The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey’s Anatomy (1, 8, 22, 27, 43, 52, 53)

content/trigger warnings: discussions of mental health, the medical industrial complex, psychiatric incarceration, suicidal ideation, death, grief, ableism, substance abuse, the biomedicalization of transness, transphobia, hormone therapy, neurodivergence, sterility, settler colonialism, patriarchy, misogyny, cisheterosexism, white supremacy, violence, abuse, and intersexness, written from the perspective of someone who is not intersex; brief references to blood, gore, illness (cancer, dementia), surgery, bombings, murder, and gender dysphoria

1

You’ll start watching Grey’s Anatomy because—four years into puberty, at 13—you’re already familiar with imminent death. The blood, the guts, the gore of injury and trauma: it fascinates you more than it upsets you. In a way, you feel at home. A scalpel making its way through someone’s body is the perfect metaphor for how you feel inside.

Plus, you’ve just been accepted into the country’s top-ranked high school. Dr. Webber’s speech in the pilot episode is repeated many times throughout the series, and will repeat in your mind as you navigate a world of incomparable wunderkinds. “Look around you. Say hello to your competition. Eight of you will switch to an easier specialty. Five will crack under the pressure. Two of you will be asked to leave.” This ratio is about right, both at your high school and at the prestigious institutions you’ll all spend four years working to gain entry into. Mostly things like depression and substance abuse will take your peers out. What you accurately diagnose as your alcoholism, and what professionals separately misdiagnose as bipolar disorder, will be the culprits for you.

But then this isn’t House, M.D.; your journey has little to do with the puzzle of diagnosis, or even with the process of treatment. 

What matters on Grey’s is emotional interplay—between doctor and patient, doctor and doctor, medical case and personal life, personal life and the desire for so much more. 

Desire, ambition, metaphor, melodrama: this is the lifeblood of Grey’s Anatomy.

You’re a brilliant young trans girl.

Of course you eat this up.

Don’t worry if none of this makes sense. At your age, your jumbled trans girl brain—not yet on hormones, but not by choice—can’t comprehend your gender, nor your sexuality, let alone why you, an aspiring creative writer, are so drawn to a show about cutthroat surgical interns. At your age, you mostly just like that the soundtrack is all cute indie music, and that there’s a member of the ensemble cast who’s a sensitive, effeminate buffoon.

Also, that the main character is sad.

Unlike the other main characters of the other shows you watch (the only possible exception here being Courage the Cowardly Dog), the main character of this show looks like she’s always on the verge of tears and is always being forced by her circumstances to hide them. This is new to you, and appealing: it is a joy to see someone on TV who’s as perpetually devastated as you.

8

When you’re 14 years old is when you’ll start talking to yourself. When you’re 14 is when it’ll become a habit, a survival mechanism. Technically, it’ll keep you away from the thing you need most—a good talk therapist—but then that’s the paradox built into every survival mechanism.

At first, it is a rehearsal. Sitting on the floor of your bedroom closet, rocking back and forth, you’re preparing yourself to meet with a professional, one who will ask you all sorts of questions—hard questions. Abuse is neither simple to endure nor to share, and you can hardly do either. You’re certain your unedited answers would get you uprooted from your life; you need to be able to give the answers the professionals would prefer. You want care, you do—but only the kind you believe you’re capable of surviving.

Your imagination is so vivid that this imagined therapy, undertaken in stolen moments of utter privacy, satisfies your need to be heard. The only person hearing you is you, but you in someone else’s skin: alone in the closet, you don the costume of a caretaker, nodding at yourself with kindness, genuinely invested in your own suffering.

You’ll return to school to take your seat beside future Fulbright scholars, tech giants, Ivy League professors; you’ll watch them ingest the science and engineering curricula that will take them where they want—or have been told to want—to go. Lost in your thoughts at school as often as at home, you’re learning instead the value of roleplay, of acting—of benefiting from a semblance when you lack access to the real thing.

In the penultimate episode of Grey’s Anatomy’s inaugural season, a stubborn patient believes he’s clairvoyant, and is told this is an illness. The show is young, so it employs a silly trope: the patient mysteriously knows things he absolutely shouldn’t, with no logical explanation. It’s a suspension of believability the show won’t pull again without cues clearly indicating, for example, a tumor-induced hallucination.

The so-called clairvoyant does not have a tumor, but he does have an arteriovenous malformation. He puts off surgery partly for fear of death, but his bigger fear is losing his supposed gift.

