Penn thought but did not say: You can ask us anything. That should have been true, but he wasn’t sure it was.
Rosie thought but did not say: It was your fault. That shouldn’t have been true, but she wasn’t sure it wasn’t. She locked eyes with her husband. He felt like he was drawing breath from her lungs. She felt like he had lain down in the middle of the dining-room table and she’d opened his chest for surgery, that naked, that much of a look at what was supposed to stay inside and unseen. But surgery was familiar enough so once she began to explain, she wondered why it had ever seemed hard to her. It was clinical, medical, pharmacological, and she was a doctor. That was all. “Hormone blockers,” she said simply, and Penn grinned at her like she’d made a joke.
“Hormone blockers?” Frank and Marginny sounded like they were auditioning for a bad sitcom.
“We’ve been using these drugs for years,” Rosie the clinician explained, “to put a stop to what’s called Precocious Puberty. Sometimes we’ll see a little girl who has breast buds at six or a first-grade boy whose testes have already enlarged or who’s already sprouted pubic hair. These kids go on hormone blockers. The drug puts them on hold. It buys them time for everyone else to catch up. Then, when they reach the age of nine or ten, we take them off the blockers, and they proceed through puberty normally with everybody else.”
Penn looked giddy. Frank and Marginny looked like they were waiting for the punch line, so Rosie supplied it.
“Poppy will probably go on the same drugs—”
“Probably?” Penn broke in.
“—when she’s eleven or twelve or so. They would prevent her male puberty. They’d shut down the whole system so she would stay a little girl.”
Frank fake-gasped. “You can do a sex change on a minor?”
“Hormone blockers just pause the system.” Rosie didn’t like having to dip into her reserves of patience for patients on the weekend. “The effects of these drugs are reversible. It’s puberty that’s not. That’s why the clock is ticking. We have to stop Poppy’s—well, really Claude’s—puberty before it starts. If we wait until Poppy’s no longer a minor, she’ll be six feet tall with whiskers and a broad, hairy chest and big hands and men’s size-twelve feet, and those never go away. At that point, we could load her up with all the estrogen we like, and she’d grow breasts and get rounder and her voice would soften, but she’d still be taller than every girlfriend she ever had. She’d still have to order all her heels online. She’d have to get electrolysis for the remnants left behind by every single chest hair, every mustache whisker, every bit of beard. She’d have to have surgery to shave down her Adam’s apple. The blockers put a stop to what can’t be undone later. Then, when she’s older and ready for estrogen, it’ll work better because it’ll have less to overcome. Or if she changes her mind, we’ve done nothing that’s not reversible—”
“Changes her mind?” Penn interrupted.
“—because as soon as you take them off the hormone blockers, patients’ bodies proceed normally through their natal puberty.”
“But.” Marginny’s brow wrinkled. It was a sentence, not a preamble to one. It was entire. Later, Rosie was struck by how Marginny understood instinctively worries she could not explain to Penn, no matter which ways she tried.
“Yes,” said Rosie. “But. But Aggie will turn into a young woman, and Poppy will still be a little girl. But everyone else in their class will become teenagers, and Poppy won’t quite. But kids with Precocious Puberty eventually mature physically and emotionally with everyone else at the normal age, but Poppy will stay prepubescent while everyone around her grows into young adults.”
“Then … why?” Marginny asked.
“It beats the shit out of the alternative,” said Penn. Even once he’d mastered the hows of secret keeping, he’d stayed on the listservs, the blogs and Instagram accounts and Twitter feeds, the YouTube channels with their pages and pages of comments. The kids who weren’t on blockers, puberty was killing them. The affirmed boys’ breasts were tumors, poisoning their bodies, growing malignantly as cancer. The affirmed girls studied their faces like maps for hints of hair, of bone spread beyond flesh. They could feel disloyal hormones blooming inside them, scattering indissoluble toxins like pollen into ill winds. They had, they harbored, such hatred, such revulsion for change as inevitable as seas, like their lives would be over if the tide came in, as it did, as it always did. The Internet was full of broken, breaking kids who spent their lives hiding beneath too many layers of too baggy clothes, beneath binders and tape and pads and straps. And those were the lucky ones because there were also the ones who tried simply to cut off the offending body parts. And there were the ones whose cuts did not stop there. There were not just a few. There were hundreds. There were thousands.