Olivia Werth: Episode III: Revenge of Puberty

Puberty! The child is crumbling 

Under attacks by the ruthless

Hormone, Testosterone. There

Is no hope anywhere.  Suffering 

Is everwhere.

In a stunning move, a lone

Princess has swept into the 

Uproar over the AIDS epidemic

And struck a decisive blow

For acceptance

As the child tries to find the

Hope to face the future, a

Father delivers news that

Shakes the world to its

Very foundations.

Hello again.  Welcome to installment number four of my life story.  So far, I’ve covered the process of rediscovering my transness a couple of years ago, then went back in time to my childhood.  In the last installment, I ended with how, thanks to the way the world reacted to a sick boy during the AIDS epidemic, I became a ten year old child terrified of the world.

The next year, fifth grade, would be a momentous year for me.  I went back and forth a lot over whether to include this first incident, as I am not sure it really is relevant to the story I am telling here.  But that uncertainty itself makes me feel like I should include it, as it is the only moment from my childhood of which I am truly uncertain.  Everything else I remember from my childhood either feels like something told to me (the same way I remember dates and names from a history book) or is so absolutely clear that I could step right into it and re-experience it all over again, for good and bad.  

But this moment is the one memory I have that doesn’t fit those extremes.  This one is fuzzy, all along the edges and right in the middle.  This happened in the hallway of school, and it feels like it must have been during class as the halls were almost completely empty.  I was out there, and another boy in my class was there, and I feel like there were a couple of other people (maybe his parents?  a teacher?) but I can’t see them.  (I also have a vague sense of my grandfather around this memory, but as he would not have been in the school that day I don’t know why.)

Who was this kid?  I can see him clearly, but the only thing my brain will tell me about him is that he was the tallest boy in our class.  I have no idea what his name was.  (Though, as I have come to realize as I am writing this, in that he is not alone.  I have come to realize that I cannot remember the name of a single boy I went to school with until I was in high school.  The dozen or so students whose names I can remember from my first eight years of school are all girls.)

Anyway, as unclear as all of these things may have been, some things in this memory are as clear as anything I have ever remembered.  The reason we were in the hall was that he was telling me he was moving away, all the way to the west coast.  (Why was telling this to me?  And only me?)  The other thing that is very clear was how I felt as he was telling me this.  I felt sad.  I felt guilty.  And I felt ashamed.

Why?  I have no idea.  I mean, maybe we were friends?  I don’t remember any real friends in elementary school, but for some reason he was telling me, and me alone, that he was moving away.  And if we were friends I would expect to be sad he was leaving.  But why did I feel guilt (and to be clear, this is not the generalized sense of guilt I felt for everything that happened in the world, but a very specific guilt)?  And why did I feel ashamed?  How could I possibly be to blame for him moving away?  I have spent a lot of time trying to understand these feelings in this moment, and despite some speculations the answers aren’t coming.

So I’ll move along, to the horror that truly defined fifth grade for me–puberty.  I know, puberty is distressing for most, if not all, kids. Your body changing, things growing that weren’t there before, hormones flooding your body with no idea how to handle them–yeah, I see how that would not be fun for anyone.  But for me, all of those feelings were amplified over what my classmates were feeling by a factor that felt greater than the mass of every star in the galaxy.  Because my body was changing in a way that was all wrong for how I felt about myself.  I was growing hair on my chest, where breasts should have been developing.  My hips should have been developing, but instead my voice was breaking as it began to drop.  And don’t even get me started on how it felt to have testosterone in my system.  Even now, after years of experience and therapy and breakthroughs, if something happens and my testosterone levels start increasing my mental health collapses instantly.  At eleven, that was not something I was at all able to handle.

But it was more than just the physical changes due to puberty that were making my life hell.  I felt like I was literally being torn in two.  My body was becoming more and more like a man, but the brain inside my head kept screaming at me that I was a woman.  Every time I caught a glimpse of who I was physically becoming in a mirror, such a wave of horror washed through me that I could barely breathe.  I began to feel less and less connected to my body, more and more as though I was trapped inside a prison of flesh rather than actually having a body.

And yet–there was a part of me that welcomed these changes.  They made it oh so much easier for me to hide my secret.  If I had hair growing on my face, if I spoke with a deeper voice, then I could maybe relax my mask a little.  Those things would cover for some small slips–who would possibly imagine that a person with a beard was really a girl?

But while a small part of me welcomed the camouflage, to the bigger part of me all of these changes felt like a betrayal.  And what comes from feeling like you have betrayed yourself?  You got it–a massive increase in my already galaxy-spanning sense of self-hatred.  But the hatred was not alone, as for the first time in my life I began to consider suicide.  While the testosterone running through my system was probably a big factor in this (side note–I am not saying that testosterone is bad in and of itself–I am only saying it was bad for me) it was not the only thing.  There was, of course, the hatred for being broken.  There was the guilt I felt for everything that happened in the world.  There was the fact that I never had a single moment in my life where I could actually relax and just breathe.  

