When someone in the group told the story of a friend being given the choice of whether to be raped or killed, I remembered when a group of men started running after me outside my studio in South Boston, after one of them approached me on the street then realized I might be a man. He threatened me because he had anticipated a chance to have sex and was denied. He wanted to exert his power over me whatever way he could. This was what I began to feel whenever a man approached me in public, and kept insisting when I wasn’t interested, that the guy would try to overpower me if I found myself alone with him, only to be humiliated or worse if he found out I was trans. Hearing these stories in that rehearsal room that somehow felt more cramped than when I first entered, I came to know that what I went through as a trans woman was not fundamentally different from what they’d been going through their entire lives.

It was simple enough to absorb these lessons within the confines of that room, so much harder outside. The following weekend, I went out clubbing at Liquid with Lenora, who had recently broken up with Richard. She didn’t seem to resent me for going behind her back, maybe because she still felt guilty for dating Richard in the first place, when she knew I had feelings for him. Now we were suddenly two single women out for a night on the town.

The great thing about Liquid, apart from the freedom I had to dress in whatever gender, was that all sexualities were welcome there. As I moved through my transition while clubbing almost every weekend, it was as if each pulse of Liquid’s flashing disco lights shifted me away from the gay man I was when I first entered that club and toward a confident, glamorous type of womanhood, as I danced with Lenora that night in three-inch ornately strapped heels and a dress made of black lace, which stretched to fit my increasingly feminine frame.