I Got My First Pubic Hair When I Was 2 Years Old

I couldn’t talk, I could barely walk, but I started growing a bush. Or so they tell me. I have no recollection of a time before puberty, before the carnal cravings, the impulses, the angst and anger and violence. There was no prelapsarian age of innocence for me; I was born, I took a huge bite of the apple, and, by 2 years old, I was pretty much ready to get busy with Eve.

- Patrick Burleigh

It was the same for my father, and for his father, and for his father, and for the men in my family going back as far as we have records. We’ve all carried the same hereditary genetic mutation. On chromosome 2 in the DNA of all human beings, there’s a gene called the luteinizing hormone/ choriogonadotropin receptor (LHCGR). In women of reproductive age, the LHCGR triggers ovulation; in men, it triggers testosterone production. But somewhere back in the lost recesses of my family’s genetic history, an unfortunate ancestor of mine was born with a mutant LHCGR gene.

Having a mutant LHCGR gene leads to what doctors now call familial male limited precocious puberty, an extremely rare disease that affects only men because you have to have testicles, which is why it’s also called testotoxicosis. The condition tricks the testicles into thinking the body is ready to go through puberty—so wham, the floodgates open and the body is saturated with testosterone. The result is premature everything: bone growth, muscle development, body hair, the full menu of dramatic physical changes that accompany puberty. Only instead of being 13, you’re 2.

Testotoxicosis affects fewer than one in a million men, and a leading expert estimates that we may only number in the hundreds. Being an anomaly for having pubes when you’re still breastfeeding isn’t typically something one brags about, which is why, like my forefathers, I spent the majority of my life hiding it, lying about it, repressing it, and avoiding it. This feeling of freakishness, of being strange and different, persisted well into adulthood, such that I refused to talk about it with anyone other than close friends and family.