By the time I performed my monologue in front of a few hundred people for several nights in February 2002, I’d already decided to be a woman the rest of my life. The fact that I could experience these threats and hear terrible stories from other women only fortified my belief that I should be a woman myself, that if I could see how being a woman was not the objectively ideal gender and still want to be one, then I was meant to be a woman after all. Just as I’d done in the books, movies, and TV shows I’d read and seen throughout my life, I identified with the challenges women faced rather than the power of men and found myself experiencing regret over the ways I had taken advantage of being male, how I didn’t do household chores like the women in my family, how I was consistently praised for being smart while girls were only expected to be beautiful. Just as I’d struggled with how my whiteness unfairly advantaged me, being among women gave me the means to comprehend my immense alienation from the advantages of manhood.

As for the question of reassignment surgery, I concluded that it would be worth doing not because I hated my penis or my mental health was compromised, but because I didn’t have a strong commitment to having a penis in the first place, and it made me feel like a more complete woman to have a vagina, which alone was worth the risk. But I could not have had surgery so quickly, or possibly had it at all, had Ralph not given me the money, even when it meant letting go of the person he loved, in the gender I could no longer be.

One of the things I’d always loved about Ralph was his strong sense of ethics, independent of what served his own interests. From the time it became clear that we weren’t getting back together, he grew concerned over how I was going to adjust to not having the financial resources we had as a couple, and whether it would be fair to give me some of his money, something he brought up over dinner a few weeks after our breakup.