Buying My Girlhood Is Putting Me In Debt

The dress is citrus green and covered in neon-pink polka dots. The thin fabric collar clasps around my neck and connects to the shoulder straps, emphasizing my pronounced collarbones. I bought it for $170 after negotiating with the Depop seller because I thought it would make me feel like a girl. The brand is Eckhaus Latta, a name I started searching for on clothing resale apps after the Scottish music producer Sophie walked for their 2018 Autumn/Winter runway and actor Hunter Schafer wore several of their designs in Euphoria’s first season—two trans women whose work helped me realize I am also transgender. Eckhaus Latta’s gender-neutral clothes also seemed ideal for transitioning because the loose-fitting, often-sculptural designs can adapt to widening hips or triangular, pubescent breasts.

When I bought the dress, estrogen was finally making visible changes to my body after three months on HRT. My nipples transformed from mosquito bites to wide, sloping anthills and darkened, becoming a walnut brown. My skin softened like warming butter. My metabolism slowed, and the weight I gained migrated to my stomach and butt. Standing in front of my bedroom mirror, I hiked the dress up to my waist and gently jiggled my butt cheeks with my hands.

Kathy Acker famously once told Rosemary Bailey, “I can’t afford to buy a painting so if I get some money I go buy a dress.” I couldn’t afford to make the changes that might make me feel more like a girl: fracturing and moving my cheekbones, shaving the cartilage of my Adam’s apple, or augmenting my newly developing breasts. But I could afford a $170 Eckhaus Latta dress.

Later that night, I wore the dress to the gay club. The DJ played a Dua Lipa song, and my friend Taylor and I danced on the club’s elevated platform. I watched our reflections in the wall of mirrors and admired the delicate shape of my lips as I sipped my vodka soda through the tiny plastic straw, imitating a porn star’s pouting expression when she holds a dick to her mouth. Taylor leaned closer to me and exclaimed, “Bitch, you look so good.”

“It’s the estrogen, baby,” I cooed and adjusted my dress, which kept sliding down and revealing my right nipple.

I couldn’t afford to make the changes that might make me feel more like a girl. But I could afford a $170 dress.

She took a photo of us with her phone. I arched my back and shimmied the dress a few inches higher so that my matching neon-pink thong would peek out from underneath the hem.

Another friend and I stepped outside to bum cigarettes. A man with a greasy ponytail and broad fingers handed me two. When I thanked him, he smiled—eyeing my smooth, shaven legs—and said, “Of course, Beautiful.” I imagined his broad fingers cupping my almost-imperceptible breasts. Maybe I’d flirt with him after another drink. I passed one of the cigarettes to my friend, who lit mine.

“You really will wear those shoes with anything, huh?” My friend pointed to my Doc Marten platform boots, which I’d put on because I was dog-sitting for a friend and didn’t have any other options. Staring down at my shoes, I saw them from my friend’s perspective and thought that maybe they were right. The boots looked clownish with this outfit. I looked like a cross-dresser. A man wearing femininity as a costume.

My friend’s comment reminded me of a similar experience of self-doubt. I was fifteen and sitting on the bathroom counter as I applied eyeliner for the first time. The cheap drugstore eyeliner was thicker than I expected and flaked as it dried. I widened each stroke, trying to compensate for my unsteady hand, and accidentally painted my entire eyelids black before adding exaggerated wing tips. As I waited for my mother to unlock the car, she gave me an unsympathetic look and said, “That’s a lot of makeup.”

I’ve never mentioned either of these memories to my friend or my mother, or how inadequate they made me feel. Why didn’t I know how to select the right pair of shoes to wear with my new minidress or how to apply the correct amount of makeup? If I confessed that their judgements affected me, I worried that they would watch me more closely, witnessing my timid attempts to experiment with femininity, and see me as an imposter. A real girl knows how to be feminine intuitively, I thought.

I took one last drag from the cigarette before tossing it to the ground and stomping the smoldering tip beneath my boot.

*

The cost of facial-feminization surgery can run from twenty thousand to fifty thousand dollars, breast augmentation is six thousand to twelve thousand dollars, and a tracheal shave is three thousand to four thousand dollars. My insurance considers these gender-affirming procedures cosmetic and will not cover them. However, they will cover genital reconstructive surgery—a procedure that I have little interest in and that would have little impact on whether strangers perceive me as a woman in public.

My full-time nonprofit job paid me a salary that, after federal and state taxes, amounted to about forty thousand dollars last year. Occasionally, I receive a small sum of money for my writing, but not enough to feel secure spending a fourth of my income on new tits. But my credit card provider offered me a limit of nearly the same amount, and this credit financed the bulk of my early transition as I used it to pay for laser hair removal, lip fillers, cosmetics, and clothes. This borrowed money felt less tangible, a wellspring I could tap whenever I felt dysphoric to mitigate the fear that I simply couldn’t afford to fully transition. Through this credit, my girlhood became debt.

After getting home from the club—unable to take off my rings because my fingers were puffy and swollen—I lay in bed and looked at the pictures of me and Taylor. Taylor was wearing a nude tank top tucked into a silver metallic miniskirt that seemed to emphasize her petite shoulders and ample ass. My dress hung limply around my figure, making me look rectangular. I couldn’t stop staring at my arms. They were lanky and oddly proportioned. My fade haircut made me seem even more boyish and, worse, made me look like my father. My attempt to appear devilishly flirtatious by lifting my dress merely exposed the neon-pink bulge between my legs. I looked unmistakably like a man.

