To My Beloved Royalty...

Puberty can be traumatic. When you're a transgender kid...... all the worse.
Speak Out

Comments:

RachelN

Puberty was not as traumatic for me as it is for most transpeople, if only because I was naive enough to believe as a teen that female hormones could completely reverse its effects once I took them. (I was more sheltered than others my age).

Shows I saw about MTF transsexuals in the seventies seemed to reinforce this view. (It didn't help that they were usually portrayed by cis women, giving me unrealistic expectations as to how I might look.)

In the TV series "Soap", the gay character played by Billy Crystal decides to undergo SRS--for awhile, anyway. But as he's explaining what will happen when he takes the hormones, he says (among other incorrect statements) that his facial hair will fall out--patently wrong. Never mind that the episode also gives one the idea that you can walk into the hospital as one sex and walk out another.

Had I known how difficult--and expensive--it is to lessen the effects of hormones after puberty (facial/body hair, longer jawline, heavier bone structure, etc.) I might surely have reacted to my puberty as Mars reacted to his.

Last edited by RachelN
Edited 3 time(s).

Submitted February 17, 2014 at 3:05AM

Tyler
*Guest*

Guest post by "Tyler"
It took me a long time to realize I was trans (longer than the characters in this comic, at least; I was 16) and when I started puberty I swung between hiding my breasts and trying to make them look bigger because my discomfort with my body was so strange and hard for me to understand that I didn't know how to make it go away. It didn't help that I was homophobic and had never even heard the word transgender before. Once I used the internet to my advantage things began to make sense (after over a year of fervent denial).

Submitted February 17, 2014 at 7:29AM

Rachel Ann
*Guest*

Guest post by "Rachel Ann"
*ugh* Pooberty (As Harry Morgan calls it in "Support Your Local Sheriff") was devastating on me. I'd been the smallest 'boy' in school until 7th grade and pooberty. I was absolutely CERTAIN that pooberty would finally make me female. And then I grew up into a linebacker-sized nightmare. (To me.) Over six feet, broad shoulders... *sigh* the whole terrible change. Suicidal thoughts really kicked in about then, as did self-mutilation. Worst of all, back in the 70s there was so little known about transgenderism that it never, ever occurred to me that what I had - what I was feeling - was real, had a medical term, and that there was treatment. So the crushing guilt piled on, too.

The upside is that it is behind me and I know it won't get that bad ever again.

Submitted February 17, 2014 at 8:25AM

Jane
*Guest*

Guest post by "Jane"
Wrong puberty :(
I wish no one had to have one.

Submitted June 14, 2019 at 11:07AM

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