Girl/Boy

In late August last year, I was informed that I have about forty tiny cysts on each of my ovaries. The ultrasound looked like craters on the moon.

This was conclusive evidence of the latest addition to my already impressive collection of medical maladies: a little gem called Polycystic Ovary Syndrome—PCOS to its friends. The typical outward symptoms of PCOS primarily include morbid obesity, excessive body hair, and disfiguring cystic acne. Consequently, every ultrasound technician, radiologist, gynecologist, and endocrinologist I have encountered on my most recent medical odyssey, along with every too-chatty nurse and nosy office receptionist, has exclaimed, “Oh!”—upon looking up from their charts and noticing my average, relatively unafflicted form—“You’re a lucky one!” Then these so-called professionals beam at me expectantly, as though the revelatory news that I do not have hair on my nipples should have inspired me to break out confetti and noise-makers and dance an impromptu jig on the examining table.

All the gruesome side effects of PCOS can be blamed on a basic hormonal imbalance. Affected females produce an excess of androgenic hormones—a fact that I find interesting, considering that if a stranger were to raid my closet, he might reasonably conclude that a prostitute was sharing storage space with an eighty-year-old man. Leopard-print silk slips mingle with argyle golf sweaters; black lace peeks out coquettishly from under piles of threadbare cotton knee socks; a pink feather boa tickles an extra-large plaid suit jacket; a dazzling pair of gold stiletto twins turn away in disgust from the scuffed brown loafers moping at their side. I am Cyndi Lauper one day and Buster Keaton the next

Obviously, it would be erroneous to attribute my eclectic wardrobe to cracked-out hormones alone—but purely as a matter of symbolism, the fact that my ovaries are oozing testosterone did not come as much of a surprise. In the second grade, I solemnly instructed my teacher that although my mother had introduced me as “Johanna,” I would please be henceforth referred to as “just Jo.” In a long-running imagination game in which my little brother pretended to be a horse, I tacked on an “e” to this abbreviation to assume the role of Horsie’s owner, “Joe,” a John Arbuckle-type with serious midlife anxieties, including the futile search for a woman’s love. When I wore a dress to school one day in fifth grade, the entire class erupted in chaos, exclaiming, “Oh my God! Jo, you’re a girl!” and, “Whose dress is that?”


And somehow it just seemed natural to audition for all the male roles in the middle school plays. Once, I even won the part: Professor Bloodworth, a teacher/vampire secretly plotting to drink the blood of his students, to my hungry 11-year-old eyes, was the breakthrough role of a lifetime.

“Don’t worry,” grunted the director, a doughy middle-aged woman who looked like she was perpetually giving birth, “we can just make Professor Bloodworth a lady.”
“No!” I shouted adamantly. Despite the poor woman’s protests, on opening night I intrepidly donned an ill-fitting Dracula wig and dropped my voice two octaves to stand before a parent-packed auditorium and deliver with awe-inspring gusto such masterfully penned lines as, “You kids are driving me batty!”

Innocent memories such as these, like old Halloween costumes buried at the bottom of your closet (Bert the Chimney Sweep, Edward Scissorhands, and John Lennon, to name a few), when spread over the course of twenty years are easily ignored, but, when dusted off and laid out side by side, start to look like something pretty significant. Maybe they were obscured at first by a veil of markedly more normative items (a princess, a fairy, a mermaid) and a host of innocently gender-neutral ones (a giant jellyfish, a lion, a carrot)—or maybe you just never really go in your closet anyway. Maybe there are spiders in there, and it smells funny.

It’s not that I’ve ever really thought I was a boy, but I’ve never felt like much of a girl, either—and since it’s just so irresistibly convenient, I’m going to go ahead and link that, too, to my recently diagnosed condition. The most notable symptom of this handy philosophical springboard otherwise known as PCOS is an irregular or nonexistent menstrual cycle. In my case, I got one sorry excuse for a period when I was fifteen, and never again. A doctor with clammy hands and stale-smelling breath zipped up my pants and wrote me a prescription for birth control. I took one little yellow pill every night for over three years, and bled like clockwork.

But last December, having read some alarming internet reports linking the synthetic hormones in birth control to ovarian cancer, death, etc., and seeing as I had no sex life to speak of, I decided the pill was more trouble than it was worth. But as soon as I stopped assaulting my body with estrogen supplements, I’m sure you can guess what else stopped.

Initially, I was not troubled in the slightest by the loss. The online birth control community agreed, “It takes up to three months for your body to adjust after stopping the pill.” So I didn’t worry. And three periodless months went by. And I still didn’t worry. Truth be told, I was more than happy to forget all about it—I was free! Free from the bloody shackles of womanhood!

