and mathematics. I learned to try to mask being effeminate at the same time I had to mask being smart. What a burden for a child. A twofer!
Back at home, Dad was a raging alcoholic, and Mom was well down the road to very full-blown manic-depressive or in today’s parlance, bipolar status. I had older siblings, one Step-Brother and two Step-Sisters who had long earlier left home. Possibly due to this confluence of circumstances (in other words benign neglect), there was a lack of awareness of my dolls, my female role-play, though several times my mother found me rapt, sitting at her make-up mirror experimenting with full-face make-up. Likewise, I knew exactly what clothes she had in her closet, and enjoyed dressing up as a child’s version of a woman, though the shoes always threw me. She was (and I say this with decades of retrospect) a tall, stunningly raven-haired beauty with a 50’s 36-24-36 figure she was proud of, and if it didn’t have a high spike heel it wasn’t a shoe.
By the time I was heading towards 4th grade, my parents separated, and we moved across the country into the region of my Mother’s family, in the deep south. I now had other relatives around me, and was perhaps less lonely, but my body became increasingly alarming to me. I was having erections, which I took as a kind of sign that I wasn’t in the proper body to marry a man. Worse, going to the boy’s bathroom became excruciating. Boys were happy to be showing each other their penises, and naturally mine became erect, which branded me simultaneously as fag, and of interest because I was just quite large. Mortifying, and driving fairly radical unhappiness. I tried all manner of self-modification to hide my genitals from that point forward: think “the tuck” of a drag queen, only with a 10-year-old child and spools of sticky cloth bandage. I decided the only workable response then was to simply stop using the bathroom entirely, so from around age 11 onwards, I would never use a public bathroom in school under any circumstances. When trans people speak of that behavior, I know exactly the what, the why, and how. My Mother and Father had no idea, nor did anyone in schools I attended. Uncomfortable, possibly leading to bladder problems I have decades later but there it is.
My intellectual curiosity now led me to the local library (I was a very frequent visitor) and the magical DSM, the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, from the American Psychiatric association. Being an annoying but practical child, It was clear to me that I had a gender disorder (we’re in 1972 or so edition), and that upon pursuing accessory reading, I decided that when I was an adult, I would simply have transsexual reassignment surgery, and everything would be fine. This was an usual thing I came to understand later. At around 9 or 10 I was planning my life from age 20 onward, weighing scenarios I would face with my limited knowledge. I could marry men and engage in sex, my feelings wouldn’t be “unnatural”. My effeminacies would be congruent to my physical body. That was a kind of comfort. I was very effeminate, and arrogantly smart, makes for a great combo at a child. Think of a lisping Sheldon in “Young Sheldon”, the TV show. And disturbing, for a 9 or 10-year old, noting down information about bilateral orchidectomy, and penile inversion vaginoplasty. Had my “Visible Man” model, so I could imagine how resection would work vis-a-vis my bladder, rectum, caecum and appendix.
This knowledge from the DSM led me to endure more calmly the absolutely unceasing bullying by adults, boys and now girls about “being a girl”, because it would cease at some point and my outside would match what I was supposed to be. When I say unceasing, I mean of course from 8am until 4pm, 5 days a week, the entire school year. There were friendly teachers of course, teachers always loved the child who was bright, engaged, perceptive, easy to teach or way ahead of the game, teachers like girls — thanks Miss Snow, Mrs Paar — perhaps I shouldn’t have graded all the other student’s science projects because I had memorized Peterson’s Field Guide to Insects and Trees, didn’t help with friends. I disappeared slowly into music, self-pedagogy in science and mathematics, and a few close friends who were having similar problems. In short, the usual school experience for a child of many differences.