You’ll put off therapy partly for fear of Child Protective Services, but your bigger fear is losing your supposed gifts. You’ve been marked since age five as “gifted and talented,” and even at 14, you already suspect this refers to something like clairvoyance—an invisible external force dictating the future to you from afar. You’ll contextualize this psychosis with logical explanations, like the vivid imagination of an aspiring writer. Whatever it is that makes you “special” (and you feel so different from everyone else, you build your identity around the idea that you, in fact, are), you don’t want to lose it to the medical industrial complex; to diagnosis and treatment; to talk therapy.

In the show, after much cajoling, the man is talked into having surgery. He wakes up to find his gift survives too.

As will soon become another habit, you’ll refuse to learn the lesson provided.

22

The ninth episode of the show leans on another silly trope. Dr. Burke’s supposedly virile friend turns out to be sterile and (surprise!) intersex. Literature has a long tradition of treating so-called sex/gender variation as a plot twist—for the person who’s the supposed variant, for the people around them, or else for the unsuspecting audience. The patient rages the rage of indignation and disgust pioneered and perfected by trans people, but mostly because his sterility indicates that his pregnant wife has had a secret affair.

The 22nd episode does trans rage a bit more justice: the patient is a kid with the killer name of Bex, who looks to the doctors (and presumably the audience) like a moody, tomboyish girl. Bex turns out to be intersex too. Their parents take up too much space for Bex to get to rage; instead, Bex quietly stews, pouring themselves into their comic art. The sensitive, effeminate buffoon’s arc also takes a twist when he defies his superior, refusing to conceal Bex’s diagnosis because, as he empathetically proclaims, Bex just wants to know why they’ve always felt so different. The episode never uses the word “trans,” but it’s implied at the end that Bex will transition, the first thing to happen during their storyline that makes the character smile. (At 32 years old, you’ll rewatch the series for the first time since beginning to transition, and this will be one of many scenes that will make you cry nonstop.)

But if the show’s going to go any further than surprise intersex diagnoses, it’s going to need a reason. (Remember, these episodes are premiering in 2005 and 2006—a veritable century ago in terms of “progressive representation.”) The answer is the most stereotypical plastic surgeon Grey’s Anatomy creator and showrunner Shonda Rhimes can muster: a self-described “man-whore” whom the characters call “McSteamy,” who’s defined by his abs, his jawline, and his propensity for sexually harassing his subordinates. He’s so distasteful, his character’s unforeseeable twist is that, when an out trans person arrives in episode 43 (played by an out trans person, the splendid Alexandra Billings), it’s shocking how kindly he treats her, chastising his colleagues for misgendering her, and respecting all of her demands, even when they run the risk of killing her. This melodramatic plotline leans on one more silly trope: the character turns out to have breast cancer. The episode’s formulation is that what makes her a woman will kill her. Her trans rage is that she’d rather die than stop taking hormones or be forced to put off indefinitely her impending vaginoplasty.

I’m sorry to say that this scenario will someday be more relatable than anyone could possibly bear.

27

“Intersex” is one of many diagnostic categories the medical industrial complex simply cannot handle. “Neurodivergence,” another. Youth, writ large—yet another. 

You can replace “the medical industrial complex” here and elsewhere with “Western medicine,” “settler colonial conceptions of health and wellness,” or any number of equally pejorative but accurate phrases.

Your first dealings with the medical industrial complex revolve around your asthma. You’re hospitalized for it for the first time when you’re age 5, or 7, or maybe 8 years old, all of which would be good times for the doctors to ask you about your mental, social, and familial health.

They don’t.

Instead of meeting with a social worker or child psychologist (either of whom would make your life tremendously better or tremendously worse, with no possible in-between), you’ll be sent home with inhalers and a cool little rubberized tube, clear in the middle, cerulean at the ends. You might imagine a pinkish equivalent given to cis girls, but you’d only assume this because the rest of your dealings with the medical industrial complex will be so fucking gendered.

You’ll start seeing mental health professionals when you’re age 19, or 20, or maybe 22 years old (you’ll spend those years so intoxicated, you’ll remember too little, though the uglier truth is it’s maybe psychosomatic—a word/concept you’ll come to consider hopelessly out of touch). For over a decade, you’ll see more therapists than you can count, and almost every single one will be a straight, cisgender white woman. To them, you’ll be something of a sensitive, effeminate buffoon—well, that’s the gender you’ll be performing at the time. (Buffoon can be a gender, though the medical industrial complex has no place on its forms where that could possibly be noted.) 

