As a trans woman in my 20s, 'Gilmore Girls' made me realize just how much of my girlhood was stolen from me

• I started watching "Gilmore Girls" in 2014, at 20 years old, in my first year living away from home.
• At first, I related to Rory, but as a trans woman, Lorelai's stolen girlhood became more poignant.

When I first started watching "Gilmore Girls" in 2014, I was 20 years old and had just left home to attend university in another city.

There was something so comforting about the fuzzy nostalgia and witty femininity on "Gilmore Girls." It gave me renewed hope, starting with the opening lines of The La's "There She Goes" that introduce us to Lorelai.

While living away from my family for the first time, I was transported into Rory Gilmore's struggles at Chilton and Yale as if through a magic mirror. Like Rory I was always a bookish girl, academic and timid. She was raised by a single mother and had a deadbeat dad, and so was I.

Our similarities drew me deeper into the show, and I didn't want to leave.

But there was just one glaring difference between my life and Rory's — one I'd known about myself since puberty. I was a transgender girl.

Watching and rewatching the show throughout my 20s, I came to realize that although Rory's life was what I yearned for, it was Lorelai's that I deeply related to.

On the "Gilmore Girls" pilot, Lorelai tells her mother she "stopped being a child the minute the strip turned pink." It was the moment she stopped being a girl and became — if not yet a woman — a mother.

It was a reminder that, whether cis or trans, girlhood and womanhood are fragile, volatile conditions that women can be robbed of or thrown into without consent or warning.

Like Lorelai, my girlhood was stolen from me

The first time I became acutely aware of my chromosomal and hormonal birth defects was when I saw signs that puberty was starting to make me look like a boy. My girlhood ended the minute I turned 13, just as it was supposed to be beginning.

First, my wavy, white-blonde hair turned to dark-brown curls almost overnight, making me look more like my father than my mother. My blonde hair had been like a promise my body made to me. The promise, as I understood it, was that no matter how people saw me then, I'd eventually grow into the beautiful woman I knew myself to be.

My voice slowly deepened, and I no longer got called "ma'am" or "miss" when ordering family pizzas over the landline every Saturday. Now it was "sir."

This was also the time when my feminine behavior started being policed. I was disallowed from watching TV shows "meant for girls" like "Sabrina the Teenage Witch," "Winx Club," and "Unfabulous," and learned to feign an interest in "Jackass" and "Monty Python."

When I came out of the shower or went to the beach, I felt forced to show my chest, which I preferred to cover with a towel or a shirt. I felt innately shy about revealing any part of my body, but especially my chest. My brief experience with pubertal gynecomastia — when boys develop excess breast tissue during puberty — didn't make this any easier, even if it was another sign to me that my body was fighting just as hard to be a girl as I was.

I started having tantrums about "not looking right" that I didn't have the words to explain. I now understand them as my first breakdowns over gender dysphoria, or the conflict between my assigned gender and my gender identity.

Without that terminology or support of any kind, I just knew I felt like an ugly girl with a broken body.

Like Rory's best friend Lane Kim, who hid her true self away under floorboards in her room, I'd learned to conceal my gender melancholia over the years. Eventually, I nearly forgot the person I really was. My adolescence as a girl was spent trying to learn how to be a convincing boy — which seldom worked.

I felt like I was playing a character. As I entered my 20s, I knew that character had to evolve into a man, and trying to become one is still the most painful and humiliating thing I've ever experienced.

Coming out to my mother was the cathartic exhale I needed

Eventually, at 28, I came out to my mother after a visit home. We were seated on an airport bench minutes before my flight. The illusion that I'd ever been her son evaporated, and after some gentle questions and a hug, she paused and told me, "I always wanted a daughter."

I cried the whole flight home and began to see how curses can become blessings. I thought about how Lorelai's truncated girlhood gifted her Rory and the inseparable mother-daughter bond they came to share.

I had to learn to accept that I never had the girlhood I needed. But just like for Lorelai, becoming a woman at any age is not the end of being a girl. It's the heart of it.