Wynsday's Child

From the onset of puberty, it was obvious there was a problem. I had my first period the summer before my 12th birthday, and didn’t have one again until I was thirteen. My mom didn’t believe that I’d truly had a period (we’ll talk about her labeling me a liar in another post), and assumed, when I had my second at thirteen, that I would start getting them monthly moving forward. I did not. So after eight more months and no period I was taken to the doctor. I had my first vaginal exam at thirteen and was mortified that someone was even looking “down there”. Being asked if there was a possibility that I could be pregnant was mind boggling to the extremely sheltered, neurodivergent girl who’d never even had a boyfriend outside the kind you have in kindergarten.

The doctor informed my mother and me that I had a “hormone imbalance” and I was given HRT because good Christian teen girls didn’t need birth control. There were patches and pills that made me cry and feel crazy every time I looked in the mirror. I didn’t understand what was happening to me or my body, I just knew I didn’t like the way it felt. None of it felt natural. After a few short months, I stopped taking the meds and when my mother noticed, she called me out on it. I remember telling her that “if this is how God made my body, this is how it should be!” I knew that anything I said about my feelings would be dismissed, but by invoking God’s name I might get a pass. Thankfully it worked. For the remainder of my teen years I went along with only random periods about 2-6 times a year. There was no rhyme or reason to them. Around the time I was eighteen I had a regular boyfriend and was having regular sex, so I went on birth control. My best friend and I went to the free clinic in our area and got our tickets to womanhood and all the condoms we needed. It was the ’90s after all and pregnancy wasn’t our only concern. Despite the fact that we’d both been taught abstinence only before marriage, we understood our urges and that we needed to be safe. The first year on birth control I gained nearly 50 lbs. I was likely depressed and unaware of it. I with a possessive boyfriend who was a few years older than me and my family structure had recently fallen apart, so adding hormones to that cocktail was detrimental. I broke up with the boy at 19 and went off birth control. I dropped 20 lbs in a month.

As a teen I remember my mom watching a talk show about PCOS and she called me into the room. “I think this is what you have!” she said excitedly. It was. As disinterested as I was to sit and watch the show with my mom, I learned that day that my hairiness was part of the issue. It would still be years before I could remember the term “hirsutism” but I finally understood why my legs looked more like my dad’s and brothers’ and less like my mom’s naturally practically hairless body. I mean, the woman plucked the hairs in her armpits and shaved her legs maybe twice a year, only having hair well below the knee. I began to wonder, am I a boy? I knew my testosterone was high, my estrogen was low, and I had interests far more in common with the men in my family than my mother. I was also fascinated with women in a way that I couldn’t explain, not understanding that bisexuality was a thing at all. I was puzzled, but in my conservative Christian family, I dare not speak it.

My early twenties were a different kind of beast. I began having painful periods, even if they weren’t monthly. At twenty I went to my first doctor’s appointment with a suspicion of endometriosis. The doctor sent me for a sonogram, and, when that came back clear (endometriosis only shows on a sonogram about 30% of the time, something I would learn at nearly 40 years old), the mean ole doctor looked at the little goth girl in front of her and made some terrible assumptions about my character: “I’m not just gonna give you pain meds!” I was being completely dismissed and judged on my looks. At least we know I looked like a girl (I’m giving a massive 50 year old woman eye roll here – gender bias in the medical field is real). This was only my first of many misinterpretations of me telling a doctor I’m in pain. My other favorite thing to do was tell doctors about my irregular periods. I was regularly treated as though I didn’t understand my own biology, was constantly given pregnancy tests, and consistently talked down to regarding my weight. I would try a couple of different forms of hormonal birth control before throwing in the towel. I understood being damned if I do, damned if I don’t when it comes to BC and weight loss. I had one doctor tell me, “Just because you feel hungry doesn’t mean you need to eat.” Fuck you, Françoise. At 23 I became pregnant, something I was told would be difficult without medical intervention due to PCOS. I was engaged and planning a wedding, and, knowing my medical history, I understood that this might be my only chance to have a child. It wasn’t something I was planning, certainly not that early in life, but it was an opportunity I knew I had to take. And, as life progressed, it was my only pregnancy. I’m proud to say I have a wonderful, thoughtful, intelligent, and handsome child.

Over the years I was drawn to stories of intersex folks. Stories on talk shows and nightly specials and magazine articles made me wonder about my own experiences. Yes, intersex folks can give birth to children, so that didn’t rule me out. I don’t have a beard, just a few hairs to pluck, but my male family members don’t have full beards or either. Same with their chest hair, and I’ve got the same few hairs around my nipples that I plucked like my mother did her armpit hairs. Many of the stories I heard or read talked about how no one told them they were intersex. Was that a possibility? I’ve been cut practically in half to give birth to my child and no one had bothered to mention the endometriosis it was discovered I have years later, so is it possible that no one told me that my body was actually intersex? And what did that mean? While I think I perform femininity fairly well, I’ve been described as masculine in a way that others couldn’t quite put their finger on. Was I a lesbian, people would ask simply because I disliked dresses and had a preference for jeans and t-shirts. The truth was I had no queer identity of my own, I was just doing what felt right for me. And most people would assume that I’m a woman because I wear women’s clothes and hairstyles, I have always been a big fan of makeup, I’ve been married to a man and had a child. Still there was this quiet question, am I a boy? Or boy-like? Intersex? What am I?

These days there is a conversation around the possibility that PCOS being an intersex variation. That wasn’t the case when I was growing up. I sometimes just felt “wrong” or “not fully female”. My reproductive organs are female, but never fully functioned like the women around me. While I had a more regular cycle as I moved into my thirties, it was still complicated and unpredictable at times. In my mid 20s I went a whole year without a period. In my thirties I settled into an approximate 45 day cycle, but that could still vary and skipping periods was commonplace. At forty-two, I finally had the hysterectomy I’d wanted after years of horrible periods. I had my uterus, fallopian tubes, and cervix removed and kept only my vagina and ovaries. At this time I was also, finally, diagnosed with Stage 4 endometriosis and Stage 4 adenomyosis, 22 years after that ugly old woman told me she wasn’t just gonna give me pain pills. I felt vindicated and angry none-the-less. Three years later, almost to the day, I had my left ovary removed due to continued disease. The multiple follicular cysts on the ovary had become encased by the scarring the endometriosis had produced, and I had a cyst the size of a baseball in the lower left quadrant of my abdomen (that was apparently pressing on another as-of-that-time undiagnosed issue with my lumbar spine causing terrible nerve pain, but that will be another post). So another part of my female make-up was removed. Since then I’ve functioned fairly well. I barely noticed perimenopause because my hormones had always fluctuated wildly. Menopause has been…different. Vaginal atrophy and the late development of hidradentitis suppurativa have been two of the more difficult developments in my life.

Here I sit. A fifty year old woman. Fully in menopause. That one ovary finally gave up the ghost. I’m comfortable with who I am and no longer worried about how people categorize me. Bisexual. Intersex. Woman. Witch. I feel each of these things a little bit. Let them guess. Their opinions no longer matter to me.