Trans & Asexual “Puberty”: It’s Okay if it’s a Phase
By Theo Northcraft, March 2023
Trans people often have a difficult relationship with puberty: some of us delay its onset with pubertal blockers, and some of us experience it two or more times when we undergo hormonal replacement therapy (HRT) and/or detransition later in our lives. Testosterone and estrogen impact libido, which potentially changes the kinds of sexual attractions a person does or does not feel; generally, endocrinologists tell us that taking testosterone increases or creates one’s sex drive whereas taking estrogen decreases or erases it.
None of the scholarship below explicitly addresses asexuality and HRT as they relate to trans people, but we can use this reading list to help us begin thinking about (a)sexualities while keeping the complexity of trans puberties in mind; I am challenging us to create a narrative of (a)sexuality using the lens of “puberty” to think both about hormones and about ideas of development, growth, or change.
The first source is Martha McClintock and Gilbert Herdt’s “Rethinking Puberty,” an older but important article that foregrounds the role of hormones in the development of sexual orientation and personal identity. Psychologists of the 1970s conceptualized of “puberty” as a time when an adolescent’s gonads (their testes and/or ovaries) developed. They assumed that sexual attraction was the result of gonadal maturation, and that people only experienced sexual attraction after puberty. McClintock and Herdt challenge this narrative: they point out that many children have their first experiences of sexual attraction when they are about 10, before the physical changes of puberty begin (the physical changes occur between 12-16 years old). McClintock and Herdt suggest that sexual attraction may predate physical puberty because during middle childhood, “a significant hormonal event” occurs as adrenal glands, the glands that produce hormones, mature (178). McClintock and Herdt stress the significance of hormones in the production of “aggression, cognition, perception, attention, arousal, emotions, and of course, sexual identity, fantasy and behavior” (182). In other words, hormones directly impact our libidos––and potentially, our sexual and romantic orientations––more than our body’s physical development of its testes and/or ovaries. This study explains why our endocrinologists warn us about HRT impacting, creating, or erasing our sex drive, and it also helps us disarticulate the onset of libido from the physical developments that occur during the span of time that doctors call “puberty.”
The second source is Cameron Awkward-Rich’s “Trans Study (1), and: Sterile.” Awkward-Rich’s poem puts us in the mind of a young trans person sitting at the endocrinologist’s office waiting to begin their HRT. The trans person thinks about what they do and don’t want from their life as they wait, and they meditate on their strained relationship with their significant other. Awkward-Rich’s poem concludes by questioning our capacity for self-knowledge when it comes to love, identity, and childhood. In this conclusion, the poem showcases an intriguing tension between the speaker’s argument that young people can’t know some things about themselves (such as what they want from a partner), and the speaker’s unwavering assertion that they know that they want HRT. Awkward-Rich’s poem reminds us that different points in our lives are confusing for a host of reasons, and that how we perceive ourselves, others, and our desires for others tends to change throughout time.
Ela Przybylo’s book review of Karli June Cerankowski and Meagan Milks’ Asexualities is the third source on this list. In addition to succinctly explaining Cerankowski and Milks’ research, “Asexuals against the Cis-tem!” makes the case that “asexuality and asexuality studies should be of prime interest to scholars in transgender studies” because both communities have been marginalized “through tactics of disbelief, invalidation, and claims of inauthenticity” (654); both challenge hetero- and homonormativity by ways “not accounted for by queer theory” (655); and because the two fields often overlap with each other, as many of us identify as both asexual and transgender (656). These points emphasize the productive potential of keeping both trans and asexuality studies in mind as we continue to cultivate both emergent fields.
The fourth source is Megan Milks’ “Stunted Growth,” which uses the language of sexuality studies to make our asexual community’s grievances about invalidation more legible to queer theorists. Milks questions where and how asexuality studies should interact with current academic discourses on sexuality: she points out that many queer and feminist intellectual lineages have devalued asexuality, constructing it as “an immature, under-developed, and incomplete form of pre-sexuality suffering from stunted growth” (10). Despite the new vocabulary that asexuality studies uses to describe “sexuality, romance, eroticism, orientation, attraction, desire, and sexual identity,” many feminist and queer politics have dismissed the field and failed to consider how radically asexuality could help us reimagine our life possibilities. Milks’ article prepares we trans and asexual theorists to endure some level of resistance from the queer and feminist theorists with whom we should enjoy community and comradery.
Queenie’s blog post “Navigating adolescence as an asexual,” the fifth and final source of this list, helps us think about how “coming out” feels for many young asexual people. Queenie describes the invalidation that many asexuals experience as adolescents (and indeed, even as adults) since it is assumed that they will “grow into” their sexuality. Because of this constant invalidation, Queenie writes that many asexual people miss “puberty’s” “tacit ‘coming out window’” of 12–16 years old during which “you were expected to come out or forever hold your peace.” Many people claim their asexual identity later in life, after “puberty”; they do this when they feel sure that they had not “somehow gotten an F in Puberty 101.” I would point out that many of we trans people feel like we too got “an F in Puberty 101” because we took pubertal blockers, or because we detested the physical development(s) of our breasts, beards, testes and/or ovaries between the ages of 12–16. And if you are (or were) asexual and trans as I am (and was), then you got “an F in Puberty 101” multiple times: an “F” on developing a sexual orientation, on growing into your sex, and settling into your gender identity.
I hope that sources four and five, Milks’ article and Queenie’s blog post, remind us why phrases like “it’s not just a phase” exist on t-shirts, pins, and banners in much of the queer community: heteronormative regimes tell us that we will “grow out of” our (a)sexual orientations and/or gender identities, and that we will grow into a cisgender heterosexuality. “It’s not just a phase” as a popular sign of queer resistance responds to the discrimination that many of us endure, but ultimately I am suggesting that we try to be more mindful about whom the “it’s not just a phase” rhetoric excludes. A trans person who identifies as asexual before HRT but transitions into their pansexuality after several months of HRT does go through “a phase” of asexuality. But that doesn’t make their experiences or shifting identities any less real during any point of their transition; they were not less ace than someone who remains asexual throughout their whole life, or throughout their gender transition. We might say that this trans person’s experience with asexuality was “a phase”––but “not just a phase.”
These five readings are of disparate genres and disciplines, and taken together, they help us think through how complex “puberty” and identity are for those of us who use HRT to transition among genders at different points in our lives. By keeping them in mind, we can use the constellation of trans, asexuality, and “puberty” to ask new questions of how, why, and when we validate various orientations and identities.