Because they’re cishet white women, and because the stories you’re drawn to up until that age are written by white gay men who portray cishet women as both enviable and irreparably damaged, or else by women of color who portray white women as both malevolent and sympathetic, you’ll simultaneously envy, distrust, pity, and want to heal them—these women who are supposed to be helping you heal (heal your mind, heal your brain, heal your heart; the medical industrial complex doesn’t have a decent metaphor for this; you’ll eventually prefer something like “soul”). You’ll always feel this way when you meet white, or cis, or straight people, which is why you’ll need to avoid them at all costs.

You’re trans. I.e.: you have too much empathy, and yet you have no choice but to conserve it.

Still, these women won’t be the reason you’ll be unable to tell your story.

They simply will not know any better. 

Nor, at that point, will you.

By the time you get to therapy, you will have had more access to educational resources than most adults whom you encounter. You’ll have been given the opportunity to familiarize yourself with more theories, more histories, more information and analytical tools than most people on Earth. (This is not an asset: the well-known graph showing that personal happiness plateaus—and, in fact, decreases—beyond a certain threshold of income probably maps one-to-one to formal schooling. Trust your intuition here; people with/earning PhDs do not, on the whole, seem particularly thrilled to be alive.) What this means is that the people who are supposed to help you do not have the capacity, as you do, to detect invisibility—to know the future, to manipulate time and space as a storyteller can.

Heterosexuality is a perceptual cage from which you’ll have already escaped, but it is a cage enclosed by another cage (cisness) enclosed by another cage (whiteness). It will take you decades to escape these and other cages, and still, one foot will remain entangled in the bars—the price of making it out alive at all. When you do finally make it out, you will understand what it is to be gifted and talented. It is to know better, and for this to be a hindrance. Self-awareness, as the Book of Genesis implies, is the original, ultimate prison.

43

At 31 years old, you’ll thank God that the parking area for UCLA Beverly Hills Medical Center is underground. It means you’ll only be visible to the public for a short half-block walk, dressed awkwardly in a tight, purple V-neck sweater; a fluttery, ankle-length skirt; your favorite pink New Balance sneakers; your cherry red Ray-Ban eyeglasses, your fingernails painted to match; your face and arms shaved; your lips colored pomegranate by a makeup brand called Fenty (you haven’t heard of Rihanna yet, but you will, later in life, refer to her as our lord and savior), though your lips won’t even be visible under your N95 (you haven’t thought much about pandemics yet, but you will, later in life, whether you want to or not).

Your breasts will be small, your hair short, so to you, you’ll still look like a cis man in dress-up, and not in a good way, despite the string of cis celebrities who are now awarded brand deals and public praise for what would get you pilloried and pariahed in elementary school and junior high. Really, you’ll just look like a crossdresser (or, in your more self-deprecating moments, a brick), but crossdressers (and bricks) still fall under the trans-with-an-asterisk umbrella, and besides, there’s no one way to be trans. Forget this at your peril. Coming out as trans-with-an-asterisk will, thankfully, be the last time you’ll deal with feeling not [insert identity marker here] enough. But this is not yet your concern.

Outside UCLA Beverly Hills Medical Center, your concern will be safety. This is a fucking joke. There are few places safer than the journey to the Center’s esteemed Gender Health Program, cradled by the shell of your partner’s Mazda, your meals at this time in your life assured, your care at this particular place certain to be excellent. There’s a paradox to this, too. Your suicidality will always be entangled with survivor’s guilt. You’ll feel less suicidal, for example, when you start hoarding some of your estradiol, to give to any stranger who wants it, and you’ll feel more suicidal when you realize this isn’t particularly helpful unless you hoard your testosterone blockers too—which you can’t because your body’s not supposed to contain high levels of both hormones at once, and which you won’t because testosterone is what you’re most afraid of (the thing around which, completely irrationally, you feel least safe). As has already become another habit, you fear the things inside you more than anything outside.

This fear is misplaced, of course: there is nothing inherently wrong with testosterone, nor anything especially holy about estrogen either. The fear you will identify is the fear of ill-gotten gains, of the bargain you have made in order to transition.

