Testosteroni

For those of you who have never heard this, I’ve long joked that I am actually a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. By which, I mean that I have a lot of “manly” characteristics and like to do “guy stuff,” but I definitely like-of the boys. For example, I really enjoy both building and destroying things and playing with power tools, and I have enough facial hair to go ahead and call it a full beard. Now, I’ve always suspected that this was largely due to having higher levels of testosterone than average for a woman, but I never did have any confirmation of that. Until recently. I had a really strange discussion with the doctor about starting on the Pill again to help control my acne (another symptom of too much testosterone), and during the course of that conversation, he just sort of flippantly said that I do have this condition of having too much testosterone. The weird thing is, he said it like we’ve talked about this and it’s just some part of my medical history that everyone knows. Everyone but me.

 

The good news is that the treatment for too much testosterone is to put me on the Pill. So, the end result is the same, it was just a really strange trip to get there.

 

Since this discussion, I’ve found myself wondering how much of my physical and psychological self is actually affected by this skew. I mean, I have to think that I’m not alarmingly high on the spectrum of women or I’d be losing my hair and braiding my beard ZZ-top style by now. But it did make me start to think about the stereotypes we play into for gender roles, and how many of those “male” things I do might be different if I had less man-essence and more womanly-ness. Like, would I be more interested in doing my hair and wearing make-up? Would I want less pizza and beer and more salad greens? Would I be more nurturing? Would I have wanted to get married when I was younger the way other girls did? Would my hobbies and interests be different? Even assuming the stereotypes are true, it must be more complex than just hormonal influence, because I’ve been considered (and considered myself) a tomboy for my whole life, long before testosterone would have come into play (right?). I was playing football and soccer with the boys on the grade-school playground while the girls were talking on the swings. In high school, we didn’t have a girls’s soccer team, so I played with the boys and didn’t give it a second thought. When I wasn’t playing soccer, I was taking martial arts classes. And when I think about all of those things, I also recall that, in all those situations, I was completely and totally boy-crazy. I loooved being the only girl in a whole group of boys – loved it. I dated lots of guys that I met in all these boys’ games.

 

I don’t have a poignant summary for this one. These are just some thoughts that have rolled around in my mind for the past few weeks and I thought I’d put them out into the ether – perhaps fodder for the old nature-vs-nurture debate. I do want to point out that I’m actually OK with me, like I am, and that I really don’t think this little extra testosterone actually makes me who I am today. I like myself as a person, and I’m probably about as OK with myself as a woman in our culture can be, given all the pressures we face.