The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [19]
So that was what it was like growing up, but then you reach puberty. That got really weird, you know, because then you start to get breasts. I really didn’t want them, and they just seemed like foreign objects. I wore really loose T-shirts just like I’m doing now so that they wouldn’t show. I never did the binding thing, I think because I wasn’t that big-chested, and maybe if I had been I would have. Another thing that I noticed in puberty was my incredible discomfort about wearing dresses. I wanted to wear guys’ clothes. Ever since I could choose my own clothes, I would always wear jeans and shorts.
The only way to explain it is that I felt very uncomfortable and I didn’t understand why. Like when it came time to shave my legs. I didn’t want to do that. I felt like a naked chicken or something. And makeup: there was just no way I was going to put on makeup. And jewelry. I was constantly being given jewelry as gifts and being encouraged to, you know, do my hair, but of course I always had my hair cut short. In puberty, it really started to get very weird. I could never dance because that would mean behaving female, and there was no way that I was going to do that. Dating, wearing dresses—guys never asked me out anyway because I think that I was very masculine in my behavior. But, overall, I guess that I had this feeling of just being wrong in my body. I just started to feel very uncomfortable and in fact became uncomfortable for the rest of my life because you have to wear dresses. If you are a doctor, you have to wear a dress to go to the clinic. You have to wear a dress to funerals and weddings. Having to go to my sister’s wedding and wear this flowery dress. These are amongst the big traumatic experiences of my life!
And that sort of discomfort (because I’ve only changed my sex over the past few years) has characterized most of my life. Just this very, very uncomfortable feeling about being female—every aspect of it. But I didn’t understand it and I was always very confused about it. When I went to college, I was diagnosed with mullerian agenesis.
They realized that I didn’t have a vagina or uterus. I remember the doctors going up and looking for testicles that were undescended, checking my karyotype. They never told me the results of the kary-otype, so I just assumed that it was normal. I remember talking to these doctors and they were saying that they were going to construct an artificial vagina, and I never had any say in the matter. They never asked me if I wanted it. I remember thinking, “God, I’m just an interesting case to them.” They would come in and they would go out, but they would never ask me how I felt. And I had feelings! I felt very confused about the whole thing, like why are they going to do this, and I really don’t feel female, and I didn’t think that I particularly wanted a vagina. But on the other hand, I was a girl and I should have a vagina. It didn’t seem like there was any choice really. And I had a boyfriend at the time—I’m attracted to men, by the way, weakly, not strongly—so I thought if I’m going to have sex with him, I guess that I should have a vagina. But I never really had an interest in vaginal sex. But they did it anyway.
And then I remember when I was in medical school learning about testicular feminization [the discarded name for androgen insensitivity syndrome, a condition in which the lack of cellular receptors for testosterone and dihydrotestosterone creates a female-body