The Joy And Chaos Of My Second Puberty

I am in Newtown getting my nose pierced. It’s going to hurt like hell. I am mostly doing this because I’m going through puberty, finally, the right one, and it’s not too late to be rebelling against the phantoms of authority in my dim memory.

Have you ever thought there was an extra step at the bottom of some stairs, and then there wasn’t one, and you freak out that physics has stopped working for like a second, and you do that weird panic wobble? That’s puberty. Puberty is an entire staircase of extra stairs. It is a protracted stumble through what is and isn’t where you thought it would be. And in that elongated moment of physics not working anymore, you get a chance to take notes. And you gain the power that comes from watching yourself survive in brand new territory with every moment.

Puberty is a slow and mundane catastrophe, a Rube Goldberg machine of clumsy romance, shame, fear, and longing, that somehow, in spite of its haphazard mechanism, is supposed to produce a new person. It’s a desperate yard sale for drug money. It’s a carnival of knife wielding clowns. It’s life at its most… “life.”

The needle pushes through my nose, my toes curl. The piercer threads the ring through my new nose hole. I think: “My mum is going to be so pissed.”

The first time I did puberty, it wasn’t a joyous period in my life.

I grew up in the country, there was no-one around. We sat behind TV trays unbalanced on ugly carpet. Almost every meal would end in a fight. Their world was so tiny and uncurious. I found the edges of it and gnawed at them like a rat. Mosquito bites on my legs, I would push mashed potatoes around like a pile of grave dirt, then leave without a word. In the open world, in the grim black earth at the end of the driveway, my clattering bike carried me down the country roads.

This was my secret girlhood. The demand to perform maleness was ever-present, and I had quickly learned as a child how to fake it. But I didn’t have to do that when I was alone, and so, I spent most of my childhood alone. There was a gold light that singed the saltbushes and rushes, turning them black in the twilight, an estuarine stench, great clouds of insects parting and converging.

It never occurred to me to say anything about how I felt, about being a girl. I always assumed I would die, that simply, the pain would eventually kill me, and then I would never have to tell anyone about me, I would just be asleep.

It seems weird to me to call mine a ‘male puberty,’ when it utterly failed to produce a man. Some part of the machine, that I hoped would fix me, just didn’t fire. A bowling ball ran off the rails? A match failed to strike? Some superfluous, inane section of the Rube Goldberg just… missed. As I slowly realised that the changes in my body weren’t being reflected by a similarly changing mind — I started to panic.

Anti-trans ghouls will insist “You can’t be a woman because you don’t bleed.” But I bled plenty, don’t worry about that.

I waited for the other times. There was this sweet humidity, a bloom, a laudanum daze, that existed only in private moments. I remember when my mother went away for a while, and in the absence, I shaved my body hair, and for the first time in my life, I felt clean. I felt like all the lies had been cut down at the root. I wore what I wanted, talked how I wanted, and finally, smiled. The joy, in these moments, the purity of them, grotesque, and divine.

Rotting lantana in foraged pots, the spectral scent of ripe semen, the cuts and their exquisite mercy. I would dance. Birth defect between my legs, slutty yellow top, I kicked the air and let my hair fly around. My heart had an open field in it Sound of Music style, and I twirled through it like a big queer pinwheel. And I felt okay. And I remember days when there was a boy, who used to appear on my bus. I felt like he saw me for who I was. And he was plain, and straightforward, and honest. We would sit and talk and it was beautiful, because I had no idea what he meant to me, because I didn’t understand why I loved him, I just knew that I felt like someone had looked at me for the first time, and not turned away.

I told him something like this. I never saw him again.

For me puberty was stumbling down stairs, in someone else’s house. It was a suspension of physics surrounded by unfamiliar smells, décor, framed pictures of anonymous relatives dotted along the stair case wall, none of it mine. And at the bottom of those stairs, where you are supposed to right yourself, to dance all wobbly for a second before realising you’re fine — was a stranger. Puberty for me wasn’t emerging from an ‘awkward phase’ into myself, it was the training ground for a lifetime of secrecy.

It hurts a lot when people say things like “Trans people are lying about who they are.” Anyone who knew the first thing about us would know that transition is taking a costume off, not putting one on. To say we transition with some nefarious purpose is doubly painful, because it utterly discounts the extraordinary determination and self-sacrifice it takes to do this; it belittles the strength- and it must, of course, because it is a strength our detractors fear. After all, if we can change ourselves, go through all that upheaval, lose so much, and still stand up with pride in our hearts, then we can do fucking anything.

My nose hurts. I walk through Newtown, these days almost totally unnoticed except for an older woman looks at me disapprovingly. Does she know? Or is it just that I dress like the leader of a militia in a post-apocalyptic version of Seattle? I decide that I’m having too much fun to care.

I am in the fourth year of transition, the fourth year of my second puberty. At this point I can tumble down stairs without even spilling my drink. I am so at home in the chaos of it. I am playing poker in the middle a rodeo. All that familiar pandemonium, the visceral emotion, the way music hits your bones, the sex, the friendships, is just as heightened as it was before, but this time it feels right. There’s a dulling that happens after puberty, life’s edge gets kind of blunted, and we forget how important and world ending everything used to be. It’s wild to be immersed in it again at thirty-nine.

Life at its most life. Joy shakes off the dust, all hair dye and cigarettes. I am walking down the street. My nose hurts. Finally I’m finding the real me under the stranger. I am going to video call my mum, see if she notices the difference.

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Cassie Workman is a stand-up comedian, artist, writer, and musician. She is known around the world for her poetry, eulogies, and fables.