“It’s funny,” Barrett continued as he stared at my reflection. “I know you’re trans, but I can’t really tell. It’s a lot harder to see you were an Asian man when I can’t see you as Asian to begin with. To me you’re just a woman with a dancer’s body.”

I nodded. I knew by “woman” he meant “white woman.” I wanted to be pleased but was surprised at myself that I wasn’t. We left the room and had coffee at the dining table, but Barrett’s words kept playing in my head, “I don’t see you as trans,” coupled with “I can’t tell you’re Asian.” The way he looked at me was exactly what I’d honed over many years, this trick of perception, and it puzzled me that I was dissatisfied over having accomplished it, a state of being so many trans women sacrifice so much to achieve. Maybe I didn’t feel the satisfaction because I hadn’t sacrificed too much, only had reassignment surgery, hadn’t gotten implants or done facial feminization.

Though remaining undisclosed for a decade was burden enough, so it wasn’t that. It was something about how my gender and race reflected on each other like a dizzying hall of distorted mirrors. When people looked at me and only saw a white person, I understood that being white wasn’t actually better, that I only coveted whiteness because of what I associated it with—wealth, education, and beauty. But for someone like me, whose whiteness was literally skin deep, who did not have any actual European ancestry, to be perceived as white could only mean that whiteness is nothing more than illusion. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t need to go through so much effort, make so many sacrifices to gain the privileges of whiteness, and other brown people who are not albino would have just as much access to those privileges if they wanted it.

I flinched when Barrett told me he only saw me as a woman, because my experience with race forced me to understand that womanhood wasn’t real either. I wanted to be a woman because I wanted other people to perceive my qualities through the lens of that gender, but having molded myself to their expectations, I now understood how much of an illusion gender was too. To become a woman in the world’s eyes, I made what felt like a huge sacrifice at the time, reassignment surgery, but in hindsight was really a cosmetic change not unlike a nose job, a shift in a body part’s aesthetic appearance while keeping its function intact—the only difference was the meaning our society invested in one body part versus the other. Had I lived in a world where men were allowed to dress and behave like women without being scorned or punished, I wouldn’t have needed to be a woman at all.