It wasn’t something I’d considered at all. Even though Ralph and I shared our finances while we were together, I didn’t feel entitled to his inherited wealth, which was part of why I didn’t want to be listed as a co-owner of our condo, even when Ralph asked if I wanted to be. But he made the point that had we been straight and married, I would have been entitled to half his money, and it became a thought experiment between us, if we would have gotten married had we been straight. So many things would have been different, but, given that we were not actually married, I had no real claim to Ralph’s wealth, so I told him that he could make whatever decision he felt was right.

He finally decided to give me twelve thousand dollars in exchange for a set of large, framed pictures I’d taken of his family and friends. The pictures themselves weren’t worth anywhere near that much, but it comforted Ralph to think that he was helping me out by buying some of my art, how this was the best way to honor the end of our relationship. Yet I wondered whether he knew—consciously or not—that this was almost exactly the amount I needed to have reassignment surgery in Thailand.

It certainly would have been tougher to make that decision had I moved through the world thinking of myself as just like anyone else, as normal. One of the big adjustments about being a trans person is standing out, being different from most anyone else. But having been white in a sea of brown people, a first-generation immigrant among native-borns, especially in the elite circles I operated in, I was so much less intimidated than other people would be about the prospect of being radically different.

It would have also been harder had I been closer to my family and sought their approval. But I was estranged from my mother and only had a tenuous relationship with my father, who I didn’t talk to about my transition until I was supposed to come to New York for my sister’s sweet sixteen party, the summer after I started living as a woman full-time. His reply on the phone when I told him I would come as a woman: “As long as you’re beautiful.” As for my family in the Philippines, they were so far away and I saw them so infrequently that I figured I would cross that bridge when I got there.