I knew everything that would happen before it did, and I wasn't looking forward to it. This was because I asked my parents about it and they just rattled off all the stuff to me like the academics they were.
I was practically 17 before anything happened. Which is very late by modern Western standards for a female body puberty. I was glad it was late. For a long time I had convinced myself it wasn't going to happen at all and that there was probably something up with me like sterility or hormone imbalance something, which I would have been happy with. But no, I was normal and there wasn't a problem, it was just delayed.
When it did finally come around several things happened. I rejected the whole thing and paid almost no attention to it. My mother was asking me about if I was aware of when I would need sanitary products and I would always forget and had no interest in the subject. It wasn't just a hindrance, it would put me in a foul mood as well just because of disgusting I found it. I definitely felt unclean and physically uncomfortable with the blood. Not so much the blood itself, because I was no stranger to the sight of that in general, but the whole process and the amount of time it took out of any month. The smell of it, the way the guts all screw up tense for five days, the feeling of that stuff trying to ooze out and make an unholy mess everywhere when you're asleep or unsuspecting, being too hot, the spots, and just the whole deal with vaginas in general. I remember spending a lot of time in the bath and in showers because of how I wanted to feel clean. I didn't suffer much in the way of pain and I never experienced PMS on a mental level, so I was not only forgetting in general to keep track of a cycle, but I was also not warned about the onset by PMS symptoms like most people are. I remember wondering if female sex organs are supposed to look like that and thinking if I had the guts I'd do some impromptu surgery on myself, but ofc knowing that would be a bad idea. It never occurred to me there was such a thing as transition and surgery for those things, at that time in my life. There was no information about it easily available, so I assumed nothing could be done.
I went out and got sports bras that acted much like binders instead of regular ones. I continued to behave the same way I always did and didn't become like my friends who obviously started to get interested in sex. For me that was conflicted issue. I did feel attraction to some people, but I had zero desire to act on it. The fact I was stuck in that body meant I wasn't prepared to make do with it and be somebody's "girlfriend". That thought just wouldn't or couldn't occur to me. I got asked several times through school and flat out turned those people down without a second thought. The idea I could even do that role wasn't present in my brain. I'm also sure some kid friends I knew tried to hint at it subtly and failed because the idea was so far from my mind I wouldn't have picked up on it. I didn't "make do" with that body until my early twenties, so all through adolescence I was perfectly happy remaining a virgin. In fact I think I was convinced I was going to die one and was as happy about that as my friends were about losing that status. I viewed sex as some sort of weakness or path to unhappiness or something - probably because of my parents' failed marriage and my mother and step dad not really getting along either. The family wasn't the sort of family I wanted to have and sex just seemed to me to be the thing that was making incompatible people end up miserable together.
School was crap and I was a curious case of being a loner in my class, even though I have friends within the school, I didn't get to spend hardly any time with them. The kids were split up based on their grades from junior school so I got put in one class and the kids I knew got put in another and that lasted 5 years. So I was alone and almost nobody talked to me for that whole time, except when I would happen to find one of those friends again in a rare class where we were in the same one. I had different friends at home in my street, who I played a lot with, but on the whole every day I would go and sit in silence at school and was just taken for the silent class nerd. I accepted this niche without question and didn't bother trying to change it. But I did try to outdo the rest of them in grades. I guess I did well because I wasn't distracted by having any friends to talk to. But the girls were like an alien species to me. They would obviously see me as one of them, but they weren't too friendly, and I saw myself as having nothing in common with them. Trying to impress them never occurred. Trying to impress the boys never occurred. I felt like a separate species, completely outside of the social hierarchy and I didn't care because I hated school and all I wanted to do was go home and get back to my own world. I was able to avoid getting into trouble (I was a troublemaker sometimes) because looking like a girl meant it was easier to get away with things, but I would often disobey the uniform rules and wear trousers and to be honest, nobody pulled me up on it. Hated doing anything where I might have to take off any clothes like gym, the school nurse, vaccines, getting height measured, whatever. Pretty much felt like a public violation to have to deal with that stuff.
When it was obvious to my parents I wasn't acting like a normal kid trying to get a boyfriend I heard them discussing one day while I was out of the room if I was gay. They said they didn't care if I was but that it was odd I had no interest at all in relationships. I didn't explain anything to them. I wasn't sure of the reason at the time myself. I would be 21 before I got involved in one, and it was a wishy-washy sort of thing that I wasn't all that keen on but that I'd decided to give a go because otherwise I just wasn't ever going to learn "about life".
How I felt about puberty on the whole? Like it was a progressive disease I had no way of avoiding, so I accepted quietly but was filled with disgust about. I hated what I was apparently turning into, and I dissociated from it, and from a whole bunch of things. On the whole people didn't pressure me with much I guess because trying to herd me into anything was like herding cats. But I was pretty naive and unsocialized too. When I was 19 in my first job some guy who worked in the same building tried to jump me on a twilight shift when nobody else was around. I don't know what he thought his plan was other than to sexually assault I guess, but I had no instincts to call for help or anything like that. Mine was just to stare him down and threaten to put a sharp piece of metal I was holding right through his face, and I meant it. Apparently he was so unnerved by this he backed off. I got fired the next day. Looking back on it, my fear response was that I had to fight. That there was no other choice open to me, that nobody would come and help me anyway. It strikes me as a male mindset, when confronted with the idea of male-on-male rape. None of my female friends have ever said that's how they would have chosen to deal with a coworker like that. They felt there were other options at their disposal. I didn't.
I dunno, puberty seems like a nightmare for most people, I don't hear anyone saying they want to relive theirs. Mine was bad, but it was formative. At the time I had existing anxiety issues, two parents who were always drinking and fighting, a demoralizing school life, and depression, aside from the trans stuff. I think it's why life in general has felt mostly like a massive improvement since, even if it isn't anywhere near perfect.
