Decommissioning the Battleship
By: Kira Wertz
Tags: Self Improvement, Self Love, LGBTQ, Life, Transgender

Decommissioning the Battleship

The Monster in the Mirror

Early in my transition I used to spend a lot of time putting myself together on a daily basis. The purpose of this was to appear as fem as possible. Unfortunately that’s not an easy task when you’re months away from beginning a hormonal transition and just as many months away from reaping any benefits from laser hair removal.

Pre-HRT Kira

Regardless, I still gave it my all; in a 40+ minute-a-day ritual I would glam myself up as girly as I could. All so I could crawl into a tractor-trailer and do one of the least feminine jobs on the planet; propane cylinder exchange. Even if my makeup could disguise what I was, my job certainly couldn’t.

Whether all that makeup actually made anyone accept my gender identity, I couldn’t actually say. But amazingly enough, I was often complimented on it, which was affirming on some level. Even if no one else believed I was Kira, I could look in the mirror and believe it; the compliments were just a little extra fluff to get me through my day.

The downside of my affirmation came to me at the end of my evening. I’d go into my bathroom and stare at myself so enamored with my reflection. But then I would become overcome with distress, and sometimes tears. I was upset because I was about begin another daily ritual, one that I would try to make less emotionally painful by cheerfully referring to it as “Decommissioning the Battleship.”

It was this end-of-day act of removing layers of makeup, a wig, earrings, and breastforms which left me an emotional cripple. I was not meant to look into this mirror and have such seething hatred for the reflection looking back at me.

2005 Kira

Present-Day Kira — No Armor

Present-Day Kira with and w/o wig

Some might wonder why I didn’t have such a violent reaction to seeing my reflection for the 39 years prior to coming out, and that would be a fair question. The best reasoning for it might be Stockholm Syndrome. I didn’t realize what I was being denied by my captor, or even that I was his hostage; I simply never took issue with him. It is only now that I am free but still forced to stare at him daily which brings me such pain. Every morning I watch him fade into me, and every evening I watch him reemerge. He’s a ghost that I can’t quite exorcise.

It is an apt metaphor that as I am prone to “decommissioning the battleship” at night, I commission it every morning. There is a war I’m waging, and it’s got more layers than most people will ever realize.

The only time I need to see this monster is at the bookends of my day. Which means all day long, the mirrors in my vehicles, and the high gloss screens of laptops, tablets, and phones are beaming back the reflection of a person that I know I’ve always felt, but never saw. Therein lies a dysphoric beast.

One would think that seeing this glorious reflection of self would always be a joyous thing. This is not always the case. I sometimes find myself in the middle of my shift fighting back tears; if I let loose, no one around me would understand the reason. For me it’s simple, for them it’s complex.

I find myself in this dysphoria because I see this reflection of the person I’d always longed to be, and I am overcome with guilt and shame for having denied myself this truth for so long. It’s the culmination of sadness from the realization that this reflection could have been achieved so much sooner had I not been a coward. This is what can bring me to tears seemingly without reason.