by Jacob Tobia
Growing up, wizards were the closest things I had to role models. Where other characters used the brute strength of their masculine bodies to vanquish their foes, wizards used their wit, their spirit, and their magic. They didn’t need to be strong—they needed to be dedicated. They didn’t need to be brutal—they needed to be cunning. Where others fought with their fists, wizards fought with their passion.
I started to realize that if being a nerd meant getting to read about wizards and talk about them with my friends, I could maybe make it through my childhood after all. When nowhere else in the world gave me positive messages about my femininity, Gandalf, Merlin, and, of course, Dumbledore, stepped in to save the day. They were my heroes. But more than that, they gave me a narrative of survival. All wizards were misunderstood as children. All wizards struggled to contend with their powers. All wizards had to go on a harrowing journey in order to find mentorship, support, and other people like them. And once they found that support, once they found a community that helped them learn to use their power for good, wizards were all-powerful.
If they could be unstoppable, I knew I could be, too.
Also, have you ever read any gay Harry Potter fan fiction? That stuff is sexy and intense.*
* * *
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Unsurprisingly, my first successful friendship with another boy was with one just as nerdy as I was. His name was Nathaniel—he didn’t go by Nathan, he went by Nathaniel—and we met as auspiciously as two nerds could expect to: at handbell practice. I recognized him from elementary school, but he was in a different class than me, so we’d never gotten to know each other until we bumped into each other at practice.
Nathaniel was a dream made in nerd heaven. He was the nerdiest boy I’d ever met. Some days, he even made me feel like the cool one. We would spend hours talking about the history of trains, and I learned very quickly that they were to be called locomotives, not trains. Apparently, the word train wasn’t sophisticated enough for their sheer technical brilliance. If I ever tried to call them trains, Nathaniel would get angry with me and start yelling. Which is how I learned that, sometimes, the words we use to describe something can be really important to other people, even if the differences don’t make that much sense to us, and that it’s just easier to listen when people teach us how to talk about things that are important to them. (I’m assuming you get that this is a queer allegory by now, right?)
By the end of third grade, Nathaniel and I would spend our time together in nerd bliss. We’d build model locomotives, read books about science, and spend hours playing piano together. He’d play a song, I’d play a song, he’d play a piece that he was composing, I’d try to keep up. He was a much better piano player than I was, but I was a much better singer, so we were even. He taught me how to play chess and lived to regret that decision, because I became a worthy adversary. He’d wanted a chess partner to beat, not a chess partner to legitimately compete against. Once, when I had him checked and was clearly going to win, he decided chess was no longer an interesting game.
“You know what? I’m bored. Chess is boring,” he decreed. “Let’s go play outside instead.”
He considered it an incomplete game, but I recognized it for what it was: a forfeit. I was smug for the rest of the day.
We’d have sleepovers at his house or at my own, and because I didn’t have a crush on him, they were just normal sleepovers. No sexual overtones, no romantic undertones, just the normal-ass tones of a great friendship. We’d stay up late at night talking about the theory of relativity and how if time was the fourth dimension, what could the fifth possibly be? We’d spend hours speculating on other universes, time travel, neutron stars, and the energy required to tear a hole in the space-time continuum.
Because of my friendship with Nathaniel, my nerdiness increased ten-fold and my queer escapism took on a more academic lilt. I was still into wizards, mind you, but in addition to wizards I became fixated on astronomy and Egyptology. Nathaniel thought both of these subjects were not only interesting, but cool.
Through focusing on ancient civilizations, I got a break from thinking about the present. Ancient Egyptians all seemed queer to me. Everyone, regardless of gender, got to wear gorgeous, thick, structured eyeliner and heavy lapis lazuli jewelry. Men and women alike were depicted in luxurious, flowing garments made of finely woven linen. Pharaohs were some of the original divas, demanding that they be buried with all their most beautiful possessions. I drank up every hieroglyph.
Astronomy provided a different comfort. Thinking about nebula that were millions of light-years away, I was able to get away from what was happening here on Earth. I loved looking at pictures of space. I’d spend hours reading through science books. I checked out every single book on space that my elementary school library had to offer.
Have you ever really taken a moment to look at photos of a nebula? The Hand of God, the Cat’s Eye, the Ring? Each is captivating, each is stunningly beautiful. It brought me great comfort to know that floating above us in the night sky, far away from this planet, throughout the universe, there were shimmering clouds of glitter, rainbow constellations of gas, bursting with energy yet invisible to the naked eye. And that even if you can’t see something, even if the sky appears to be black, there are infinite colors and shapes, beyond our wildest imagination, waiting to be discovered, waiting to reveal themselves to humankind.
* * *
—
At the end of fifth grade, Nathaniel’s family moved to Austin, Texas. At one of the last sleepovers we had at his house, he went downstairs to work on something with his dad, and I was left alone upstairs for a few minutes. I looked to my left and noticed his sister Madeleine’s Barbie collection sitting in a translucent plastic bin.
Listening carefully for any sign of Nathaniel, I cautiously took the lid off the bin to explore. In similar moments of surreptitious play, I would’ve reached immediately for the most ornate dress I could find and picked the most beautiful Barbie to put it on. But this time, when I opened the bin, something else caught my eye.
