He Started Puberty When He Was 2 Years Old. Now, He's Sharing His Experience

One thing all humans have in common is that at a certain point in our childhood, we go through puberty: we get bigger, our bodies change, we often get a little rambunctious and moody, and we mature sexually.

But imagine if those changes occurred not when you were 11 or 13 or 15 years old, but when you were a toddler. That was the experience of Patrick Burleigh, who has a rare genetic mutation that triggers testosterone production far younger than normal.

Doctors call it precocious puberty.

“It’s extremely rare — it’s estimated that there might be like fewer than 1,000 of us,” says Burleigh, who wrote about his experience in New York magazine. “And basically it’s a mutation of the luteinizing hormone chorionic gonadotropin receptor gene, which is responsible for triggering testosterone production in the testicles.”

Burleigh tells Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson his family was anticipating his symptoms of early puberty because his father, grandfather and great-grandfather all went through it, too. One of the earliest was Burleigh getting his first pubic hair when he was just 2 years old.

“I was bigger — considerably bigger — than a 2-year-old, and also [had] impulsive behavior that’s characteristic of someone going through puberty,” he says. “Like just, you know, an inability to control my impulses, aggressive outbursts, hitting other kids, tantrums that were kind of truly epic — just behavior that was extreme.”

Interview Highlights

On being twice the size of other kids growing up

“I was huge. … I was treated for the mutation at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, and my first visit, I was about 3 years old and I weighed as much and was as tall as a 7-year-old, and had the testosterone levels of a 14-year-old — kind of deep in the throes of puberty. So I was huge and I was not just bigger, but also, I had all this testosterone coursing through my body, so I was muscular, and when I was 3 and 4 years old I was kind of, basically until I was about 7, sort of an athletic phenom. I was hitting home runs and … everyone wanted me on their team because I was just much bigger and stronger.”

On how aware he was of what was going on

“I knew I was different, obviously, and I knew that … I was taking a lot of medication to suppress the production of testosterone. So I knew that there was something sort of wrong with me biologically. But beyond that, I didn’t know much. And I also … I have no memory of a time before all of this, you know? So there was no moment when it kind of changed for me physically, which is normally what happens when you’re, you know, a conscious 13-year-old and your body starts to change.”

On whether he grew up feeling like there was something wrong with him

“Yeah, yes. Because it was so behavioral, and because I was … beginning at about 4 and 5, I started to get in trouble in school a lot, because I just wasn’t able to control my impulses, and I looked so dramatically different from everyone else that sort of normal misbehavior was amplified, in my case. If there were a group of us and we were all doing something wrong on the playground, I stuck out and would kind of take the blame. And so, sort of being bad and looking different and feeling different was all sort of packaged up together.

“I started to lie about my age when I was probably about 8. It was easy to do this, because I looked so much older and it was also, in a way, it was easier for me to not have to explain why I looked so much older. … So I would just tell people … when I was 8, I would tell them I was 12 or 13, and so I started to hang out with older kids and kids who were doing things that were kind of beyond my peers, and that meant sexual stuff, and it also meant smoking cigarettes and experimenting with substances — kind of all the other rebellious behavior that’s normally associated with teenagers I started to do when I was considerably younger.”

On his peers eventually catching up with him, and whether symptoms last beyond puberty

“About 14 or 15, everyone else caught up and I also finished, and kind of the convergence of those two really … it was almost overnight. All of a sudden I kind of looked around and I no longer stuck out. I was no longer this outcast. And also just hormonally, I was all of a sudden kind of more subdued.

“The one kind of lingering [symptom] is that men who have this, they don’t grow to their full stature, what they call target height. Most men who have had familial male-limited precocious puberty end up only being around 5 feet tall. I ended up being 6 feet tall, and I think that’s a combination of the medication that I took in all my treatment, as well as just having tall genes — like my brother’s 6’6″ and he didn’t inherit a mutation. So I think I was lucky in that way. But other than that, no, it’s purely developmental — once puberty is done with you, it’s done. It goes away.”

On growing out of precocious puberty, and how going through it shaped him as a teenager and beyond

“I still kind of feel different, honestly, even though if you met me, you wouldn’t think of me as different. But I think, those feelings of being other and not fitting in, as well as sort of being labeled ‘bad,’ from an early age, they stayed with me, even though by the time I was 15 or 16, I had sort of made a 180-degree turn in my life. I was no longer getting in trouble and I did well in school, and I was a decent athlete. I think that I did, once I began to fit in, I did feel relief, and at the same time a desire to — not unlike my father — kind of hide my past and hide the challenges, and what I felt for a long time was kind of a deviant past.”

Julia Corcoran produced this interview and edited it for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Jack Mitchell adapted it for the web. [Copyright 2019 NPR]