Over the following months, I grew alienated from Barrett and eventually stopped dating him, not because he did anything terrible but I just didn’t want to see myself through his eyes. I came to understand that what I wanted was to be seen as my complete self—my gender, my race, my history—without being judged because of it. I wanted people close to me to see an albino person who had learned how to look and act white so the world would more readily accept her, and understand how that had been a key part of her survival. I wanted people to see how that albino person was also transgender, how she transitioned to be able to express her femininity and had surgery so she would be perceived as being like any other woman, her qualities appreciated on those terms. And if she ever hid who she actually was, it was only so that she could be granted entrance into worlds she couldn’t otherwise reach, worlds that should rightfully belong to everyone, not just those who happen to uphold the prevailing standards of whiteness and womanhood.

—

I waded past pools of London tourists in a vast corridor that summer between junior and senior year, crowded around manuscripts encased in glass. At a reception desk, I pulled out a letter of approval from my black leather satchel, which had been mailed to me after my faculty advisor wrote on my behalf, and presented it to a librarian, who motioned for me to walk through a metal turnstile. At the end of a dim corridor, I found myself in the British Library’s main reading room, a vast, circular space reserved only for scholars.

When I got to the central hub, another librarian directed me to the manuscript room, rectangular and wood-paneled, with row upon row of oversize desks to work at. I wanted to call up all my favorite women writers that first day, but I felt self-conscious and only ordered a number of Christina Rossetti’s notebooks, including the one that contained “Sleeping at Last.” I continued to be obsessed with the way she used ampersands, especially because different editions of her work printed the poem differently.