Sitting atop a mound of cheap sequined dresses and tiny plastic shoes was a totally naked Ken doll. I paused, captivated. Something deep within me churned; inexplicably, I was out of breath. I picked up the doll, slowly, carefully; I marveled at his complete nakedness, the muscularity of his arms, the gentle curvature of his butt. Ensconced in the safety of Nathaniel’s playroom, I pried Ken’s legs open, riveted by how his hips moved in their sockets. His chest was bare and muscular, his hair blond and coiffed.
There were feet on the stairs. Panicked, I threw Ken in the bin and put the lid back on, barely closing it in time before Nathaniel barged back into the room. Luckily for me, he was oblivious to what had just occurred. He sensed nothing of my sexual awakening.
I hadn’t realized it yet, but my body was starting to change. Coursing in my veins, unannounced and unexplained, was a furious stream of hormones, an endless cascade of chemicals that would go on to alter almost every facet of how my body related to the world and, more important, how the world related to my body.
I spent the next three days puzzling over what my feelings meant. Overnight, I felt comparatively little interest in Barbie or her clothes. Where I’d spent so much of my childhood desperate to be able to dress Barbie up, a new desire had taken hold, one that supplanted my quest for sequins and tulle and ballerina skirts. My femininity and my gender issues took a back seat, because from there on out, it was about one thing and one thing only: boys, boys, boys.
Chapter 3
Inharmonious Hormones
To say that I was an early bloomer is the understatement of the century. That metaphor just doesn’t carry enough weight. I wasn’t an early-blooming flower—I was a freak snowstorm in the middle of July. I was a twelve-day rainstorm in Los Angeles. I was so exceptional, so out of the ordinary, so singular in my ability to grow body hair, that I need a metaphor with more drama to de
scribe myself.
It’s almost as if my parents had set me up. First, my father is Arab American; my body’s natural state is tan, fuzzy, and covered in olive oil. Second, because I had an August birthday, my parents started me in school a year later than normal. They knew I would either be one of the youngest in my class or one of the oldest, and they thought it was safer for me to be almost a full year older than many of my peers. I ask my mother about that decision to this day, convinced it had something to do with her knowing that I was super queer and wanting to be sure that if I was going to be so obviously homosexual, I could at least be older than the other kids as protection. She says that had nothing to do with it. When I ask her about it, she matter-of-factly says, “You were either going to be the oldest or the youngest, and we thought it’d be better for you to be oldest.” I think there’s more to the story. And if it wasn’t my glaring queerness that inspired my parents to start me late, maybe it was because my mom loved having me around the house so much that she didn’t want to let me go? That’s probably it. That’s what I’ll tell myself.
Being older and having Middle Eastern roots was already a one-two puberty-punch. Add the fact that—surprise!—I’m trans, and the story becomes nothing short of comical. I have no choice but to have a sense of humor about the whole thing.
For many gender nonconforming and trans folks, puberty feels like a death sentence, the beginning of the end. Your body starts to change and everything suddenly feels wrong and your whole world is turned upside down. In retrospect, I hate my puberty. I loathe it. I wish I’d grown up ten years later than I did, after the Trans Tipping Point™, so I could’ve gotten on hormone blockers, thought through some things, and perhaps made a more informed decision about how my body was going to progress. I hate watching little-kid Jacob squandering their ability to slow down their biological process; I want to buy them a chance at transitioning physically. I want to put on a really cute skirt, hop in the DeLorean, go back to the past, slap my fifth-grade self in the face, and just be like, “Hey! You! Stop this puberty mess. You don’t want it. Trust me.” And then, just as my time machine is running out, cry out, “You’ll have back hair by the age of twenty-siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiix———save————yourself!”
But to say that I begrudged my puberty as it was happening just wouldn’t be right. Honestly, I was way too busy being horny twenty-five hours a day, three-hundred-sixty-six days a year to even think about my gender identity.
When testosterone hit my system, it hit hard, if you, erm, get my drift. Like, just hard all the time. Like, hard for absolutely no reason. Like, the wind would blow and I would get an erection. I would be riding into school with my carpool and the car ride would get a little bit bumpy, and presto—I’d get a stiffy. I would take one look at my crush, and kapow—accio, boner! The only useful thing about the childhood bullying I endured was that it compelled me to switch from short shorts to baggy cargo shorts. The switch was fortunate because cargo shorts just had, well, more room to move, as it were, without being seen.
The worst part was that my voice started changing, and when it changed, it dropped. Over the course of a year or so, I went from a boy soprano (the highest women’s vocal part) to a solid bass (the lowest men’s vocal part). I went from being able to hit a high C two octaves above middle C to barely being able to hit middle C. I went from being a talented and skilled singer with an exceptional range to being a clumsy one who could no longer sing pop music. I pretty much had to give up the idea of being a diva. If my voice had changed and I’d landed as a tenor, I could’ve still been a front man. I could’ve still sung solos in church and praise band and school choir. But being a bass is being condemned to melodic obscurity. No pop music is written for basses. No lead parts in musicals are written for basses. In the choral world, basses get fuck all. Being used to getting any soprano solo I wanted, I cannot tell you how crushing this was for my fragile, fragile ego.