Gym class was a singular torture. This was the period where, naturally I was always picked last for all team events, ridiculed for being awkward, ridiculed for being quite “husky” or “chubby”, and the ridicule coming from not only children, but adults – Thanks “Coach” Clarke, I appreciated the nudge with the foot and comment “You’re pretty limber for a fat boy, like a girl!”. Ridiculed for acting like, or being like a girl, I mean — I was kind of a girl, what did people have against girls? And at the conclusion of gym, we always had to change clothes into school clothes after a shower in a congregate setting – one very large shower room under the supervision of adults. Naturally I “stuck out” in many ways, and I wanted to just crawl out of my body and disappear. To the girls side. This was probably two or three days a week, for roughly six years? Fortunately, I could get out of ‘gym’ by joining the music program later, which was a slam dunk.
At least the adults in the music program certainly were able to manage effeminate boys without ridicule, or there wouldn’t be a music program. Thanks Mr. Wilcox. Bullies, well they were there too, but manageable.
Home life was quite amazing. It was always interesting to figure out what Dad was going to be like on a given day – passed out on the floor or in a drunk stupor, belligerent, depressed, or loving and fun, Mom perhaps locked in her room, or away somewhere without any indication. More than once I had to call an Aunt (think Meemaw in “Young Sheldon”: Stalwart Republican, deep Southern drawl, treated me like a human) to ask if she had anything for dinner. I think Mom began taking the antidepressant Tofranil at this stage, which, while at least she didn’t suddenly go out and plow the entire back yard to create an onion farm, she also didn’t lock herself in a room for a week at a time. Just sort of a zombie. Dad figured out that if he didn’t sign up for rehab, he was dead. He disappeared off and on into rehab over the following years as I entered puberty full blast.
Likewise, my deep reading of the DSM now convinced me I was borderline Autistic, a twofer. I had so successfully buried my emotions, that I wasn’t sure I had them in an ordinary way – Now that was success! No more crying and depression like Mom, ability to zone out of bullies by performing complex algebraic transformations in my head, playing back a Bach Canta from memorized music mentally, I was an adept at circling around emotion. Bullying, neglect, my ‘gender dysphoria’ were all converging very powerfully at this time, and I began talking to my mother about Suicide. Sounds so alarming! Poor Mom, I can visualize her standing at the island in the kitchen drinking coffee from the silver metal coffeepot that was always on (where did the coffee come from!), the fake wood-paneled walls and Avocado green refrigerator behind her as I, with the curiosity of a child and a faint chill of despair in my lisp, asked how suicide worked, and I watched her hands shake while she struggled with an answer, and I wondered if the Tofranil was really working. I was spending more time each day thinking about Mom’s friends remarks on my ‘peaches and cream’ complexion as I tried on makeup again and again. What a fun strange life, eh?
Likewise, summar camps I were sent to were annoying, but not so bad in some ways. Because Mom and Dad were so out of it, I got registered quite late, and ended up being placed in a cabin with boys 2-3 years above my age who were staggeringly disdainful. I could disappear during the day in the camp, go into the woods with a “Peterson’s Field Guide” book and collect and index everything. I took ‘classes’ with girls in craftwork (Tandy Lanyard knot expert here, OMG those spiraling box coils!), but I could also do things with other highly awkward boys like picking up rocks in a stream and seeing what wiggles, getting PawPaws to let turn brown in a bag to snack on, making spore prints from ferns, mushrooms, and all sorts of fungi, without bullying. I do remember a kind of schadenfreude relief once when a boy had a complete nervous breakdown complete with screaming about his parents not loving him. Gosh, I’ll never do that! There were evening group showers with adult supervision, but as opposed to elementary school, the adults had to take showers also. So that’s what it’s going to look like. Not if I can help it. Engrossing. Quite pleasant. Taps at Sunset, Ghost stories by the campfire, and the #1 pursuit of boys together in a camp without adult supervision during puberty, the world’s oldest male hobby, unrelentingly. Just nonstop. I was shocked and titillated in equal measure – if your not sure what I mean, think about it. (Note: years later I watched a film about summer camp for gender non-conforming children at an art gallery, and I cried embarrassingly for some time.)
