Maybe I would have been more cautious had I not spent my childhood standing out from everyone else, but after a trip to the makeup store and a few more tutorials, I went into my boss’s office one Friday afternoon in late October. I told him I was exploring gender as a project for photography class, and part of my experiment was to dress as a woman all the time. The professor I worked for, Ted Adelson, was a logical man who regularly conducted experiments himself, so he just nodded and wished me luck.

I left his office for the weekend wearing black jeans and a button-down shirt. I dressed for work the following Monday—thankfully, Ralph had already gone to his office—in full makeup and a gray tweed coat I’d bought from a fancy Cambridge shop, fitted on top and flared with several pleats at the bottom, unquestionably feminine. The coat fit me except I had to wear just a blouse underneath, red with a mandala-like pattern, since my shoulders were too broad. I also wore a loose hunter green velvet skirt that reached a couple of inches past my knees, a silhouette I would later learn from a magazine was A-line, my boots knee-high, new terms for someone who learned about womanhood from novels and not Vogue.

It was the first time I’d dressed up in women’s clothes during the day, except within the safe confines of my undergrad dorm. I half-expected someone to yell, “That’s a man!” five minutes after I left my apartment, and I would have aborted the whole experiment. Instead, a woman on the subway complimented my coat. When I entered a crowded bus after work to get to my Museum School art class, a man stood up to offer me a seat and flashed a smile in my direction while I took out a book to avoid his direct gaze.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that people thought I was a woman even on that first day; people had been mistaking me for a woman ever since I first wore women’s clothes, in large part because they also mistook me for white. Had I still lived in the Philippines where it was obvious to people I was albino, at least before I left, an observer would have noticed that my features were too strong, my shoulders too broad, to be a woman’s. Had I been brown and not white, my facial structure and build would have been consistent with an Asian man living in America. But instead, I was read not just as a woman but as a young, attractive blond woman from the start. It turned out my only impediment to manifesting the womanhood that lived inside me was not other people’s perceptions but my perception of myself.