Gia and I spent a week in that recovery room. I would go out and buy bottles of Diet Pepsi and greasy tacos from the gas station across the street while she convalesced in bed, cloistered. On the sixth day she was getting restless so we decided to visit the nearby Basilica of Our Lady of Zapopan, a seventeenth-century Franciscan sanctuary where every year a million pilgrims gathered to parade a statue of the Virgin through the streets. Gia was still too sore to walk any significant distance, so I pushed her in a wheelchair wherever possible. As I wheeled her through the basilica, her head wrapped in the white gauze, her features altered to perfect, delicate proportions, she looked more like the saints and angels in the church frescoes and icon paintings than any woman I had known.

At one point she stood up and hobbled over to an icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They were dead ringers for one another. The same green-grey eyes, the same thin nose, the same voluptuous lips, the same white drapery encasing her head. Held aloft in the virgin’s right hand was her flaming heart. Dangling to Gia’s side was a plastic tube connected to a little packet collecting the excess blood and fluid from her wounds. She took this little heart into her right hand and held it aloft towards the painting itself as if it were a mirror.

Nothing about Gia was ironic or satirical. Every fibre in her believed in the existence of these mythic women and the power their archetypes had upon the everyday lives of the devoted. Gia felt herself in communion with the divine feminine, as the living embodiment of its many prismatic identities. She was the Aztec fertility goddess and the snake-headed goddess of war as much as she was Saint Teresa of Ávila and the Virgin of Guadalupe, just as much as she was Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Ophelia, Isis, and Sinéad O’Connor. These great women lived through Gia and Gia lived through them. As a former sex worker, a trans woman vilified for her body, shamed for her sexuality, she had always felt particular affinity for the Whore of Babylon. “There’s no stronger woman than an old whore,” she once said to me. The Whore of Babylon was the ur-whore, the mother of all prostitutes and abominations of the earth, and the very embodiment of evil (naturally feminine) in the Book of Revelation. The woman “with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication” (Revelation 17:2). The great slut of apokalypsis.