Precocious Puberty and The Sin Of Growing Up Too Fast.

Precocious puberty is a term I first heard when I eight-years old and seated in front of a fifty-year old endocrinologist. I had absolutely no idea what it meant but I knew that something about getting my period at that age is what had led us there. Prior to that, my body had been something of a concern to my family for a couple of years. In the year that I graduated kindergarten and started elementary school, I had started to grow hair in my pits, pubis and face, and as soon as I started elementary school, I needed a sports bra. In that phase, I started to experience sexual desire as well. As I understood it back then that is what precocious puberty meant.

Now, I want to talk about it.

Before I do talk about it, I want to clarify and state a few things. First of all, this is a discussion of a real problem that afflicts real people when they are children, it is not a discussion of *nymphets* from the Humbert Humbert persuasion. It is not a story told for the male gaze in order to normalise a system of sexualisation of the young. I struggle to talk about it now, it was easier to talk about when I was young enough to be closer to my own experiences, but it is only recently that I have begun to truly understand the vast impact it has had on my life. If you read this, please bear in mind that as an adult, I am writing about *my* life and that alone, if it is jarring or uncomfortable, take solace in the fact that it is real but if it titillates you in some way, that’s on you, not on me.

Precocious puberty is easy enough to understand as a concept, and there is some amount of medical research on the subject, but I want to talk about it from a more personal space. As a child when I was first diagnosed, it was directed at me like a sentence for a crime I had committed. All of a sudden, all of these adults—my parents, aunts, doctors and teachers—began to examine and accost me for having done something wrong. Some suggested it was my “lifestyle,” and you know what, maybe I was partying too hard and doing too many drugs in the second grade. Others said it was caused by stress and I was at fault for *taking too much stress*, funnily, no one ever thought to question why a six-year-old would be so stressed they’d spontaneously sprout breasts. Some told me that I was in too much of a rush to grow up, so much that I had somehow manipulated my body into menarche. After the initial shock of it wore off, came the revulsion. I was never really a cute innocent child, people have a hard time seeing it that way when certain attributes like facial hair, breasts and sexual desire begin to manifest in a creature so small. It is easier to demonise.

To varying extents, all children go through phases of sexual development, even at ages when they are too young to fully understand, but in my case (as well as that of others who may have the same condition) the latent phase was over too soon, and even before I knew what sex was, I was thinking about it all the time. I wasn’t just thinking, though, I was also actively trying to make it happen. It consumed me, akin to a teenager at fourteen or fifteen, I was aroused all the time before I hit double-digits, and even though it made no sense, I knew what I wanted. I actively solicited it from the people around me, and when I think back to that now, as an adult, I find it horrifying that the only intervention that ever occurred was by people who wanted to take me up on it. It’s this thing about children asking questions about sex, we know we should encourage it and be honest, but we also know that there’s *a right age* to start discussing certain things and when the child asking, or worse, exhibiting this behaviour is too young, it’s disturbing, we don’t want to deal with it, we want to shut it down. So I was insulted, beaten, medicated into hormones and diet pills, all before I was old enough to even begin to grasp that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, because I was repeatedly told that I was doing it on purpose, and if I just stopped, everything would be okay. I was beaten for writing erotic stories, for trying to attract strangers on the internet or through my phone, for performing elaborate sexual rituals by myself in my room and other such things, they believed that if I stopped doing those things, I would be fixed.

But I didn’t know how to stop, just like I had no idea how it had begun. I could have stopped one thing or the other, but I would always find another way. I just knew that there was something alluring about what I felt inside me, and I retreated into a secretive life, in which I grew bolder and bolder, as I got older. I began an unfettered pursuit of sexual spectacle empowered by the idea that I was the child in question, and if anyone chose to engage with me sexually as an adult, they bore criminal responsibility, while I would just be socially ostracised, and that was happening anyway. It didn’t feel like so much of a gamble to me. This began way earlier than any process of developing safe sex methods or ethical sexual practises was even on the horizon. As a child, I had been relegated to being a kind of monster, and at some point, I decided to embrace the monster and let it play with whomsoever. I figured, at worst, there was only one victim, and I felt enough loathing towards myself not to care so much about that anyway. So I went looking for the absolute worst people I could think of in society, people who would *actually* fuck a child. I always told the truth about how old I was, even when I was only thirteen or fourteen, which meant that any of the men who chose to engage knew exactly what they were doing. I don’t know why that felt like a victory.

Of late, I have been seeing it from a different perspective, a few different ones, actually.

The first is related to how I view my body. I have no memories of it as a non-sexual entity so to this day, its primary purpose remains sexual in my head. That has also governed how I feel I am viewed by other people. Some of the self-loathing that is directed at my body is coming from the place where I blame it for enabling abusive and pedophilic men for being attracted to me. I know that’s not true or rational assignment of responsibility, but these feelings don’t seem to follow a reasonable path. I also feel a degree of alienation from my body because it had been deemed *wrong* for so long, I guess I just believed some of that. Aside from that, by far, the most jarring perspective I have begun to confront is how my *premature* and dangerous and unfettered exploration of my sexuality affected the people around me. By which, I primarily mean my sister.

My sister and I are very close to each other and by virtue of her being present for almost the entirety of my life, she had also seen exactly how I lived. I spent most of my adult life believing that as a child she only had access to the parts of my life I chose to expose to her, and that she saw me solely as protector and confidante, but recently she shared something with me about watching the development and then execution of my sexuality.

“*I worried about you so much, all the time. You didn’t tell me things but most of the times I was the only person in the house who knew there were men in your room, beating you up and doing what else. For a long time, I was terrified of even developing a sexuality because I believed that’s what it meant to have a sexuality. I thought it meant you had sex with forty-year-old men, cheat, got raped and hurt all the time. I was so scared of sex, and when I discovered the sex I liked, I was so confused and worried that it wasn’t like the sex you seemed to like. To me you were the person who kept me safe, solved my problems and helped me, so when I asked you questions, I knew you would give me the right answers, I had no idea that you were still searching for answers, yourself.*”

My sister has really turned into a wise woman. I never thought about this. I was sure that I had kept it from her and everyone else. I had no idea the impact my precocious puberty and subsequent exploration had on her. That’s also a part of it. I am not sure there is a right or wrong age for sexuality, but I do know that there is an age when you may desire it, but you have not thought about it enough to have the morals and ethics to take no victims. I may have known this, if someone had told me, at the right time, what I was going through, without demonizing me. I regret, so deeply, the impact this had on my sister when she was younger, but even more that I had no access to any information that would keep me from acting in ways that harmed other people. I write this now solely because of that, because I know it is so easy not to talk about this. No one wants to but it’s real. It could be happening to someone you know.