But this specific conversation affected me somehow, even for just the few minutes between when Karen made her comment and the rest of lunch. Vivid scenes flooded my mind, a mosaic of beautiful white women, from Gwyneth Paltrow’s blond and vivacious Emma, to the gender-shifting Viola in Twelfth Night. Of course, my mind dwelled on Orlando from Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name, a nobleman who wakes up one day and discovers that he has become a woman, and from that point on is known as Lady Orlando. Even though it was just a joke, how women who are married to baronets get the title of Lady, and so a man who marries a baronet should be called Lady too, my mind led me to the possibility of literally transforming into a woman.

I didn’t actively dislike being a man. It was more that for so much of my life, I lived vicariously through women, who were always the central characters in my favorite stories, searching for and finally finding the love of men. It was thrilling to imagine myself living these fantasies, whether in rom-coms or Shakespeare, but especially from great novels set in England. But whenever I finished those books, I had to live with the disappointment that while women in real life had the chance to experience some version of these stories, my pleasure in them was always destined to be indirect, so that one moment when a virtual stranger called me a Lady gave me an outsized amount of joy.

I dismissed this idea as a possible reality shortly after lunch was over and dismissed it again in my humid childhood bedroom in Talacsan. No point dwelling in idle fantasy—of course Ralph, the real, living person I loved as the man I was, would be with me the next time I returned home.

—

The day after Christmas, an exhausting family holiday involving visits with innumerable relatives and family friends, I decided to make good on a plan I had begun talking about the day I arrived, to gather old school friends for a night in Manila. It felt momentous to hire a van myself and leave my grandmother behind, my first act of true adulthood back home.

I’d asked my family and neighbors to spread the word, hoping the information would reach my school friends before I dropped by. There were no landlines in our town, let alone internet, and only the richest households owned gigantic satellite phones that cost a fortune to use. I spent the money to call Ralph Christmas Day on a weak signal, just long enough to say I wished we were together even when I was the reason we were apart.