The first night of rehearsal, I walked from my office at the northeast side of campus, through the main building with its seemingly endless corridor, passing student upon student in unkempt jeans and hoodies. I’d worked at MIT for three years and hardly interacted with undergrads there, except for the couple of research assistants who came through our lab. As I found my way to the spacious rehearsal room with its shiny tile floors and MIT-gray walls, looking around at a group of young women who less than a year before belonged to a gender I wasn’t a part of, I suddenly wondered what it would have been like to go through college as a woman and immediately felt as though I would have been less lonely and isolated.

Although the cast performed monologues and so didn’t interact with one another during the play, the director, Ruth—who in her placid smile and always-ready hug managed to be motherly as a college sophomore—wanted the experience not just to be about putting on a performance but for this group of twenty MIT women to bond and share experiences together. So as we spent the next three hours discussing our motivations for being in the show, each cast member taking a turn to stand in front of our semicircle as we sat on the floor, it was clear that my sense of belonging would have come with challenges I didn’t have to face as a young man. I learned about how difficult it was to grow up smart but for the world to see you as valuable only if you looked beautiful. I learned about trying to live up to an ideal of attractiveness but being beset with obstacles as soon as you approached it, how the prettier you are, the less you’re taken seriously, how you become more vulnerable to harassment or rape. I suddenly flashed back to the summer I spent in England at nineteen and how much freedom I felt, how often I wandered out of clubs and onto the street in the wee hours, oblivious to danger. I realized how different that summer could have gone had I been a different gender, how I would have needed to be much more alert. My great adventure would have been compromised, and yet that compromise suddenly felt like an unavoidable part of life as a woman.