Jump forward a year or two, back at home. I found something very strange happened. Years before, after Mom had separated and Dad hadn’t moved cross-country to rejoin, I was at home alone on a Sunday, watching a monster show on TV. A scary movie on an afternoon, with a host dressed as a vampire, overlaying the movie with humor, think Elivra except done by Buck Henry. The movie was “Black Sunday”, or “The Mask of Satan” by Mario Bava, a leader of the Giallo movement in Italy of lurid, violent horror movies which precluded “Friday the 13th” or “Freddy” type movies by a few decades. The black-and-white, very atmospheric movie started with a woman on a stake (I can recall this with glistening accuracy) being condemned as a witch by shrouded priests (her brother! Ouch!) then a very large, extremely muscular, semi-nude well-oiled man calmly walked over to her and put a mask with inward-pointing daggers over her face and… Well, at this stage I ignored the mask, entirely fixated on the very large, extremely muscular, semi-nude well-oiled man, and men around him. Naturally, I was hard as a rock. I was breathless. (Four decades later, I found that Mario Bava films tended to to feature a number of semi-nude, hard, muscular, well-oiled men in Horror settings, including “Hercules in the Underworld”. Just perfect.)
Now forward a few years as puberty was starting full blast, I woke up one morning with a mess in my pyjamas, having replayed the muscular man sequence from the film in my head (sans Mask of Satan). Well, something was clearly very wrong with my genitals, and after washing up and feeling unrelenting dread, I went to the library again that afternoon, and of course found that I had a wet dream. And, for the first time I began grasping that all the things that were alarming in my body were starting to increase dramatically, summer-camp-counselor-in-the-shower-alarmingly. I think that I was probably 12 or so, bit of a late starter perhaps. I delved further into the library working to logically construct what was going to happen next – the preparation in ‘family studies’ class, given by the gym teacher with amazing oblique language except for “queers” was, as you can imagine, not so useful. Thanks “Coach” Crumley, the sound you didn’t hear from the back row wasn’t my tear. Got that dried up. I certainly wasn’t going to discuss this with my parents either, and no power on earth was going to get me either ask for or participate in a doctor exam, I knew I would get an erection if I had to wear that paper smock naked, and the game was up. I acted like a girl, but my body was a boy!
Then the day not long after arrived during marching band, when I was in shorts outside, and a girl made remarks about my legs. I had slowly thickened from a child’s body into the body of a pre-teen linebacker, legs like treetrunks, and thick blond hair was growing over them. Mortified, what I had been ignoring for a year was becoming more and more visible to everyone, which really worked well with the effeminacy and lisp. To compliment those legs, I had incredibly wide shoulders. I overheard older boys complaining that they could go to the gym forever, but would never get my shoulders. My voice cracked not soon later, and the pudginess that I had as a child started strangely hardening up. I watched one day as my quads flexed and bounced while I marched, nauseated but strangely fixated. Because of my legs, I was always given the heaviest instrument in marching band – a baritone saxophone or a strap-on marimba., in orchestra and indoor band I preferred oboe, sax, flute, clarinet. But there I was, bathed in testosterone as I started my growth spurt.
But something else was changing also. I looked at my notebooks (I took “Harriet the Spy” to heart at a very early age.) and while still being bullied for being effeminate, I wasn’t recognizing the writing I had done, wanting to have a different body. I know the feelings I had written down, and observations. I was unhappy being male, but crucially I found I was transferring that anger, unhappiness and resentment from something I felt about myself inside, to being unhappy being surrounded by assholes, who seemed to do nothing but make my life hell.
Still locked into not using restrooms in schools (folks, it persisted ten years), still worrying about the prominence of my genitals, still refusing to have doctor exams (absolutely not), there were two final signal events awaiting.
First, I was an inveterate Public TV watcher as a Child. Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and likewise ordinary children’s TV – H.R. Pufnstuf, The Banana Splits… One day watching PBS, I saw a documentary on homosexuality. By today’s standards, not really glowing with happiness, but it was fascinating to me watching men with men. That was a mind-bender. Not long after, on one of my very late-night binges, I was watching the Tom Snyder Show, who had gone into a Gay Disco in New York City. A TV screen full of glistening dancing men, shirts off, looking very hairy-chested and muscular. Transfixing. My poor brain was spinning around like a roasted side of beef in it’s bone box, stewing in hot testosterone.
