In honor of International Transgender Visibility Day on March 31st, this week’s episode celebrates storytellers who are transgender and gender nonconforming.
Part 1: Comedian Riley Silverman attempts to use science to change the course of puberty.
Riley Silverman is a writer, comedian, and professional geek. An author of Star Wars books, Riley is also a contributing writer for Nerdist and Fandom, the award-winning sci-fi podcast, Bubble, and SYFY's Forgotten Women of Genre limited podcast series. As an actress she appeared in the STARZ series Take My Wife as Regan, in the comedy horror film Too Late, and as the voice of Zelda in the vampire series Port Saga. She has rolled dice on numerous actual-play Dungeons and Dragons and roleplaying shows, including in the role of Braga for the official tabletop adaptation of Rat Queens. Her comedy album Intimate Apparel was a #1 bestseller. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and she is certain that her lightsaber would have a white kyber crystal.
Part 2: Comedian Ang Buxton explores the differences in gender expectations from the football field to the middle school cafeteria.
Ang Buxton (they/them) is a nonbinary comedian, DJ and teacher from Springfield, MA. Ang has headlined comedy shows all around New England and beyond, and has DJ'd for events like Northampton Pride. Ang is a Teach for America alum and is dedicated to educational equity, and views their work as a comedian as queer activism.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
I had a lot of time as a child to think about what I wanted to be when I grew up, which, for me, woman was like the top of that. That was the thing that, at the time, I didn't think was possible.
So then I moved over to jobs, like what do I want to do for a job when I grow up. For a long time, I had three jobs as a child that I wanted to be. The first of those was dinosaur scientist. I did not know that there was a term paleontologist. I did not know any of the science that was involved in dinosaurs. All I knew is that I liked dinosaurs. I knew a lot about them for a six‑year-old and I thought this seems like a good way to make a living.
Turns out it wasn't. Jurassic Park ruined that for me. Killed the industry. I don't know. Also, I didn't know any of the science and that's an important thing, it turns out, when you're doing anything it's a science job.
So then the other job that I wanted to do was comedian, which it turns out, you heard my intro, worked out, so that's good. Pays slightly less than dinosaur scientist but still it's working out for me.
Riley Silverman performs her story at Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, CA in May 2018. Photo by Mari Provencher.
The other job that I wanted to have as a kid was inventor and I didn't really know what that meant. My first engagement with science and with engineering and all that kind of stuff was through science fiction, through Star Wars and Star Trekand Jurassic Park eventually and stuff like that. But the first movie that I remember that engaged me and made me excited about science fiction was Back to the Future.
It was great. It was awesome. I watched it. I loved it. And I saw and I really wanted to be an inventor like Doc Brown, because the beginning of Back to the Future is this scene where Marty McFly walks into Doc’s lab and he has all these inventions. So he's just working all the time making things.
I did not realize at the time, because I was like four or five when the movie came out, that none of those inventions worked. It's a garage full of broken junk basically. The only thing that I knew about Doc Brown as an inventor was that back in the ‘50s he had fallen off a toilet, hit his head and invented a machine that let time travel happen.
So when I was saying to myself and other people that I want to be an inventor, what I was really saying is I want to be a wizard. What I want to do is think, “Hey, a problem exists,” and then think of a solution to that problem and then go, “Okay, I invented that solution.” That's what I wanted to have happen. I didn't understand that in order to be an inventor, you had to know at least some of the science, and probably all of the math. I assume that would be useful, a little bit of the math. Just a bit.
So I that's why I moved off of inventor and I got a little older and I moved into comedy, because you don't have to know any math to do comedy, not even your taxes it turns out. Don't tell the government I said that. We're recording this? This is going to be a problem.
Okay. So a lot of people think that being transgender is anti-science, which I don't agree with. I think there's a lot of science involved in all the medicine that I take, first of all. But back then, when I kept saying to the world that I wanted to be an inventor, what I was really saying but didn't have the language to say is I want to find a way that I can be a girl. Because I know that I'm a girl and I try to tell people that and they don't seem to understand it.