You will be forced to tell a story, as many trans people must, in order to earn the medical designation of transgender. That story will have needed to include a neatly legible tale of persistent gender dysphoria and, wherever possible, indications that you exhibited signs of the diagnostic criterion at as early an age as possible (you’ll share with your doctors a childhood affinity for American Girl books, and how, when your mother unhelpfully used stickers to relabel them as American Boy books, you understood even then that she wanted you to paper over your idiosyncrasies, when what you wanted instead was affirmation that you were, indeed, an American girl). That story will not have room for facts like that, at my age, you like the look and feel of your beard, particularly the centimeter-length it stays at once you commence your hormone therapy; that you like to wear your old boy clothes sometimes, in an Avril Lavigne, tomboy punk, intersex Bex kind of way, which means you sometimes pass as male (and which is why you cannot wait for your breast augmentation, the clearest sign to any onlooker that they’re not dealing with someone cis); and that you don’t feel particularly strongly about any pronouns and only choose she/her upon transitioning because it seems powerful politically. In truth, if pressed, you’d identify as an imp, the way trans-with-an-asterisk legal scholar and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray did at the end of her/his/their/imp’s life.

The version of your story that omits these things, the version of the story you initially tell: it’s dangerous because it is compelling. Narratives always run the risk of ossifying upon their telling. We don’t yet have adequate technologies for presenting texts as malleable, ever-changing fluids. Whiteness, for example, cannot function without the rigid persistence of stories of superiority; cisheterosexism cannot succeed without the deceptively timeless fable of the nuclear family; colonialism cannot conquer without the infrastructure for disseminating narratives that justify dispossession at all costs.

You, like so many before you, will be tempted to offer up counter-narratives in response, to write the same old stories replacing the people at the center with people like yourself. You will feel the pressure to claim that representation matters, because it will feel good to finally be at the center of things. When you make this awful bargain, you will in the process justify the utility of story as a weapon, as a means for positioning yourself as superior to those whose lives and experiences cannot fit the mold of a story that’s neatly legible—to anyone, but particularly to our proliferation of industrial complexes, medical and otherwise.

You will someday suspect that if every art form were valued equally—if they all offered the same amount of pay—most people would not choose storytelling. Maybe no one would choose it at all. Language is a tool of communication, of interaction. When transmuted into an art performed in silence and solitude, it runs the risk of calcifying, and even the least capable doctor among us knows that calcification, in the wrong place at the wrong time, will lead to certain death.

52

Whenever you visit a doctor, there is risk.

Your doctor may fail to diagnose you, may misdiagnose you. They may prescribe the wrong medication, or the incorrect dosage. They will likely ask the wrong questions, fail to consider the appropriate conditions. They are nearly guaranteed to fail to ask you about your home life, about the meaningful parts of your family history that have nothing to do with your internal organs. Even the doctors who are supposed to ask about these things will do it wrong (and you can replace the word “doctors” here with several equally pejorative but accurate phrases).

It is sensible, then, to be afraid. To feel unsafe. Watch enough episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and you will understand how often small amounts of wrong decisions can lead to certain death.

In episodes 25 and 26, Meredith Grey, the show’s titular character, nearly dies while helping surgically remove unexploded ammunition from a patient’s body cavity. Seconds after the explosive device is removed and transferred out of the operating room, it goes off—just a few yards in front of her, launching her in slow motion away from the member of the bomb squad who has become a cloud of pink mist. The ultradramatic two-parter during which this plotline unfolds is responsible for turning the show into a primetime juggernaut, and is bookended by oblique references to Meredith’s suicidality, which lie just beneath the surface of the show. They’re hidden under what looks like, to the casual viewer, the stress of having your abusive mother succumb to Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. (You, suicidal to varying degrees from ages 9 through 31, are not the casual viewer.)

Meredith states, at the beginning of episode 25, that she doesn’t want to go to work because she feels like she’s going to die today, her premonition prompting concerned looks from her friends, all surgeons. These are the kinds of looks you’ll become inured to after receiving them enough times; clairvoyance, since at least the time of Salem, has always been dreadfully suspect.

In the section labelled “27,” you’ll write about your excessive educational privileges, and the resulting curses this lays at your feet. You’ll skip over what actually happens in episode 27 of Grey’s Anatomy: how Meredith’s near-death experience compels her to visit her estranged father, who is at least partially at fault for the abuse Meredith experiences throughout her life at the hands of her emotionally tortured mother, and whom she visits in order to make this clear. In both 27's, someone is being centered at the expense of another—a practice for which there is always an unbearable price.