Second, in the library, I was going through the ‘special’ stacks which were generally Very Large Art Books. I was going through the photography section, (I can tell you all about Diane Arbus, as well as Lisette Model, Bill Cunningham and Richard Avedon, annoying child syndrome) I came across the book “Pumping Iron” by Charles Gaines. On the cover was a spectacular Ed Corney, and with heart jumping (and something else) I read the book cover to cover. Schwarzenneger, not a gifted speaker at the best of times, I believe said something as to the effect “Gay people are fighting the same kind of stereotyping that bodybuilders are: People have certain misconceptions about them just as they do us." I had to process my feelings about that simple, strangely gifted statement for a months. Add Testosterone, lather rinse and repeat.
With each month of puberty that passed, the intense gender dysphoria I had was becoming more and more a remote memory, and an intense excitement sprang up from nowhere. Well, it sprang up clearly, quite insistently, pretty routinely, in one specific place, morning noon and night. I began to feel that maybe I wasn’t going to have surgery, that maybe I could find a man to love me and have sex with me, and maybe I was gay. I remember being in the mall at the good old B. Dalton bookstore (remember those?), besides perusing college textbooks to see what I wanted to read for pleasure (annoying, very annoying child), I noticed gay-looking things like “Apartment Life” magazine (hey, men with big moustaches, Izod shirts, 501’s, taut muscles, interior decoration…), which featured lovely photographs of a life in New York, complete with handsome male roommates putting up track lighting, skylights, and macrame hangers (I hope you’re laughing: this is the happy ending), and pots of Monstera deliciosa (I’m sure that’s a charm used at Hogwards in their “family studies class”, a row of awkward gay boys flicking a wand, “MonsterA deliciouSA”). I joined a local basement gym, far away from anything and anybody schoolwise, and instead of readings at the library a few days of the week, I was surreptitiously doing bodybuilding, trying to understand my decade-neglected male body, and I found I wasn’t afraid of taking a shower. I began calculating how far away I could get from the town I was in for college, and with perfect scores on ACT, a National Merit Scholar, and acing SAT’s Caltech seemed like a reliable possibility. I was planning now for the post-graduate decade, where I would live, which macrame plant hangers and track lighting, turned down low. I would have supergraphics on the wall and chrome furniture, tasteful Danish art objects, and a MONstera delicioSA crawling up an exposed brick wall, while I didn’t drink scotch incessantly in a chunky glass with hand-cracked ice (no, I never became an alcoholic in projection or fact), but I was imagining and planning another 10-15 years in the future, now beyond the fateful bilateral orchidectomy and penile inversion vaginoplasty.
A year away from graduation, my father developed throat cancer (something about a lifetime of cigarettes, cigars, profound alcoholism and obesity perhaps, who am I to say), and the three of us drove to NIH in DC for treatment, my Mom staying with him as I drive home to the Appalachias. On the way home, I stopped for gas in large town – Roanoke Virginia – and drove by a very large warehouse structure with a sign 50 feet high which read “Adult Books”. Something clicked, and I stopped in. Well, that’s what was inside, or more accurately, “Adult Magazines”, a B. Dalton it was not. Walls of them, perhaps half with men. Same big muscular moustached or bearded men with pendant or rampant pleasure, this was the age of “Winston Man” ads of muscular mustached or bearded men staring straight into the camera with pursed lips (“MONsterA deliciouSA”), only they had no clothes. What’s a jockstrap between friends? I shouldn’t have been in there of course, and I shouldn’t have been able to buy a stack of male physique pictorials (Colt, Javelin, Mandate…), but looking “old for my age”, and the guys behind the counter not giving a shit, well, there I was. Home alone that evening, and for a few weeks with a stack of skin magazines, puberty at full volume, doing what boys have done from time immemorial, the world oldest male hobby.
