This was the same confidence I armored myself with when a friend drove me to a DMV in Natick—the one I’d heard through the grapevine was liberal—and changed my name on my state ID, switched the letter of my gender to F. It was the same confidence that brought me to a well-known therapist in the field, Dr. David Seil, where I combined my impeccable appearance in a stately summer dress with insistent arguments against the standard procedure of therapy for at least eighteen months before hormones could be prescribed. I reminded this therapist that mainstream mental health professionals had also treated homosexuality as a disease until at least the ’70s, that I had no prior history of mental illness, that denying me hormones amounted to saying that I was incapable of making sound decisions about my own body, despite graduating from an elite school and working for another. I did not expect him to acquiesce so easily, prescribe me hormones without requiring therapy, until I read his approval letter where he attested that I “appeared to be an attractive woman,” and realized that without my impressive performance as my new gender, without the face and body that mimicked a blond white woman’s, I could very well have been denied the right to choose the future of that body, regardless of my state of mind.

But in the months after I started taking hormones, I also had to wrestle with whether I wanted to have reassignment surgery, which felt drastic not because of the specific procedure but simply the prospect of a major operation, to change a body part I didn’t have significant psychological issues with. It was clear to me that my concerns about my body didn’t stem from some paralyzing dysphoria that only surgery could fix, but from the simple reality that my genitals were the main reason why other people judged me unacceptable and why the government refused to fully acknowledge my womanhood. Having surgery just to appease others felt too much like surrender, though there were times when surrender felt like the right thing to do.

I was in the lab one afternoon a few days later when one of the producers sent me an email informing me I’d been cast; my body’s power to persuade had worked again. I figured if I had any doubts about a surgery that would sever my ties to my old gender irrevocably, being around women for several months would help me decide.