In episode 52 of Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith is unwell in every sense of the word. Her mother is in the hospital, suddenly lucid and desperate to inflict abuse on anyone who enters her vicinity—particularly Meredith, with whom she is disgusted and disappointed, in part for not having simply let her die and thus sparing her the indignities of dementia. Meredith—distracted and morose, attempting to save a man’s life at the scene of a chaotic mass casualty incident—accidentally falls into the sea. Shonda Rhimes, the show’s creator and the episode’s writer, gives Meredith the opportunity to drown. Meredith elects to take it.

Technically, Meredith dies; her doctors take extreme, extraordinary measures; ultimately, she is miraculously revived. The episode never uses the word “suicidality,” but many characters, including Meredith, finally recognize that it would be appropriate.

Over the next several episodes, Meredith’s father and his new wife will use the newly clarified depths of her depression as a reasonable excuse to grow closer to her. Their daughter and newborn grandchild were, after all, successfully operated on by Meredith’s friends in episodes 46, 47, and 48. Meredith’s second near-death experience finally grants her a more positive outlook on life, and a chance at building a healthy relationship with her father and his family.

Because of this silly chain of events set in motion seasons prior, when Meredith’s father’s wife can’t stop hiccuping in episode 58, they will opt to visit Meredith’s hospital, where—in episode 59, after some rare but plausible complications—Meredith’s father’s wife will die.

Neither Meredith nor her father will ever be the same.

Over the course of the rest of the series, at the rate of about one episode per season, Meredith’s father will succumb to the bodily toll of alcoholism, of trauma that has ultimately been accumulated over the course of an entire lifetime.

It is possible, perhaps likely, that the preceding does not happen if Meredith does not visit and accost him in episode 27, making their estrangement about her and her alone (forgetting that a parent who abuses a child is just as likely to abuse a spouse). It is possible, perhaps likely, that the preceding does not happen if, in episodes 46 through 48, Meredith does not take the neonatal surgery needed by her father’s child as an opportunity to reconnect, rather than recusing herself as a doctor, or distancing herself as a relative stranger, as would have been ethical and appropriate (but then Meredith does not see things in black and white, hence her surname, and the title/premise of the show). It is possible, perhaps likely, that some or all of the preceding is Meredith’s fault. At least this is how Meredith’s father sees it, giving him a supposedly good reason to drink himself to death.

These kinds of plot arcs make for what we consider a good story. The trajectories of the new century’s most well-received TV shows embody this kind of seamlessness, like a puzzle that can only be put together one way. Every decision affects everything that comes after. Sometimes these shows are called “TV novels.” They employ the literary technique of making every plot point matter, a departure from a time when continuity on TV was an afterthought rather than the norm. On TV, as in novels, it effectively clarifies for the audience characters’ development over time. It’s effective because it’s how we perceive our lives.

When you write this, you’ll be in episode 52 yourself. The metaphor you’ll use to describe your transition is the murder of your body’s prior occupant and his replacement with the woman you’ll become. You’ll give that man the opportunity to drown, then you’ll make him take it.

Other things will be out of order.

You’ll reconnect with your father before the quasi-death you’ll think of your gender transition as, in which you kill your father’s son and birth him a daughter.

You will, upon reconnection, make your estrangement all about you, thinking him at least partially at fault for the abuse you experience throughout your life at the hands of your emotionally tortured mother, but forgetting that a parent who abuses a child is just as likely to abuse a spouse.

Your mother will, at this point in your life, have become estranged too, so she will not yet have succumbed to dementia, at least as far as you will be aware of.

As for your father’s wife, she will not be dead; nor will he have blamed you for her death; nor will he have subsequently spiraled into alcoholism.

But if or when these things do happen (because they are possible, perhaps even likely), you will have remained at such a frustrating emotional distance that you will blame yourself—for being incapable of imparting whatever it is you possess, for being unwilling to listen to them tell their own stories, for failing to recognize that the trauma they’ve accumulated over their lifetimes has taken a lethal toll on their bodies. There are no doctors they would be willing to see capable of alleviating or addressing their pain. Sometimes what stands between injury and health is the decision-making of a relative stranger.

It is always easy to talk about how you were failed. It is much harder to talk about how you failed others. There is no amount of pain large enough to make self-reflection a desirable alternative. You will hurt people, harm them, fail them, wrong them. You will too many times prioritize the inert, immature ideas in your writing over the living, breathing organisms in your orbit who need more than to simply watch you work. You will condemn those who care about you to emotional destitution because you will think your gifts so critical to your species’ survival, you will fail to realize this is one of the most inhuman things a person can possibly do.