I finally felt like I was in the right body, at the right place, at the right time.
When I write about the euphemistic “Puberty Blockers” in other posts, or what are also referred to as “Chemical Castration”, I’m enormously glad I didn’t have access to such “therapy” as a child. Today, I’m a fifty years older gay, quite assuredly male. I look remarkably like Santa Claus, complete with a twinkle in his blue eyes, if Santa were a 250lb bodybuilder with blond furry shoulders, and I’m married to the love of my life, a man, and we’ve been wedded for more than 23 years, having been able to form our Union in a European country far in advance of the US.
As you read this, consider that I had persistent gender dysphoria from a very early age; I had many of the highlights commonly attributed to a clinical situation – persistent feelings of being in the wrong body, wrong genitals, play behavior of the opposite gender, use of opposite gender clothing, suicidal ideation, the list goes on.
Chemical and physical castration has been a common response to homosexuality in the modern period. One of the more prominent heros of World War II espionage, and who had foundational work in computer science – Alan Turing – was castrated chemically for being gay, which led directly to his suicide. This castration was common in many countries, including the US which focused more on medical castration as punishment for being gay. Even though of course the public complained that castration made men “more passive”. Castration OK; aggression? Priceless.
At an event I peripherally organized two decades ago with a noted Transwoman advocate speaker who was and is a heroine to me for decades (along with Wendy Carlos), I heard her speak of the need for starting to use Puberty Blockers for trans children. Something didn’t click in my head at the time, but I couldn’t find much to read on the subject, because there simply isn’t wasn’t any substantial clinical research on the subject, a problem which persists to this day. A fascinating medical mystery to me, and the question bounced around my head with my reading for several decades on precisely how puberty works in children, wondering how it worked on me.
It turns out that for the gender dysphoria I experienced, gender dysphoria in children specifically, at puberty it most often resolves to a satisfactory gender experience as it did for me. Don’t take my word as accurate, or my anecdotal experience as a trend, but feel free to read studies, and scientific review, here’s a few items to Google from Wikipedia.
Kreukels B, Steensma TD, de Vries A (2013). Gender Dysphoria and Disorders of Sex Development: Progress in Care and Knowledge. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 61. ISBN 978-1461474418.
Fatemi H, Clayton PJ (2016). The Medical Basis of Psychiatry. Springer. p. 302. ISBN 978-1493925285.
LeVay S (2010). Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation. Oxford University Press. p. 91. ISBN 978-0199753192.
In fact, 60% to 80% of children in my situation cease to desire to be the other sex precisely because they go through puberty. Wow!
Fuss J, Auer MK, Briken P (November 2015). "Gender Dysphoria in Children and Adolescents: A Review of Recent Research". Current Opinion in Psychiatry. 28 (6): 430–434. doi:10.1097/YCO.0000000000000203. PMID 26382161. S2CID 23690783.
Consider that fact now when you read about gender dysphoria in children, and the proposition that you consider chemically castrating a child to “delay puberty” until they become accommodated and happy to whatever “gender they want to express”, then you release the chemical castration.
To make it utterly simple, for the vast majority of children with gender dysphoria
That’s the essential conundrum.
In fact, the essence of the problem is that Parents, Physicians, Priests and , Politicians (apologies to the Police, I’m alliterative now) and others are proposing to withhold precisely the essential experience which resolves the vast majority of gender dysphoria cases.
Now, imagine somehow with chemical castration, the dysphoria is resolved, chemical castration is reversed.
You must realize however you cannot reverse the effects of losing key maturation years during puberty.
I’ve long had worries about my genitals, which to put it mildly is not uncommon in men. I have a ‘small’ case of body dysmorphia, which means that no matter how large I get, I look ‘small’ to myself. I have to have custom business shirts and clothes to accommodate the condition, all my ordinary clothes are XXL or XXXL. In the words of my trainer, my shoulders are freakybig. The stocky child is a massive adult. I’m 5’9”, 250lbs, and a 32” waist. My dysmorphia also projects onto my genitals. I always have some sort of size anxiety, even though objectively I’m in an upper percentile of development, and I have for many years been assured are much more than adequate, to put it delicately. I knew I was big as I entered puberty, but of course I developed some not wonderful internal reactions to my genitals.