The first time I ever heard a word as a child that even like was remotely close to how I felt inside was the word ‘transvestite’ in a MAD Magazine parody of Batman. That's how far I was from understanding who I was. That's what I wanted to invent was like being myself. Turns out comedian what's good for that too.
So this was like the beginning of my battle with science, because like I didn't know there wasn't a way that I could just make like an invention that would just snap my fingers and turn me into what everyone else saw was a girl.
Then I got to where I started hearing about the concept of puberty, and this is like the prem battleground between me and science. This is when I was like science and I were not buddies at puberty, because someone explained it to me, they go, “Oh, well, if you're a little boy and you go through puberty, you become a man. And if you are a little girl and you go through puberty you become a woman.”
And I thought, “Okay, this is my last chance to fix this problem.” It is downhill from here.
But unfortunately, I had not… I came of age in an era where we had the internet but it sucked. We didn't have your WebMDs. We didn't have places you could go and ask a bunch of questions and then read a bunch of slurs about yourself as a response to it. It didn't have that yet. The only questions I could ask the internet when I was right about to hit puberty were age, sex and location. And for me, one of those was a lie.
Riley Silverman performs her story at Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, CA in May 2018. Photo by Mari Provencher.
So then I all I knew, in my mind when I understood puberty I thought it was just about like muscle definition and stuff like that. So I got the genius idea that I was going to trick my puberty. The way that I was going to trick my puberty was working out to my mom's VHS copy of a Cindy Crawford workout tape. This was a genius idea. I was sure of it.
And I was more sure of it because the name of this tape was literally Shape your Body. And I did. For a month, I worked out in secret in my bedroom to this Cindy Crawford workout tape. Like spoiler alert, it did not turn me into Cindy Crawford. The reason for that is not because of science but because my mom found the VHS copy of the Cindy Crawford workout tape in my bedroom and took it away from me.
And the reason why she did was because what she thought she had discovered in her pubescent son's “bedroom” was a bikini model workout tape. In her mind, she had just discovered that her son had discovered masturbation. And I had to go ahead and let her believe that was the case, because that was way less embarrassing than trying to explain to her the truth of what I was actually doing with the Cindy Crawford workout tape.
I couldn't like, “No, Mom, I'm not masturbating. I'm just working out trying to become the world's sexiest lady. I'm fine. Don't worry about it.”
The lie that I made up, I told my mom that I was working out trying to get in better shape. I told her that I was getting picked on school for being heavy, which was every good lie has some truth in it and that was one of them.
My mom's like, “Oh, you want to get in shape. Okay. I'll give you a tape you can work out to,” and my mom handed me a real tape that existed that was called Regis Philbin: My Personal Workout.
Use your better internet later and look that up. That's a real video that somebody in this town pitched, like somebody in a meeting was like, “Do you know whose body everybody wants? Regis Philbin.” And then they pitched it to read in a meeting.
Somebody sat across from a table with coffee with Regis Philbin and said, “Hey, we want to make a workout tape featuring you.”
And he was like, “Me?”
And they said, “Yes.”
And he said, “I'll do it,” and they sold it.
So my mom gave me that and I did not continue to work out to the Regis Philbin tape because I did not want to go through puberty and become Regis Philbin.
Eventually, I then had health class in junior high and I learned about what actually happens to your body when you go through puberty. This was like peak science fight, because now, suddenly, it was being revealed to me that like there was nothing I could have done to stop it at that point in my life. Like I had no options. There was no amount of push-ups, no amount of stomach crunches would have made me a lady. That was what I was learning.
So then I just had to go through puberty. That's a thing that I think doesn't get talked about enough, because we talk about children who transition. Nowadays, there are puberty blockers you can go on. You can take them and it basically gives you the time that you need to decide what you want to do with your own body. It gives you the little bit of time you might need to make a decision about yourself. Because whenever we talk about trans children, someone always says, “Well, they're too young to make that choice.”
