For Morgan Givens, the onset of puberty feels like an alien invasion.
Morgan Givens is a storyteller and performer based in Washington, DC. He has performed at Story District's Top Shelf, Creative Mornings DC, Little Salon and a host of other storytelling events throughout the city and along the East Coast. He has been featured in the Washington Post, Upworthy, Buzzfeed and participated in a panel at the 2017 AFI Documentary Film Festival Forum, titled Hear Me Now: The Art of Nonfiction Podcasting. Morgan is the creator and host of the podcast Dispatches, and uses his podcast to explore the intricacies of identity, culture, and the complicated nature of human interaction.
This story originally aired on June 1, 2018, in an episode titled “Coming of Age.”
Story Transcript
So I have the perfect body, because it’s mine. And growing up, there were kids who could run faster than me or kids who were dunking at 12 years old, tongues flailing from their mouths as they did their best Michael Jordan impression. I was not that kid. I was usually in the school library reading the latest fantasy or science fiction novel we had gotten or at home playing video games trying to figure out when best to revive a fallen character so that we could go on and beat the boss its final, final, final form.
My favorite video game was Resident Evil. It had zombies, misbehaving corporations, a flesh-eating virus that made anyone infected, human flesh-craving monsters, an infection that turned the body against itself. Oh, I thought this shit was amazing.
And then I got infected with an estrogen-laden hormone-infused invasion known as puberty. And just like in the horror movies, the call, oh, the call was coming from inside the house.
I was a kid of deep imagination. Often I would pretend that I was a swashbuckling pirate sailing the seven seas, rescuing damsels in distress, or a swarthy Lothario who knew just what words to say to make women swoon. My path was clear. The man I was going to become even clearer.
But what was apparently clear to everyone else, and not to me, was that at some point as a pre-teen, I would enter the bathroom and there I would find it in the crotch of my underwear. A small, red dot. The sounding of an alarm, the clarion call of biological reality coming toe to toe with everything I had imagined for my future and my dreams.
So of course I called my mother. “Ma. Ma. What is this? What is this right here?”
“Child, that’s your period. We talked about that. Remember?”
Oh, I remembered. We talked about it the same way we talked about the Black Death in school. It was something that happened to other people a long time ago and would never, under any circumstances, happen to me.
“Okay, a period. How do I get rid of it?”
“Baby, menopause.”
“Okay. Meno—what? Where do I get that?”
“You don’t get it. It’s something that happens to little girls who become women and their bodies just stop making enough estrogen.”
“Well, I ain’t a little girl and I’m not a woman.”
“Morgan Dionne, little boys do not get their periods.”
And what had started as a clarion call across the bow of my underwear became a full-on hormonal invasion as estrogen crested the hills of my ovaries, set up residence in the confines of my uterus, declared itself queen of my body.
But there was hope. My mother had given me the key. I only needed to go through menopause, and quickly.
Even as it became harder to like a body that began to soften in all the wrong places, I still loved it. It was a reason I could turn so many pages in my favorite novels and it gave me hands and let me write the stories that ran around in my brain itching to be placed on the page.
But never has the idea of unconditional love been tested in quite the way it was as when estrogen decided to take up residence on my chest, of all places. Setting up dune-like homes in which it could live. And I found myself in a department store with my mother as she waved training bras in my face.
“Baby, just try on one of these.”
“I am not going to do that. They are covered in rainbows and butterflies and flowers. We ain’t got no training bras with swords and shields? Maybe a zombie or two?”
“Why on earth would they put zombies on a training bra?”
But the more important question is what was estrogen training for? It was already more than halfway to winning the war.
I tried to fight it. I engaged in guerilla warfare that I learned from playing videogames like Final Fantasy tactics. And a blog post in 2002 told me through really rigorous scientific research that they had learned that if you ate hazelnuts, pecans and almonds you could increase your testosterone production. Which led to me dumping an eight-pound bag of pecans in front of a bewildered cashier.
“You are making a lot of pies.”
“I ain’t making no pie.”
“Cakes?”
“No cakes.”
“You got to be making cookies, yo?”
“No. Look, okay. Nuts make testosterone and I just need my nuts. Okay? And then I’m going to go.”
It would take years of false starts before I finally figured out how to fight back. I would first have to hear the word ‘transgender’ in middle school from Oprah Winfrey, of all people.
“Today, we’re going to talk to the families of children who say they were born in the wrong bodies. Transgender children.”
And I would have to find a doctor who believed me and was willing to prescribe testosterone. But when I found him, never have I felt the type of joy I felt as when that hormone began cresting through my bodies, taking over territory that had long been seated to the forces of estrogen, and hot on their tails was menopause.
Sure, it meant that at twenty-five years old I would go racing to the industrial freezer at my former job standing in negative zero temperatures as steam and mist rose off of my head, but I had a mission and I had a purpose.
Yeah, looking back, when my mom said that, “Baby, you got to wait for menopause,” I’m pretty sure that I only heard ‘man on pause’. And it would take time and years for me to learn to fight back, but one day I did. And I hit play but on the right hormone this time. Thank you.