That is, until age 12, when I began to worry about it very much.
It was summertime. We were recently moved to Norway, and the weather was glorious. Children and ducks swam in the nearby lake, and girls my age were now covering themselves with shoulder-strap swimsuits, under which a few were beginning to ‘show’. I felt increasingly out-of-place, self-conscious. I wore a tee-shirt to swim, which made me stand out a bit. For the first time I was really beginning to feel ‘other’. I stopped swimming.
I became hyper-aware of my genitals and my chest. I began having an intense, recurring dream in which I would awake having been magically endowed with a vagina whilst I slept. It was so vivid that, when I did actually awake, I would immediately check myself, then start my day off with the most profound sense of loss. I became so obsessed that I developed a ritual each night before dropping asleep: I would press with my fingers on the spot where I knew my vagina should be and wish for the dream, wish for it to really work this time, wish for relief and a way out of my hideous predicament.
Needless to say, I discussed this with no one: I knew there was something horribly, horribly wrong with me.
Summer ended. After several months of intensive tutoring sessions to gain literacy in Norwegian Bokmål, and with great trepidation, I joined other children in school, essentially for the first time.
I was ashamed, certain that the teachers knew I was ‘really a boy’, but never really sure who knew what. It seems that there would have been painful pronouns, but I do not remember this; perhaps I blocked them out, or perhaps I was not mis-gendered — people tend not to question an appearance that meets norms, and in Norway my long blonde plaits were pretty normal. Mercifully, there were no school uniforms and no gym classes in the school I attended; no activities which separated boys from girls — here, even in 1969, girls took wood shop and boys took home economics. Girls now commonly wore shorts and jeans, so my clothing didn’t stand out. In all, I continued to pass as a girl, and was well treated.
My body was beginning to change, there were stirrings, my strawberry-blonde hair was beginning to darken toward red, and a few months into the school term my body did something odd: my nipples became very sensitive and hardened, and my chest began to grow — I, too, began to ‘show’. I find it difficult to describe the mix of emotions this brought up in me — the most extreme hope combined with extreme embarrassment. My chest drew comment and I took to wearing bulky pullovers. In any event, my magical wishing seemed, at last, to be working.
Despite my best efforts, my mother eventually noticed, insisted that I show her my chest, and became very concerned. She took me to a doctor. Who was quite perplexed.
We are in the doctor’s exam room. At my mother’s instruction I remove my top and the doctor looks me over. I am humiliated.
‘Madam, this is perfectly normal.’
My mother looks put-out.
‘How can this be normal?!’
Now the doctor looks put-out.
‘She is what, twelve years old? She is developing normally.’
My mother is struggling with her next words. She is looking straight at me and our eyes are locked and I am telegraphing my thought to her with all I have.
Don’t say it.
She says it.
‘She is a boy.’
‘Pardon, madam?’
‘She, is a boy.’
I am utterly mortified. I start to put my top back on, but the doctor recovers, with an odd look toward my mother, and inspects me again, more closely. Touches and squeezes where I want no touch and certainly no squeeze. I cover myself as soon as he pulls back.
‘Well, this is uncommon in boys, especially to be this far advanced, but not really abnormal. It will pass.’ *
My mother looks unconvinced. I am horrified by the thought of such a betrayal.
Mere weeks later the swelling subsided, as if my mother and the doctor had colluded to snuff out my last remaining hope. My nipples became less painful, softened, and shrank away, leaving me disconsolate. I refused to go to school, eventually refusing even to leave my room. My sleep cycle became disordered, so that I read books during the night, often till sunrise, and slept during the day. For the first of many times, I wanted out of my life.
My mother was now very concerned indeed.
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