Had I gone through puberty blockers, I would have arrived at age 16 or 17 with the genitals of a child; “Cross Hormone” therapy would have been introduced to attempt to alleviate problems with bone growth and mineralization. I probably would have restarted body hair growth where it ceased, but I would have lost probably half a decade or more in maturation of my genitals, a common issue with Chemical Castration of children, male and female. Male genitals don’t spontaneously grow with the introduction of testosterone, growth requires a complex timed orchestration of Gonadotropin, Testosterone, even Estrogens and Growth Hormone, and other factors present during the critical years of early- and mid-puberty. If testosterone after the post-pubertal peak were all that was required, bodybuilders who use anabolic steroids would be stallions. Trust me, they can be, but usually aren’t.
And, you know what’s fascinating? There is exactly zero research on this with puberty blockers. Zero. Nada. Parents, Physicians, Priests an Politicians are performing a grand experiment involving the genitals of most probably gay boys (80% probability!), without a shred of data on what’s happening. It’s like the “intercision” out of the children’s books “The Golden Compass” (highly recommended), applied to children today, now, here. (I mean genital mutilation for boys isn’t enough is it? Let’s talk sometime about circumcision, and informed consent!)
So, I’d probably have been crushingly disappointed with my own development, had I become fixed at maturity with the genitals of a 12-year-old, and it would have been more challenging that it is in all cases to develop normal sexual relations. It would have been precisely a trans-dentified problem of being “uncomfortable with my genitals” introduced specifically by the chemical castration, a case where the intended treatment creates the disease.
Men are known to kill themselves because of feelings of inadequacy. Google “Penis Size Suicide” and you’ll get the gruesome stories. Me, I’m so arrogant I doubt if I would have committed suicide over undeveloped genitals due to Chemical Castration “Puberty Blockers”. But, putting this in context, it’s an easy outcome to consider.
While I fully support the right for adults to identify the gender they wish to be recognized by others — frankly who am I to tell someone who they are. Trans people should be treated with full dignity and respect, access to treatments to align perceived and actual gender, and to be fully supported in society in achieving their full potential and happiness as a human. Trans lives matter.
I however, strongly disagree strongly with a view that this Chemical Castration to affirm trans status is possible with children. Science is on my side.
Chemical Castration as a temporary “treatment” for gender dysphoria in children who are homosexual is a medical abomination, completely absent long-term study on effects and outcomes, and is on order of Medieval Castrati, Female Genital Mutilation, Castration punishment for homosexuality, and conversion therapy for Gays and Lesbians.
Do you really think children who are gender-nonconforming should be “treated” via chemical castration? I don’t. I think we should treat them with the duties of love and care, and helping through a very rough spot. Isn’t that the best thing we can do for one another — love and care, and help, not experimentation and worse.
Here’s some simple, accessible summaries on topics I covered:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria_in_children
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_castration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty_blocker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castrato
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_States
Oh, and there’s always a song for Sesame Street for things like this:
https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/One_of_These_Things
"One of These Things" was a song regularly used on Sesame Street for sketches where viewers would be shown a group of four items, one of which was different from the other three, and they would have to identify the item which didn't belong (ouch!). A similar song that asks the inverse question is "Three of These Things".
I’m sure that I’ll get vituperative responses, it goes with the territory. There will be claims of inauthenticity, as always (yes, that’s me with a Tie-Dyed teeshirt from camp!). Many claims of bias (I am biased, towards protecting gay men like me from unnecessary medical experiments), a whole raft of letters and acronyms for what I am (because we care enough to say the very worst, like a demonic Hallmark, but can’t actually take the time to type), but through it all, I’m always cheerful and positive, which is something surprising at times, a resilience I’ve never understood.
Ask me anything.
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