Today I was talking someone who’s related to me but not
part of my “nuclear” family. (I won’t
get into the implications of that term!)
He’s a couple of years younger than half my age. We talked about one thing and another; he
mentioned some high-school friends he’d recently seen. Then, he told me something I was not
expecting from him, or anybody: “I’d
really like to go through puberty again.”
As someone who experienced puberty “again”, I didn’t
know whether to laugh, argue with him or react in some other way. Before I started my transition, I simply
could not imagine myself going through puberty—or, more precisely, what it
meant for me—again. For a long time, I
wished that I didn’t have to experience it at all.
The difference between the way I used to feel about my
puberty, and his wish that he could experience his again, could be summed up as
follows: He told me that in his puberty,
he experienced his first attraction to a girl.
“I knew I was straight. Nothing
has ever made me happier,” he claimed.
On the other hand, my puberty meant—to my horror—that I was becoming a
man.
For a long time, I was angry about that. Not only did I have to become a man—at least
by the definitions that were accepted at that time—I had to deal with sexual
feelings that I couldn’t reconcile with being a man or a woman, at least as I
understood those terms at that time in my life.
Because I didn’t have what academics call a “frame of reference” and a
vocabulary to describe my feelings in a way that would have made sense to
anyone I knew at the time, having those feelings was even more bewildering and
terrifying than seeing my pubic hair grow around a sexual organ I didn’t want.
I wouldn’t want to go through any of that again. However, I am thankful that I did. When I went through my second puberty, in my
40’s (when I started taking hormones), much of what I felt made more sense to
me—and was even cause for joy—as a result of the changes that came during my
early teen years.
One of the things I realized was that in puberty, the
emotional and mental changes are even more important than the physical
ones. So, while I was happy to see my
breasts grow and the lines in my face soften, I was even more thrilled to not
only experience the giddiness and crying jags, and new depths of feeling about
everything from songs I heard on the radio to a Shakespeare play, and to feel
my senses open in ways I never imagined on walks and bike rides. Best of all, I had ways of understanding
those things, and the fact that I wasn’t developing new sexual feelings as much
as I was able to more thoroughly experienced the ones I’d had since my first
puberty.
Still, even though I am glad to have experienced my
“second” puberty, I cannot understand why my relative, or anyone else, would
want to re-experience his or her pre-teen puberty. Then again, my first puberty brought me into
a part of my life I’d never wanted to experience, while my relative got what
he’d hoped for when he experienced what will most likely be his only puberty.
At least I got what I’d hoped to have from my second.
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