Peach Fuzz

by Nova

“You came out wrong. You were cut out of me. I won’t be a real woman until I do it right.” Harsh words for five-year-old me wondering how I was born, but typical coming from my mom.

 Everything I did was wrong. I didn’t start speaking until I was three and when I did, everything I said was wrong. The organized and meditative playstyle I had was abnormal and wrong. I held writing and eating utensils wrong, I colored with crayons wrong, I sang wrong, and my interests were all wrong. I’d later learn that my mom thought she could abuse my disabilities and quirks out of me and mold me into the person she wanted to be. Unfortunately, all she did was teach me that I was wrong to my very core.

I was a blonde little girl with too-big glasses, the joint and back pain of a middle-aged barista, and the anxiety of a badly socialized chihuahua. Aside from the terrible home life, desperate poverty, and lack of supportive adults, elementary school was fairly uneventful. I was odd to other kids at times, but I made friends and maintained honor roll in spite of it all. I loved to learn, and school was an escape from my bad home life. I was so excited to start middle school. I’d make new friends, learn new things, and be one step closer to adulthood. Freedom. Middle school, unfortunately, was when my life became a living nightmare.

I had my first period when I was eleven during my first year of middle school. “These don’t grow on trees, so don’t use ‘em all up,” was the only advice my mom gave me along with a huge pack of pads. Those pads remained in the bottom drawer of my dresser for years to come, as I never had another period again. Instead, my body began developing differently than I expected. I wasn’t the girliest-girl in the world, but I liked being a girl. I looked forward to being a woman. I certainly wasn’t a boy and didn’t want to be a man.

“Girls aren’t supposed to grow peach fuzz! You’re hairier than me,” a little boy in my science class shouted, pointing at my face. Everyone turned to look, and some laughed. I heard “peach fuzz” whispered around the room while horror and self-hate bubbled up in me.

I hadn’t even realized. I was growing facial hair, and I was growing more than I’d ever seen on a girl. At eleven years old, I grabbed my dad’s razor and shaving cream and taught myself how to shave my face in secret. But it couldn’t stop there. I was growing thick stomach hair, chest hair, and darker hair on my arms than the other girls. I developed a daily ritual of sneaking a parent’s razor and shaving every inch of my skin, cheek to toe. And it had to be daily since the stubble would be back within eight hours. If I had a band recital in the evening, that meant shaving twice a day, irritating my sensitive eleven-year-old skin while trying not to cry over how monstrous and wrong I was.

No amount of shaving or learning how to apply the thickest makeup stopped my body shape from developing “incorrectly” for a girl. Kids began to comment on my “beer belly” and “man boobs” and I began fantasizing about cosmetic surgeries of every sort. Could they lipo out the stomach fat and put it in my chest and butt? Could they reshape my hips to look right in girl’s clothes? Could they burn every inch of my skin, follicle by follicle, to free me from this nightmare? Can they fix my face to look more like a woman’s? Why was every single detail about me wrong?

I kept this a secret from everyone in my life until I was fifteen, when my mom asked me for the first time in years if I needed any pads. What she thought I was doing all that time is anyone’s guess. I admitted that I stopped having periods after the very first one, but I kept the body hair issue to myself. It was too shameful. It would be admitting that I was a failure as a developing woman, something that terrified me beyond reason.

I was taken to a young, pretty OBGYN who was the very image of what I knew I would never look like. During my first ever pelvic exam, alone with the doctor, she asked why I shaved if I wasn’t sexually active. I froze and couldn’t reply. My jaw felt wired shut. To her, that meant I was sexually active, likely pregnant despite a negative test, and needed to be punished for being a lying slut. I was subjected to various invasive tests that were inappropriate for a sexually inactive child, that my therapist would later identify as sexual assault. I was humiliated, degraded, and assaulted by multiple women at that hospital and was told by my mom, “Just be grateful that they’re helping you.”

Once the young, pretty OBGYN got bored of assaulting a child, I was sent to an endocrinologist. He took one look at me and misdiagnosed me with polycystic ovarian syndrome, an ovarian disorder I didn’t have. I was put on a medication to regulate my insulin – not that I needed it – and on birth control to “fix the period problem.” I got wildly sick, both physically and mentally, and stopped taking the medications within six months. I was enduring trauma with a smile on my face, saying thank you every time I was given the wrong medication. I believed and trusted that they were trying to help me, and I knew I was the one who was wrong in the first place. I dropped out of high school amidst all the medical chaos, lacking any external support from any adults, unsupported by even a single teacher.

By the time I was twenty-one, I disowned my parents and left home, scraping by with very little support. Over the next five years, I ended up in bad situation after bad situation, trapped in a volatile relationship with someone who preyed on my insecurities. Job to job, apartment to apartment, homeless at some point. All this time, still shaving every day, often twice a day. Still wearing thick makeup and shapewear and wishing I could be anyone but me. I flinched away from any kind touch, platonic or otherwise. I felt irreparably wrong. Not even just wrong for a woman, but wrong in general. Fucked up. Unworthy. A waste of carbon and oxygen.

