Reflections of a girl hoping her HIV confirmation test proves her reactive result was a false positive, July 31, 2025
I tested reactive for HIV yesterday.
Made you look.
No, but seriously, my bottom surgery consult at a large hospital included a screening test, and it was reactive.
The hospital’s gender-affirming surgery staff clearly doesn’t deal with surprise reactive HIV tests regularly, and they were nervous on the phone. The queer clinic I go to, on the other hand, clearly does, and they were calm when I went in yesterday to get retested. The hospital phone call with the results treated me like an anomaly to be approached with concern and stress. At the queer clinic, the provider centered me and talked me through my situation.
A large gauge needle, four vials of blood, three to five days, and then I’ll know.
I grew up in the 90s. Blood, needles, and multiple sexual partners were drilled into me as how you got HIV, and HIV was a death sentence. AZT might buy you a decade. None of this is news; I want you to understand what the narrative around HIV was when I was a child.
I don’t actually have those risk factors. But I’m weirdly closer to them than I ever have been before. I get torn up and bloody during electrolysis. I inject medicine at home. I have multiple partners I’m intimate with. I understand intellectually that these things don’t raise my risk, that the odds of this being a false positive are much higher than the odds of me being HIV positive. And I understand that modern antiretrovirals are much more effective and gentle on the body than AZT.
It still unsettles me.
There’s something grim about having a brush with the plague that killed so many people like me. A plague that burned uncontained through the queer community. They kill us in cycles. Sometimes the weapon is neglect.
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