The Hormone Department Is Closed (Unless You Want To Grow Boobs)

A Real-Life Journey Into Clown World

The decade that promised me I could look like the posters on my wall and the doctor twenty-five years later who encouraged me to grow a real nice set of tatas.

A couple years ago I went in to get my testosterone checked, which at my age is like checking the oil in a car you have been redlining since the Obama administration. The number came back LOW. Low for my age, said the chart, a phrase that lands somewhere between “interesting find” and “we’d like to run that again, sitting down this time.”

In fairness, I did this to myself. In my twenties I wanted to look like an action figure, because I grew up in the nineties, when every movie poster featured a man named either Sylvester or Arnold who was constructed entirely out of veins and patriotism and who was, the culture promised me, what A REAL MAN looked like. So after years of eating plain chicken and lifting heavy objects for no reason, a gentleman at my gym roughly the size and shape of a gorilla leaned over and explained the facts of life. “All them guys are juicing,” he said. “No matter what they tell you.”

And reader, I tried it. Sustanon, Trenbolone, the whole pharmacy. Thirty pounds of muscle in two years. I looked EXACTLY like the toy I had always wanted to be, which I recognize is not most people’s dream, but you don’t get to pick which childhood wound runs your life.

Then I stopped, kept training like a lunatic, and over the next two years deflated gently back into a regular, albeit very strong, guy. Goal accomplished. No regrets. Except it turns out that when you spend your twenties faxing your endocrine system a series of escalating threats, your forties eventually write back. And the letter is rude.

So there I am across the desk from my doctor, and I am using that word loosely, because she is a nurse practitioner who introduces herself as “Doctor,” which is not, last I checked, how medical degrees work. We go over the numbers. Low T, confirmed, in her own handwriting.

I ask the single most obvious question a man can ask. Could we maybe look at testosterone replacement therapy, seeing as how I am running on fumes per the document she is currently holding?

She looks at me and says, “It isn’t natural.”

I pointed out, calmly at first, that NOTHING in that building was natural. Not the fluorescent lights, not the laminate desk, not the clipboard, not the blood test that detected the problem she was now refusing to fix. Modern medicine is a four hundred billion dollar industry built entirely on improving on nature, that being the entire point of it, but sure, let’s draw the sacred line at the one molecule my own body used to make in abundance. She was unmoved. She declined to treat me. I left, because arguing with a person holding a prescription pad is like arguing with a tollbooth.

The face you make when the medical professional refusing your treatment is balanced on a yoga ball in a clown wig, lecturing you about what’s “natural.”

A month later I’m back for an unrelated checkup. Same office. Same “Doctor.” And on a whim, mostly as a science experiment, I tell her I have been doing some soul searching and have realized I am a woman trapped in a man’s body, and I would like to start estrogen and transition to becoming a ‘woman’.

Her whole face lights up like a slot machine. “That’s FANTASTIC,” she says, already reaching for the exact pad she would not touch thirty days earlier. “We can get you started today.”

Today. Same day service. No waiting period, no lecture about nature, no furrowed brow of concern.

The woman who would not refill my own engine oil was ready to hand me a completely different chemical that would grow me a pair of breasts, pull my testicles up into my crotch, and have me sobbing into a throw pillow at the end of every Meg Ryan movie ever filmed.

THAT one cleared the natural test. That one she’d sign for before I finished the sentence.

So I asked her, at a volume the entire waiting room got to enjoy, how in the name of God testosterone is unnatural for a man but estrogen is fine, and informed her that I was beginning to think I should REPORT HER FOR MALPRACTICE, because one of us in this room did not understand what these hormones do and it was not me.

She did not laugh. She threw me out and told me, those exact words, to “never come back.” Which I have honored, partly out of respect and mostly because I cannot afford another copay to be screamed at by a vending machine with a lanyard.

So I’ll leave it with you, because I am tired and my numbers are not climbing on their own. Who decides what is best for a person now? The studios that sold me the action figure I bankrupted my hormones chasing? The “doctor” who would not give me the hormone I am supposed to make but could not WAIT to put me on the one I’m not? Or the guy who actually lives inside the body, who read his own chart, and is just asking, out loud, for a little help with the plumbing?

I’ve got my answer. I want yours. Drop it in the comments, because at this point I honestly cannot tell whether I am the crazy one or the last sane man in the waiting room, and you people are the only second opinion I still trust.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.