Let me tell you what happened to me. I was too young to make that choice and so the choice was made for me. My body had to go through puberty and it went through the wrong puberty. It went through a male puberty and so, for me, I had no choice but to sit back and watch over the course of two or three years and onward as my body changed in ways that were exactly the opposite of how I felt.
It was like the worst slowest werewolf movie ever. It was just like every day I'd walk and look in the mirror and just slowly see my brows arching a little bit more and little dark hair starting to form that shouldn't be there. All that kind of stuff was happening over. I'm just angry and just getting smelly and sweaty and gross in ways that I just didn't want and it was horrible.
That's just how my life went on for a very long time. So I hated the concept, I hated science, I hated everything about the inevitable nature of not being who you wanted to be and the way that it was forced upon me because I was too young to make a choice, essentially. The choice was made for me. It's like I was I was young enough to not be able to have the life that I want to have.
But then, like I said, I mentioned that I heard the word transvestite in a parody magazine. That is not how I identify but that was the first time where a word came along that said, hey, what is going on in your brain is not a thing that means you're broken. It's a thing. There's a title for it. There are other people out there that have similar feelings that you do. It's a thing that we have got some data on.
Then I got older and I got into my 20s and I started to hear more complicated terms like gender dysphoria, which is the actual study of how your brain is affected by the disconnect between what your body feels and what your body represents. That's what I was trying to understand as a child, as I was going through this puberty process.
So suddenly, I'm like, “Wait a minute. These are terms that sound clinical. These are terms that I can call a doctor and talk to about.”
And then something like, “Maybe science and I aren't such enemies after all. Maybe there is something here.”
So then eventually I pushed it away for a long time because I'd already gone through the process of thinking I could change it and not being able to, and then I finally was like, “Oh, my God, there's a light in the tunnel.” And I was like running away from that light because I didn't want to be burned again.
Eventually, I got to a point where I was just… I was never very suicidal. When I was a teenager, I had moments where I wanted to end things but I pushed it aside. I had reasons in my life why I wasn't thinking of suicide as the real answer. But I had a moment in my mid to late 20s where I said just because you're coping with life doesn't mean you're happy. Just because you have blockades in your brain that are keeping you alive does not mean that you are actually living.
So then I called the LGBT center here in Los Angeles and I made an appointment and I went and talked to a doctor. Then that doctor, over a course of a couple of conversations, eventually prescribed me estrogen. They gave me a scientific solution to the thing that I have been fighting for decades at this point.
And over the course of the last three years, I have gone through a second puberty or, as I call it, a correct puberty. I'm older. I'm in my 30s. I will never be able to get that exact body back that I could have had if I had started on this same path when I was in my teens, but I'm still being given like a shovel to dig myself out of the hole that was forced upon me in my teens.
So now, I'm having like the rewind of that same werewolf scene. I'm seeing all the hair start to fade away. I'm seeing my actual hair was balding and now it's coming back and it's growing and it looks pretty awesome actually. Not going to lie, it's doing pretty good. I'm going through this puberty and the difference between the puberty…
Puberty is terrifying for everybody. No one feels great about suddenly being hairy and gross and smelly. No one's like, “Yeah, we did it.” No one's like, “I'm glad I ate my vegetables like my mom said when I was a kid.”
But now I'm going through it a second time and I'm okay with it even though I have no idea when it's going to end. I have no idea how far I'm going to get with it. But I'm excited about it because I have some vague idea. I know that I'm developing breast tissue, which is fantastic. I developed the ability two years ago to have female orgasms, which is amazing. I'm doing the thing my mom was afraid I was doing with the Cindy Crawford tape, only now I'm using a vibrator for and it's awesome.
It's like the difference between before and two years ago is like reaching down into a skirt or dress after three or six months and realizing that it has pockets. That's how much better it is now.
So that's all happening now and that's all because, eventually, I learned that science was not my enemy. Science was actually the saving grace that would get me out of what I was doing.
