My Awkward Phase

“Can I have some tutoring now?”
“Only after you write an apology on the blackboard.”
Miguel went to the board and wrote “Sorry for calling Rios a sissy faggot.”
The class burst into a round of applause. Mr. Rogers handed him another pink slip
“Get out, and don’t come back”
Miguel got suspended for sexual harassment and reassigned to a different section. Marta became my most frequent tutee and Mr. Rogers’ most improved student. We once again became BFFs, best friends forever.
Formulary
Perhaps my physique destined me to be transsexual. I was pale, slender and weak, always the last picked for every team and the slowest in every race. My balls had failed to descend normally. After they were surgically extracted my genitals developed like a pre-pubescent’s rather than a man’s. Adolescent gynecomastia caused my breasts to swell to A-cups, and my boy boobs were still soft and jiggly when at 16 I finally jerked myself to my first orgasm, fantasizing about being a girl.
The summer after I got kicked out of St. Aybert’s I noticed the onset of my long-delayed puberty. My pubic peach fuzz thickened, a wispy mustache sprouted, and my high-pitched voice occasionally cracked. I panicked at the imminent end of my androgyny and decided to delay the onset of my manhood until the girl inside of me could safely emerge. I’d studied the websites and done the research, knew what I had to do to keep my transsexual option open, while the ambitious boy and the romantic girl wrestled in my subconscious.
To keep me busy and out of trouble, my dad arranged an internship at the UCLA medical school coding data from drug trials. It was boring and lonely but gave me ample opportunities to rifle through medical supplies that the drug companies lay off at clinics. There were cartons of syringes and vials of estrogen and progesterone in the supply room. Fully aware of the transformative power of these drugs, I smuggled out needles and hormones and began self-administered hormone replacement therapy, or HRT.
I injected the hormones in my inner thighs, where the needle marks and the bumps left by the viscous progesterone would be less noticeable. The needles’ pricks and my pain became symbols and signposts of my passage. I imagined that the proximity of my injection sites to their target intensified their assault on my incipient masculinity.