“You and Ralph seem so in love,” he replied. “That’s why I thought it was safe. If I had known you’d have these feelings I would have never gotten this close. I’m not attracted to you that way.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’m not attracted to men.”

“I’ll be a woman for you.” It was the first time I’d considered permanently shifting genders out loud, but my words felt right. I explained to him, as well as I could, that being with him made me realize how much the woman in me needed to emerge, that my love for him brought her into being. The physical manifestation of that spirit was secondary. “I can take hormones and have surgery.”

Richard silently absorbed everything I had to say, didn’t betray any antipathy or disgust.

“I want to have children with my wife someday,” he said.

I found myself with no response. It was the most obvious argument I should have prepared for, but hadn’t. Maybe it was because I didn’t have enough faith in myself, to allow my love and imagination to reach their full breadth. It would be more than a decade before I learned that among my own indigenous ancestors, select male-bodied people who lived their lives as women were held in high esteem and found themselves husbands, in domestic life treated identically as other women. Had I known this, maybe I would have advised Richard to use his imagination, to consider that we could adopt, tell him his desire for creativity should extend to the way he led his life.

“You should probably go,” I said instead, and nodded when he asked if I’d be okay.

I didn’t notice that I was weeping until he left. In my sadness, I turned to the only thing I’ve been able to depend on my entire life—my work. I set up my studio camera, put a stool in front of a cobalt blue backdrop, and took a roll of photographs while wondering, having now failed, whether this was the end of my experiment with gender.

—

I spent the next few days in a stupor of emotion, having no one to talk to about what happened between me and Richard. Apart from being brokenhearted, my actions were disloyal to Ralph and Lenora, my partner and my best friend, the only two people to whom I could have possibly confided something so shameful. Maybe I could have sought Ben out, but I knew he would have just told me to move on, as if it was the easiest thing in the world when, knowing myself and the permanence of my love for Samuel, I would always experience my feelings for Richard as a dull ache.