A Frosted Reflection

Or The Importance of Trans Affirming Healthcare for Youth (in 2 parts) Part 1

The mirror was the first border I ever had to cross, and every day it felt like a fortification I wasn't strong enough to breach. By the winter of 1988, I was fourteen hovering on the trembling edge of fifteen. I was living in a body that felt like a house with the doors nailed shut from the outside. To be a trans girl in the late eighties was to live in a static-filled frequency, an opera sang in the wrong key. There were no words for that haunting then, there was only the sharp, physical ache of existing in a shape that felt like a clerical error by the universe.

​My life was measured in "mirror watching," a ritual of both devotion and masochism. Clothed, I would stand for hours, tugging at the fabric of oversized sweaters, trying to find a drape that didn't betray the broadening of my shoulders. I was looking for a silhouette that matched the girl I saw when I closed my eyes; she was the one who had lived in my ribs since I was five years old. Unclothed, the mirror became an interrogation. I would stare at the lines of my skin, my curves, my facade, hating the way the light hit the angles that shouldn't have been there. I began the meticulous, agonizing work of plucking; the small, frantic acts of rebellion against biology that was accelerating away from me. Each hair pulled was a tiny prayer for a halt. This became a desperate attempt to keep the surface of me as smooth as the identity I held in secret.

​Every night for nearly a decade, my protocol remained unchanged. From the age of five, as the lights went out and the quiet of the house settled, I whispered the same plea into my pillow; please, let me wake up as her. I believed in that miracle with the fervor of a saint. I thought that if I wanted it purely enough, the molecules would shift in the dark. Still, every morning the sun would rise, and I would wake up trapped in the same heavy, deepening cage. The betrayal of the morning was a recurring grief that never got easier; it just got louder.

​This grief was compounded by a profound echoing loneliness. In 1988, there was no map for a girl like me. The medical world was a locked room. Certainly I knew trans girls and women existed. I had seen plenty, but I had no idea how that happened. I had no idea that transgender healthcare existed, let alone that it could be a lifeline for a teenager. To the doctors and the adults around me, I was an invisible problem. There were no brochures in the waiting rooms, no stories on the news that didn't treat people like me as a punchline or a tragedy. This ignorance felt like a death sentence. I lived in a state of constant despair, convinced that I was the only person in the world experiencing this glitch in reality. I was mourning a childhood I never got to have while simultaneously terrified of the adulthood that was being forced upon me.

​The confusion was a thick fog. I knew I was a girl, but I also knew I loved girls. In 1988, the world told you that these two things were mutually exclusive, and often still does, that if you were a girl, you must want the boys. But boys were a foreign language I had no interest in learning. I looked at the girls at school not just with the envy of wanting to be them, but with the soft, terrifying heat of wanting to be with them. I was a girl who loved girls, living in a body the world called a boy, and the math of it felt impossible to solve. I was a lesbian in a ghost suit, a girl whose heart was oriented perfectly, even if my exterior was a lie.

​The collapse didn't happen all at once; it arrived in the smallest, sharpest increments. Three weeks before the year turned, I was standing in the shower, the water turned up until the steam felt like oppression, trying to scrub away the very fact of my skin. Then, I saw it…a single, dark hair I had missed, curling defiantly over my left nipple. It felt like a terminal diagnosis. I had spent so many hours in front of the glass, an amateur surgeon with a pair of tweezers, trying to pluck back the tide of a puberty I never asked for. To see that one hair broke the last of my resolve. I dropped to my knees on the cold tile, the scalding spray drumming against my back, and I wailed. I wasn't just crying for a stray hair; I was mourning a body that was mutating against my will, a slow-motion car crash I was forced to watch from the driver's seat.

​By the time the calendar turned toward New Year’s, that memory had calcified into a certainty. The weight of the masquerade had become a crushing depth, and the milestone of fifteen didn't feel like a celebration; it felt like a deadline I couldn't meet. The testosterone felt like a slow-acting poison, and I couldn't bear to see what another year would do to the girl hiding behind the glass. In the hollow space between the old year and the new, I reached for an ending. I thought an overdose would be a soft way to finally stop the noise, a way to finally stop the prayer that never got answered. I wanted to go to sleep. I'd decided if I couldn't wake up as myself, I simply didn't want to wake up at all. I survived, though the world didn't know why I had tried to leave. They saw a boy in crisis. I knew I was a girl who was drowning in the Midwest winter, trying to find a pier that hadn't yet been built.

The calendar turned to 1989. The world outside celebrated a new beginning. As I slipped into that self-induced coma, I was starting to realize that surviving the night meant I would have to find a way to make the world see the girl the mirror disguised.