And then the thing is, like I said, I don't have an endpoint. I don't know when I will feel complete. But what I do know is that, younger and younger now, there are options for children, who went through what I went through, to be able to realize the issue earlier and have ways of giving themselves time to make choices for themselves and not have to steal VHS tapes to work out to and stuff like that. They can just take blockers.
And then when they're old enough, go, “This is what I want to do. Cool.” Which is great because that gives them so much more free time to stop worrying about themselves and focus on more important things, like their career as dinosaur scientists.
Thank you.
Part 2
I went to my niece's football game the other day and I was so hyped to be there. I was so excited to see her play.
I got there, she's on the sideline. She's high-fiving everybody. They're like slapping each other's pads and helmets and everything and she's like bouncing around.
And I'm ready. The first quarter goes by and her team is definitely going to win because the other team is losing by a lot. It was Easthampton versus Northampton. If you know the area, you know Northampton should probably stick to pickleball and ultimate frisbee.
The game continues. Very clearly a blowout, 40 seconds remaining. My niece still hasn't played a single snap and I'm very angry and ready to fight a coach.
They put her in garbage time, but at that point, I had already seen what I needed to see. Because I thought I was going to go there and I was going to see that things had improved so much from when I was the only girl on the team and the only girl in the league at a time, a long time ago when I felt like I was the only one in the world doing that.
We're the same age. I was in sixth grade too. That's the time when your body's going through a lot of different changes but, if you're like me, you never really identify with the body that you were given in the first place so you're trying to find different ways to find your herd, to find your people.
And I always loved football. There was something about it. I just loved it. I don't know for me if it was necessarily gendered or if it was just that I just love the sport, everything about it. I like the snap of the chin strap. I like the way the mouth guard would flick spit in your eye if you ran really fast. I love the sound, the sound of the pop of shoulder pads like when you can feel the whole vibration when you wrap somebody's ankles and they fall on top of you that's faster than you. There's nothing like that in the whole world. You just got them. You got them. I loved that and I wanted to experience that for myself.
Ang Buxton performs their story to a limited audience at Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst, MA in November, 2021 . Photo by Kimberly Vadelnieks and Ben Kalama.
My dad did not want me to play football and it wasn't because I was assigned female at birth. That's not what it was. He just genuinely he had played and he'd had too many concussions. Then he went to jail. And if you have to press one to accept the collect call from someone, you really don't have to listen to anything they say, to be honest.
So I asked my mom and she was like, “I don't see why not.” And she didn't see why not. She was going to be there coaching the cheerleaders anyway. Her attempts to get me to take ballet had failed miserably.
That was the first time I asked her outside of ballet class when I was four. I said, “Mom, why don't I have a penis?” And she was like, “Because you don't.”
So I started playing football and I think for the first full week the coaches thought that I was just a boy with long hair, which was much closer to the truth than any of us could have reckoned at the time. But they actually coached me in that first week. I think once they figured out, “Oh, no, like that person's a girl,” then they stopped coaching me and I got thrown on the JV team and I got stuck on the JV team.
I was playing defensive end, which is a great position. Your job is to contain the run. Don't let it turn up to the outside. Fall into coverage and cover the tight end when they go out for a pass. The tight end that I was always matched up against was this kid named Cody.
Cody had something. He didn't like me. There was something he had against me. I don't know what it was until one practice, he popped me so hard I was like I didn't know we could hit our own teammates like that. I thought we were on the same team and that wasn't going to happen.
But then I was like, “Oh, so we are allowed to hit our teammates like that. Okay. I see you, Cody.”
And it made me so mad but at the same time I was like I was ready to prove myself, because I wasn't going to just back down from that. I was going to take that hit and I was going to prove myself.
So the rest of the practice it didn't matter what the offense was calling. My focus was hitting Cody as hard as I could. I didn't care if the run took the outside. I knew, I was like, “Somebody else can contain that. Let the cornerback get it. My job is to destroy Cody's life.”
And at the end of practice, we're waiting around for our rides. My mom's a very notoriously late person. This was the time when the bullying really like picks up. It's, “You're ugly and you're weird.” I think what it was was they didn't want to be the kids on the team that had the girl. No one wanted to be on the team with the girl, right?