I know plenty of women who would have felt differently in my situation—women who cherish their period as a cosmic symbol of feminine power. I guess I missed the boat on the whole lunar calendar/Mother Goddess/uterus worship thing. My female anatomy has never felt like an integral part of my identity—the odd lumps and curves of my body are not my own. All I know is once, you could have drawn a picture of me with nothing but I’s and T’s; now I am all S’s, B’s, and J’s. I don’t know who can be held accountable for this unwanted metamorphosis—what magician was it who snuck into my bedroom one night and waved his hand, “Piff! Poof! Presto Change-o!” so that the next morning I crawled out of bed like a stunned caterpillar, astonished by its new wings? To this day I regard the mysterious contours of my flesh with the detached fascination of a scientist—when I poke and prod at the fat thighs and curvaceous calves extending from my shorts, I see so much meat! When and how were my skinny green bean legs transformed in to the juicy drumsticks on a Thanksgiving turkey?

This does not mean that at times I have not enjoyed and even flaunted my feminine assets—hence, the aforementioned silk, heels, and leopard prints inhabiting my wardrobe. Although it’s certainly nothing I’m proud of, it didn’t take long for post-pubescent me to notice that when you’re a little blond girl in this silly world, with a teeny sacrifice of dignity here and there, life can be easy as peas. It felt like a super-power—I could casually sidle up to an unsuspecting New York City bouncer and say, “Hey… it’s my birthday,” and suddenly a sweaty hand was pressing an all-access pass into mine. When accompanied by a few well-timed giggles and hair-flips, this line once got a friend and me into a sold-out Modest Mouse concert.

I was in awe of my newfound talent. But like Uncle Ben once cautioned Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.” But I, like Spiderman when he found the Symbiote, quickly fell prey to the bloodsucking, seductive forces of evil—the high-gloss TV wondergirls and their nonexistent pores, their skinny thighs, their voluminous hair. As my teen magazine subscriptions piled up, my skirts got shorter, my eyeliner thicker, and my remaining shred of dignity smaller. The time it took me to get ready for school in the morning rocketed from approximately zero minutes to forty-five. It was disturbing, but irresistible, to be stared at.

I have known girls who like girls and girls who like boys and girls and boys who became girls and girls who became boys and girls who say they are gay men trapped in girls’ bodies. But I have always known that none of these definitions applies to me. I also know that, in comparison, my mild confusion is nothing newsworthy—but maybe that’s what makes it all the more worth thinking about. Maybe no one is Girl or Boy the way the clean-cut executives cranking out magazines and advertisements and TV shows want us to be.

After all, the notion that one little chromosome could determine our favorite color, how often we cry at the ends of movies, our predisposition to bake cupcakes, is fundamentally preposterous. I will go out on a limb and claim with all certainty that there is no genetic link between how much we like comic books, how we style our hair, whether we like to wear skirts, and how we put on chapstick (boys furtively smear it on as fast as they can, concealing the tube inside their balled fist because they’re harboring some inexplicable third-grade insecurities about being taunted for “wearing lipstick," whereas with girls, it’s an elaborate theatrical production: they pucker their lips into a plump pout, then sensuously twist off the cap and glide the stick slowly over their lower lip, pulling it back from the teeth just a little; then with a finger they spread it across the upper lip, then kiss the glossy lips together and *sMaCk!*. Good lord. Just put on the fucking chapstick).

The superficial distinctions between male and female are so arbitrary, and the great lengths to which advertising companies go to capitalize on these alleged differences is just staggering. Take shaving cream: a gender-neutral and 100% commercial substance. Both women and men shave (although neither need to, of course) and they use the same foamy substance to help them do it—but hold up a bottle of men’s shaving cream and a bottle of women’s, and you would never suspect that the product is in fact identical in every way. One is a black bottle with a neon blue stripe and bold, racy font reading “Gillette FUSION. STEALTH EDITION. HYDRA GEL”—notice the resemblance to a car chase in a James Bond movie. Now the other: a curvy, sexy pink bottle with a swirling cursive letters reading, “Skintimate. Moisturizing shave cream. Vitamin E. Sensitive Skin. With Soothing Aloe.” Gee, it’s so tender and soft, you just want to take it home and make it cook you a steak!

These absurd notions of gender, as well as the real people we see walking around every day embodying them, are as manufactured as bottles of shaving cream. This realization, or something like it, is why my polycystic ovaries and I have recently traded in the feather boas and pantsuits for loose corduroys and simple t-shirts. Eyeliner and hair-flipping is a thing of the past. My new plan is to exist as something like a giant jellyfish, floating through life translucently and more or less androgynously. “Girl” or “Boy” does not fit into my plans, for I feel no particular allegiance to either sex—or maybe I have an equal attachment to both. Or maybe I have realized the absurdity of trying to make such a distinction in the first place. I’m like a black and white cookie. It’s a sort of Taoist approach, you know—a little yin, a little yang—yeah, I’m in tune with the rhythms of the universe. Don’t act like you’re not impressed.