And I was tired.  Eleven years old, and already exhausted of life.  I was hiding everything I was, everything I knew myself to be, and living in constant fear that someone would discover my secret and destroy me.  It was wearing me down to nothing.  And it felt hopeless, as everything I saw from the world just reinforced that broken toys got thrown away, and broken kids went right along with them.  It really didn’t feel like there was any point in trying to hold on, when I was going to have to keep my mask on until the day I died.

But then I saw a newscast that made me reconsider, at least for a time.  In April of 1987 I saw a story on the news, a story out of the United Kingdom about AIDS.  Sounds like a horrible setup, but instead it became the one moment of grace that gave me the strength to keep myself going.  (As I write this I am unable to think about this moment without beginning to cry at what this meant to me.  I volunteer at a LGBTQ+ youth center which has a timeline of the AIDS epidemic on the wall.  When I first walked into the space and saw the picture of this day alongside a picture of Ryan White, I almost had to leave. I was so overwhelmed by the feelings from those two moments.  And even those recent moments may understate just what this meant to me at the moment.)

The story was about the opening of the first AIDS unit to open at a hospital in the entire UK.  And the story, as all things even tangentially approaching her did, focused on the person who was there to help with the grand opening celebration–Diana Spencer or, as she was more commonly known, Princess Diana, the 25-year-old wife of Charles, the future king of England.

Diana did much more that day than just cut a ribbon, wave at the camera, and provide a good photo op for the royal family.  She–one of the most privileged people on the planet–did something that would begin to change the world.  She walked into the ward, she met with the doctors and staff willing to work there with these patients.  She spoke with some of the patients.  And she did the one thing I never expected her to do–she reached out and shook hands with an AIDS patient.  To repeat, she shook the hand of a man who had AIDS, touching his hand skin to skin, no glove, nothing between them.

This may not sound like much to you, but remember that it was only a year before that I had watched people lose their minds over being in the same building as a kid with AIDS.  Despite all the evidence, all the science (doctors had disproven claims of AIDS spreading through casual contact 4 years–4!!!--earlier), people were in such a hysteria over the spread of AIDS that touching someone with the disease was unthinkable for most people.  (Not-so-fun fact–the reason the L comes first in LGBTQIA+ is to honor all the lesbians who stepped in to care for gay men with AIDS when nurses and medical professionals refused to do so.)

America had banned anyone with AIDS from entering the country.  There was talk of putting people with the disease into camps to keep them away from everyone else.  Ronald Reagan, who had been president since the dawn of the epidemic, didn’t even give a speech about AIDS until about six weeks after Diana shook a man’s hand.  And from all that I had drawn the inevitable conclusion–if people were broken in new and unusual ways, the world viewed them as terrible monsters that needed to be kept isolated until they were destroyed.  Whether it was AIDS, or knowing yourself to be a person that you could not be, you were just waiting to be thrown away by the world.

But here, in one story on the nightly news, I saw one of the most visible,privileged people on the planet not only breathe the same air as an AIDS patient, but actually touch him.  Now, don’t get me wrong, this moment didn’t change how I saw the world–there were too many people yelling that Diana had done something horrible, and there were still people everywhere I looked talking about how AIDS was a just punishment for people who were born different than the norm. 

What it did do, though, was give me a reason to hope.  In that one image, I saw that there could be compassion in the world for the monsters, that not everyone was ruled by fear and hate.  I still never dared to dream that there would ever be any love for me, or any real acceptance out there.  But I could now hope that maybe there were people out there who, if they saw my brokenness, would not start screaming for the torches.  And that hope grew in me, giving me the strength to survive the horrors that puberty was inflicting upon me.

It was not long after that sense of hope would begin to be tested, as later that year my parents got divorced.  So this meant that I was about to be raised, for all intents and purposes, by a single mother.  (We did have visitation with my dad, but that’s not the same thing as raising us.)  And I’m sure most, if not all of you, have heard the stupid nonsense that boys raised without their fathers are more likely to be gay, or effeminate.  Well, that notion was around when I was a kid too.  So put yourself in my shoes for a moment.  A “boy” who knows he is a girl, but has to make sure no one ever suspects such a thing.  And now, I was about to be in a situation that people thought turned boys into “sissies” (probably the least offensive of the terms that get used in that situation).   

What could I do?  I tried to pretend for as long as possible that my parents were still together.  I never talked about it to anyone at school.  How long that lasted, I don’t remember, but I do believe that it was at least a couple of years before I ever actually said anything to anyone about the fact that my parents were no longer together.  

Between the divorce and puberty, my legs had been cut right out from under me.  I had been struggling to keep the mask up before.  Now, buffeted by the flow of testosterone through my system, untethered by the end of my parents’ marriage, things looked bleak.  And the next challenge in my life was at hand–middle school.  A whole new group of kids who would be watching me, trying to sort me out, and I was going to have to be able to fool them all.  But at least I had that one memory of incandescent grace from a beautiful young princess to carry me forward.