The lie is suffocating. Every time I have to play along, I feel like I'm betraying myself. Sometimes when I see myself in a mirror, I get a little splash of fear sluicing down my spine.

So much time lost, so much of my childhood gone, because nobody every asked the right questions.

I guess I just thought that I was finally a real girl.""Hey! None of that!" She takes me by the shoulders. "You think it's a uterus that makes a woman? Bullshit. You feel like you're a girl, you live it, it's part of you? Then you're a girl. That's the end of it, no quibbling. You're as real a girl as anyone.

Is she brave enough to say that for the first time since puberty started, she doesn't daydream about being dead? That she's wonderfully, terribly, gloriously alive? That the world is so beautiful it hurts?

So they spit on me. They're embarrassed by me. They hate me.FOR A MISTAKE THAT THEY MADE.