A few months later, Gia asked me to travel with her to Guadalajara, Mexico, to document her castration. Gia’s sugar daddy, a wealthy construction baron with a family in the burbs, had agreed to pay for the procedure, and she wanted to document it as part of her art practice. After so many surgeries it was the one she had been holding out on, but she said she finally felt ready. And while she was at it, she had also decided to get a facelift. It was cheaper to do both procedures at once, and apparently she was “overdue.” Surgical bodies required constant maintenance, she explained to me, because they didn’t age like normal bodies. Things began to sag in strange and unnatural ways. The facelift was just part of the routine maintenance that would be required every few years until she died. But of course the byproduct of more and more procedures was that the face, the body, began to look, in Gia’s words, increasingly “surged out.” Increasingly uncanny. She joked that this facelift would likely give her the tell-tale “Joker’s mouth,” when a face was stretched one procedure too far and the edges of the mouth were left peaking upwards in a slight perma-grin like the Joker’s in Batman. Gia was embracing this new “freak” phase of her bodily evolution. She would not hide it. She would, in her usual fashion, enhance it.

All of Gia’s surgeries had been done by Doctor Sam, a plastic-surgery wizard in Guadalajara who was legendary among transsexuals. Nothing was too outrageous or chal­lenging for Doctor Sam. Which was good, because not only did Gia want to document the procedures as part of her art practice — she wanted to remain awake for them. She wanted to feel Doctor Sam’s fingers under her skin, the scalpel making its incisions, the new lightness between her legs. For her, surgeries were ecstatic experiences. Rituals of renewal and transformation. And Doctor Sam was an artist, a Michelangelo revealing the sublime form hidden within the marble slab.

The men’s rugby team surrounding us on the plane ride down kept leering at Gia and making snide comments. But she seemed impervious to their sneers, and to the stares at the Guadalajara airport. Men came at her with waves of hatred and she dashed them against the rocks of her indifference. As we waited for our luggage at the carousel I asked her how she was doing.

“Honey I am living,” she replied, surveying the Arrivals hall from behind her dark sunglasses.

We landed in Mexico just as sixty million monarch butterflies were finishing their two-and-a-half-thousand-mile migration, arriving like the souls of the dead returning to earth. As we climbed into the airport taxi, a cloud of them passed overhead, guided by some evolutionary imprint to the hidden valley of their ancestors, coating the trees so densely as to snap branches under their weight.