While my voice was the most emotionally devastating change, the leg hair was by far the most awkward. Not because it made me feel dysphoric, per se, but because it set me so far apart from the other kids my age. My shins and calves were pretty much covered in leg hair by about fifth grade. It felt shameful to be the only person in my grade with hair on their legs. I was scared to wear shorts for a full year before my friends began catching up body hair–wise, though many of my classmates didn’t get real leg hair until well into eighth grade.
Looking back on my developmental advantage, I am split in two. On one hand, I wish puberty hadn’t been so intense for me. I wish I was one of those blond, skinny, relatively hairless types who can actually pull off androgyny without immediately looking like a “man in a dress.” I wish I had one of those waifish, hairless, sleek bodies that look good in fashion magazines and on runways. Watching my puberty from afar, it’s hard not to feel like my body was just getting uglier, less desirable, less conducive to my future safety, career, and romantic success.
By the same token, I can’t help but be grateful for how my body changed. The fact of the matter is, throughout the entirety of middle and high school, my body was always more masculine than those of my peers. Even into college, I had the most masculine body in school. Because I had leg hair from fourth grade onward, because my voice changed in sixth, because I was six feet tall by seventh, because I started shaving in eighth, because I had chest hair by tenth and belly hair by eleventh—because of all those things, I was safer. I was less of a target for others.
My body provided protection and a stable identity, despite the fact that I was so obviously feminine. Many feminine-of-center boys and teens are bullied consistently throughout their entire adolescence, but for me, the bullying stopped as soon as I had body hair. Yes, it set me apart and made me feel a little bit like a yeti, but my physical body kept me safe where my gender identity was so uncertain. I’m sure my classmates looked at me with some frequency and thought, Jacob is really feminine, huh? But that thought was almost always countered with But he’s already shaving . . .
The irony of this protection is not lost on me, because the thing that kept me safe as a teenager is exactly what puts me at the greatest risk today. Being gender nonconforming and existing in public is tricky for everyone. But it is especially tricky for male-bodied people whose bodies are very, well, male. For people who have more androgynous body types, less body hair, or less facial hair, you can sometimes wear a dress without eliciting too much unwanted attention. But for those of us who have full-on facial hair, semipermanent five o’clock shadow, fully furry legs, and a hairy chest to boot, there’s never really any blending in. Even when I wear a dress and heels, no one looks at me and mistakes me for a female-bodied person. And that often makes walking in public an unsettling experience. People stare at me so much, I don’t notice it anymore. People yell “faggot” or “tranny” or “What is that?” or “What the fuck?” at me so often, I don’t even really hear them, a chorus of bigotry so constant and perpetual that it becomes background music.
So while the masculinity of my body would come back around to bite me in the ass, for the time being, I was safe. Safe, and extremely confused. I didn’t know what was happening to my body. I didn’t understand all the changes. And I didn’t have the internet quite yet, so I couldn’t just Google it or watch a “How to be trans and get through puberty and look totally cute” YouTube tutorial like kids do today. Instead, I got my information the old-fashioned way: My parents gave me a book.
The book was called Puberty, Puberty, Puberty, Puberty: For Boys!* On the cover, there was a picture of a dad and his son tossing around a baseball. The son had a bowl cut. The 1988 edition that we had in my house, acquired from a used bookstore at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, was special because it had a big orange sticker on the top right corner of the cover proclaiming that it “NOW COMES WITH INFORMATION ABOUT AIDS!”
It was the most scandalous book in our house. My brother had been given the book
three years earlier, when he began his hormonal journey, but with strict instructions not to let me read it under any circumstances. Which of course meant that I wanted to read it immediately.
My parents didn’t give me the book until two years later, but when they did, it was like uncovering the Holy Grail. All of a sudden, I had the power, the knowledge of good and evil, in my hands. I pored through the entire book in a day.
Most of it was pretty boring and medical, but neat enough. I thought it was interesting, for example, that my testicles hung at different heights so that they wouldn’t smush up against each other so much. I also thought it was pretty cool that I could produce millions of sperm a day. But nothing excited me as much as the section about sex. It described, in detail, what (heterosexual) sex was, how (heterosexual) sex worked, and how to know if you were ready to have (heterosexual) sex. It even had a few diagrams, which I found thrilling, especially the one of an erect penis inside a vagina. But most important, it had an entire section about sexual orientation, and specifically, about homosexuality and bisexuality.
Homosexuality
When we talk about sexual desire and romantic attraction, there is one taboo topic that always seems to come up: homosexuality. The prefix “homo” means “the same.” So being a homo-sexual means that you are attracted to other boys and men like you—that you fantasize about, crush on, or spend time daydreaming about people who are the same sex.
Go on . . .
Oftentimes, young boys are made fun of or taunted because they are perceived to be homosexual.
Uh-huh.
These insults and slang terms lead many adolescent boys who are experiencing homosexual feelings to be concerned that their feelings might not be natural or acceptable. You may have heard that many people believe homosexuality to be wrong, immoral, unnatural, or a sign of mental illness.