There was a point, sometime in those years, where I came across motivational speaker Harnaam Kaur and absolutely cried my eyes out. Kaur is a motivational speaker and model and was the first modern woman I’d ever seen with a full beard. She was feminine, beautiful, and absolutely glowing in all her photos. I remember crying hard over her photos and thinking I could never do that. I could never even try.  She was magical for doing what she was doing, but I was incapable of such magic. I tucked her away in the back of my mind, along with a collection of other gender-nonconforming baddies that helped chip away at the hard shell of never I was locked in.

I was twenty-six when I finally crumbled under the weight of it all. I was sitting in my beaten-up old car, trying to hold my broken-down spirit together. Hands gripping my shoulders, nails digging into my skin. I spent months trying to get a job, any job that would have me. And after only two days at this shitty warehouse job, I was let go after requesting a disability accommodation. My mind was clouded with graphic thoughts of ways I could “accidentally” run myself off the road and never make it back to my apartment, never having to tell my hostile partner that I failed yet again. The pain of my worthlessness felt physical, as if my blood turned to acid and was burning through my veins, melting me from the inside out. Wrong, as usual.

It’s hard to say why I made it home that day. Maybe I didn’t want to leave my cat behind without sorting out her future. Maybe I was terrified of the pain, the uncertainty, the repercussions if I failed. Maybe I just wanted to live more than I wanted to die. On my way home, I decided to give up on everything I was doing to please other people. What was the point? Who was I doing any of this for? I was exhausted. I shoved myself into boxes I never belonged in, trying to prove that I was worth something, anything at all. It never mattered. I was always too much, too needy, too disabled, too wrong. So, why try to be right? I found the first idea that gave me a spark of rebellious curiosity: What if I stop shaving?

The idea was terrifying. Everyone in my life would know I wasn’t a real woman. I would finally see the disgusting shame I’d hidden for fourteen years, that I’d worked every single day to hide. I never even went more than a day than shaving, so I had no idea what I’d look like. Horrible, I was sure. Hideous, monstrous, and wrong. The idea was exciting, though; it was a reason to stay alive to see what I’d look like. If things went badly, it’s not like I planned on sticking around, anyway. I wasn’t getting hired anywhere, I hated my partner, and I didn’t care anymore. So, I stopped shaving.

From day one, I took daily progress photos and shared them online, sharing the truth with the people I knew for years. The first couple of days were the scariest, and I hated how the stubble felt. I came to associate feeling stubble with the need to shower, and it was hard to disconnect those feelings. I didn’t leave the house much and I kept hiding my face in my shirt around the people I lived with.

Within the first week, however, I started to love the experience. People whose love I valued were incredibly supportive, and I wasn’t collapsing dead from growing a beard. I didn’t even hate how it looked. In fact, I was starting to like the way I looked. The feeling of rubbing my hand over the stubble. The lack of irritation from razors. Within a month, I couldn’t understand what I was so terrified of for fourteen years of my life.

Over the next year, I transformed into an entirely new person. I managed to get out of that bad relationship for good, won “Best in Show” at a small local beard competition, and dove headfirst into empowering others to accept themselves. I got involved with my local queer community, started exploring polyamory, and allowed people to touch my skin for the first time ever without flinching away. I began dressing in ways that felt fun rather than restrictive, only doing makeup for myself when I felt like it, and releasing myself from all the mental pits of poison I was festering in. For the first time in my life, I could look in the mirror and see myself as a real woman. I finally understood that there was nothing wrong with being me.

Through all of this, I was connected with the intersex community and found belonging I never knew existed. Many intersex people found out later in life that we didn’t have whatever disorder was assigned to us, never needed the medications or interventions forced onto us (or needed more of the socially “wrong” hormone to function) and are whole and good as ourselves. It’s a harsh sort of solidarity when it’s based in such a grim reality, but together we’re fighting hard for recognition and visibility. Fighting is much more gratifying than working day in and day out to “fix” something as benign as sexual androgyny. We will never be erased, no matter how hard anyone tries.  

And it’s hard, every single day it’s hard! Everywhere I go, I face the realities of being intersex and a woman. Other women are terrified of me now, and they often see me as a man or some inhuman monster invading their spaces – a crushing and isolating experience that the majority of trans folks also face. Many in the queer community believe we don’t belong among them, despite our history of queer activism and parallel struggles. Self-proclaimed “radical feminists” have discussed beheading me in the comments of my photos while a group of guys at a Steak and Shake in Norfolk, Virginia loudly considered stabbing me in the parking lot.

I can’t see myself ever going back, though. I can’t imagine ever hating myself like that ever again, no matter how violent and hateful anyone else is. I’m surrounded by more love than I’ve ever known or imagined. I have a vibrant chosen family full of queer folks of every sort, united by love, compassion, and freedom. I’m engaged to the coolest person I’ve ever known – someone comfortable in their own skin and more than comfortable with mine. After being homeless, unsupported, abused, and sabotaged every which way, I somehow managed to start college this summer and am already halfway through my first-ever term.

Every younger version of me would never imagine who or where I am now.  Comfortable, happy, loved, supported, and in college! Higher education was never an option for me until this year, and I’m overjoyed to have survived long enough to be here. I will go forth and excel, learning everything I can and growing into the most authentic version of myself. I will keep living my story, as hard as it might get, so I can keep telling my story. If being comfortable in my own skin is wrong, I don’t want to be right.