You are a star, but you are not the star. At your age, you may be told you are the best and the brightest, but everyone around you is as good and bright as you. You’re a kid. I’m sorry everyone around you will fail you so many times. I’m sorry you will go on to fail everyone around you so many times. There’s no such thing, in real life, as a subplot; as a side character; as a filler episode. There are few things more dangerous than what your contemporaries call “main character energy.” I know why we draw on it as a power source. People like us have been denied at every turn everything we deserve: life, love, respect, dignity. For a queer and trans woman of color to center herself in a white supremacist, cisheterosexist world is a form of resistance.

A form. A semblance.

An acting-out. A roleplay.

Practice. Rehearsal.

Not necessarily the real thing. Not necessarily the thing you need.

Jules Gill-Peterson proclaims, in Histories of the Transgender Child, that no human being on Earth has earned the responsibility for the trans children in their care. You will read this and immediately concur, though it would take you at least as many words as contained in her book to argue this idea successfully to anyone outside your immediate vicinity, anyone who has not lived the childhood of a trans kid. You must find a way to bridge this unbridgeable gap. Transness, like queerness, can lurk in anyone’s future, and thus in anyone’s past. A childhood can become a trans childhood at any moment, the moment a trans adult comes out to themselves and/or those around them. Your story does not belong to you alone. It belongs to everyone whose story might become yours. Your story, after all, is only mine because you will become me. The right to care for a trans child is earned in the aftermath. It is forged in the making.

Right now, your father is likely sitting uncomfortably at a table too small for his liking, on the first floor of the last home he may ever inhabit. He will someday die but may beforehand undergo some kind of quasi-death too. He may become, for you, another mother, or a parent of some new and indeterminate gender.

Right now, his wife is likely thinking of and troubled by the uneven trajectories of her children, distracting herself with another novel, downloaded onto the e-reader you will gift her on one memorable, abundant Christmas. She will someday die, but may also someday undergo the same kind of quasi-death too.

Their stories are not to be dismissed as footnotes in the story of a younger, nimbler, more formally educated relative/stranger. Their stories may be no different than your own. They may only be able to become themselves if you are willing to share your story—to contextualize it with care, as you will someday do for yourself with the story of Meredith Grey. This is the only value of knowledge and experience; this is self-awareness minus the self; this is the reason you exist at all.

If the people you care about are to be trans, they will have also been trans children. If you will someday become me and reach back through time to who you are right now, then reach across time towards the people around you when you get here—in other words, now, before the moment has passed.

You are, for better or worse, as much doctor as patient.

Look around you.

Say hello.

53

There is an arrogance to the writer’s life mirrored in the attitudes of the surgeons on Grey’s Anatomy—of cutthroat flesh-cutters, hungry to rearrange muscle and bone so their patients might survive the special maladies that afflict them.

The person you will someday love—yes, even you, a brilliant, beautiful, broken trans girl, will get to be loved before it’s all over—calls writing a weapon of mass destruction. He is right, though when we refer to destruction en masse, we miss that a bomb is just an accumulation of scalpels. Open up the bodies of the bombed and you’ll see the same kinds of cuts a doctor might make.

This means that you—yes, even you, a brilliant, beautiful, broken trans girl—are dangerous. Your gift—the ability to know and change time and space as only a storyteller can—is and will always be dangerous.

Sometimes women—white women, cis women, women of all kinds who’ve amassed their little share of power and choose to wield it unquestioningly—will look back five, ten, or twenty years later, and see how much they’ve healed. They will count the ways in which oppression wounded them; they will touch the scars and wonder how it’s possible for such soft, fading marks to metaphorize what was once life-threatening damage. Really, the amount that they’ve healed equates to how much they leaned into the winnings of apartheid, of a world order that will give anyone who wants it a reasonable excuse to believe themselves superior. Sometimes what looks like healing is a compromising of the soul.

Young girl who is me, you would do well to acknowledge the danger you pose. Every choice you make matters. Your suicidality—the thing that draws you to Meredith Grey, the thing that draws you and me together through time—may yet be a glory.

Learn from what’s happened. What will happen. If you’re to survive the special maladies that afflict you, it is your duty to review. To be reviewed. Your show. Your story. Give it—sacrifice it, share it—freely.

If you do it with care, it may even someday serve as your guide.

This essay is part of an in-progress book project tentatively titled The Trans Girl's Guide to Modern Television. A version of this essay was published by Under the Sun in May 2024.