Desperate to shake this feeling, I searched the internet for a pair of knee-high boots I’d seen my friend Willa wearing a few weeks earlier—a pair of boots I was convinced would match my dress better and make me look more girlish. Willa started transitioning before me, and every time we ran into each other, she announced a new acquisition, showing off a fresh set of acrylic nails; pulling down her mask so that I could admire her shiny, plump lips, the injection sites shadowy and blue; sharing that she scheduled facial-feminization surgery and bottom surgery. Eventually, I found the boots for $470. I considered them a rare find; I am a size 12 in women’s shoes, and most brands don’t manufacture their designs larger than a size 10. When I saw Willa a few days later at Whole Foods, I confessed that I bought the same pair of boots.

“I’ve only worn mine a few times and they’re already falling apart,” Willa said. “You should try Jeffrey Campbell shoes instead.” She also warned me against doing laser hair removal at a medical spa in our neighborhood. “Go to Enfuse and tell them I referred you. I’ll text you everything.”

I had already spent six hundred dollars on six months’ worth of treatments at the other spa. Coupled with my lip injections (twelve hundred dollars), this was the largest sum of money I’d spent during my transition thus far. It was also the first time I questioned whether I’d be able to pay back my creditor. I wondered how Willa afforded her transition—if her parents helped her, if her insurance had better transgender coverage, or if, like me, she was using a credit card to finance these expenses. Raised to believe talking about money was taboo, I never asked.

I imagined spending more money on yet another pair of shoes and balked. I knew that I was borrowing from my future, that my credit card statement would arrive each month and I would have to apportion more of my paycheck to pay down the balance. And my transition goals seemed further out of reach than ever.

*

The first time I wore the bikini to the beach, I reclined on my towel, trying to appear demure and feminine for the men who occasionally walked past, but I noticed my bulge was painfully obvious through my bikini bottoms and crossed my legs to hide it. When I got home later, I ordered several pairs of tucking underwear and clicked through dozens of pages of discounted designer dresses. The girlhood promised by each purchase was like the beam of a laser pointer, and I was a cat chasing after the red dot. Every time I pounced, I discovered the light had leaped to another surface just out of my grasp. Meanwhile, my monthly credit card payment was inflating exponentially.

The girlhood promised by each purchase was like the beam of a laser pointer, and I was a cat chasing after the red dot.

“Credit is a form of optimism,” Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens. “It depends on the belief that the future will be more prosperous than the present.” Each time I used my credit card, I rationalized my ballooning debt by imagining a future in which I was satisfied with my transition, a future in which I had waist-length hair, glowing skin, supple breasts, plump lips, chic clothes, and a loving partner. Money was too abstract. I could not conceptualize how long it might take to repay ten thousand dollars, but I knew what it felt like to be called a tranny while waiting on a crowded train platform. I felt the pervasive anxiety of living on borrowed money, but I considered it an investment in my future. Within a few years, I would unmistakably pass as a woman and would no longer be paralyzed by the fear of being clocked in public and harassed or assaulted. I could devote the time and energy I spent navigating transition to advancing my career, earning enough to pay off my accrued credit card debt and my sizable student loans.

If I was an investment, I would likely be considered high-risk. Nearly 30 percent of transgender people live below the poverty line, compared to 17 percent of cis people and 12 percent of cis gay men, meaning I more than doubled the likelihood that I might slide out of the middle class and into poverty. This is the conundrum of transition—knowing that the choice will make you happier and more fulfilled while simultaneously resigning yourself to precarity.

But the moment came when I couldn’t keep adding to my mounting debt. I stopped taking estrogen shortly after I received a bill for $804 in the mail. It was from my first HRT appointment. My parents’ insurance claimed they would not cover the consultation or accompanying bloodwork, but I thought it was a mistake and resubmitted the claim. The same bill was delivered a few weeks later. When I called the insurance company to explain the situation, they asked me to resubmit the claim again. Yet the same bill appeared a month later.

I imagined being billed more than a month’s rent for HRT every few months and did not refill my estrogen prescription when the pharmacy called. I did not have money saved to pay the unexpected bill; I finally had to admit that I couldn’t afford to transition at the pace I wanted. But nor could I imagine a slow, piecemeal transition where girlhood might be years away. I decided I would be happier if I stopped my transition entirely. I grew a mustache and bleached it to match my platinum-blond hair. I archived my social media posts where I publicly talked about transitioning. I avoided my girlfriend’s texts and ignored my family’s phone calls, ashamed and afraid they might corner me into admitting I had failed.

Several months later, my mother texted me a photo of a letter from our insurance that said in fine print, “You do not have to pay this charge. This is because the provider did not send the claim to us within the required time limit.” I was relieved and started HRT again shortly after, but I was still confused. If this medical debt hadn’t been erased because of a simple bureaucratic error, would I have been responsible for repayment? Why is my ability to afford transition contingent on the errors and inconsistencies of the US health-care system or my access to capital lent to me by predatory credit card companies?

Since restarting HRT, I’ve paid down a portion of my credit card debt and tried to use it less frequently. I still use it to pay for various transition expenses, accepting that even the briefest moment of gender euphoria made possible by the purchase is often more valuable than its cost. But I also recognize that I feel most like a girl in the smallest moments I can’t buy: a partner cupping my breasts in his palms while we make out, my mother offhandedly telling me that I look pretty while we FaceTime, or a friend telling me that my face seems so much softer. Like a cherub, they say.

For now, my girlhood will remain a debt I cannot afford to pay back.

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