So I was destined to prove that to me, it didn't matter. I didn't really identify with that anyway when it boiled down to it so it was just like I just want to play football. I felt like everybody else thought way more about it than I did. I was just there to play, to be honest.
So I go home. The next day going to school, Forest Park Middle School. Get to school. We have a field trip.
Now, on the bus to the field trip, I sat with Dave and Brandon. They were my football buddies. But at school, I'm a girl. I don't play football. In fact, I got sent to the nurse for the bruises I had on my forearms because they didn't believe me when I told them that I played tackle football. They were like, “No, you don't.”
I was like, “Yes, I do.”
So I got to sit with my buddies. And Dave and Brandon were really cool, but they have been on JV with me and have been recently moved up to varsity. So we were talking smack like, “I can't believe they moved Christian up to varsity and they didn't move me yet,” and they had my back.
They were like, “Yeah, it doesn't make sense why you haven't moved up to varsity yet. You're better than these kids. They're soft.”
And I felt like, okay, maybe I am a part of this team. Maybe I am a part of football as a collective. I really just wanted to be a teammate, you know.
We get back to the school and we're waiting in line to go back into the class. The whole sixth grade is standing in line, there's a lot of us, and this girl comes up to me. Her name was Amanda. Amanda was like gorgeous and she was like the popular girl, okay. I thought I wanted to be friends with her so bad. Took me about two years to figure out, no, that's just what a crush is. I didn't know we were allowed to like girls. I thought that was like off the table, like completely.
Ang Buxton performs their story to a limited audience at Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst, MA in November, 2021 . Photo by Kimberly Vadelnieks and Ben Kalama.
So she came up to me and I was definitely a little flustered by her, just like, “Why does she want to talk to me,” or whatever.
She's like, “Hey, I saw you sitting with my boyfriend on the bus.”
I'm like, “Oh, yeah.” This is not going where I thought it was. But in my head, I was just like, “Okay, maybe we can wait this out.”
She goes, “Don't talk to my boyfriend, bitch,” and she pushes me. I don't know if you've ever been to middle school but if somebody pushes you and calls you a bitch, you're really supposed to do something about it. You're really not supposed to stand there and go, “Oh, no. I don't know if I can hit a girl.” You're really not supposed to do that.
But these kids circle up around me they start chanting, “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.”
And I'm like, “Oh, no. This is it. I'm soft forever if I don't do something. I'm soft forever.”
Luckily, I waited long enough for a teacher to notice that there was a disturbance, so the teacher approaches and I'm off the hook, granted for the rest of the day I had to deal with people, “Why didn't you do something? She pushed you and called you a bitch. Why didn’t you do something? Are you trying to steal her boyfriend?”
I'm like, “Hell, no. No, like we're talking about being linebackers over there.”
And I think about it to this day just the way that gender has manifested and that feeling that I had the first time I opened DSM-5 and I sat, and this was years later. It was just five. And I sat there and I read the definition of gender dysphoria and that conflict between your assigned gender and the gender you identify with and the way that that manifests, the dysphoria you feel. the distress from trying to fit in.
And I've later read that there's an assimilation period that you go through in your teens when your secondary sex characteristics are coming in. And you're growing boobs and you want to, I guess you got to talk to somebody else who's growing them because the dudes on the football team they can't tell me how to put a tampon in.
And I tried to fit in. I tried to assimilate to that. But at the same time, like I just knew that that was never going to be me. That was never going to work.
When I think back on Cody in the way that he just laid into me that day so hard, I think maybe that was actually his way of accepting me onto the team and saying like, “You know, we're going to treat you like one of us. We're not going to act like you're a girl so we can't hit you anymore. You're on the team now.”
So as much as I hated him in that moment, I actually, in retrospect, appreciate being treated like I was one of.
But at the end of the day, I don't know with gender and fighting. How do you prove yourself? I guess we have to use our words. And that's all I got. Thank you, guys.