“It was at this dinner that I came out to my parents as a gay man,” I told the gathered crowd in that grand dining hall. “So it pleases me to know that this organization has taken the first step in recognizing transgender alumni.” I emphasized that there were many more steps to be made before we could feel like we fully belonged among them. I was pleased to see my old friend Kit Clark at the table closest to my podium, same as ever as he audibly shushed a white man next to him who was talking while I spoke.

But I also wished I could have seen other trans people in that room, or that I could have met any over dinner after that talk. In particular, I wished that Jamie Park could have been there, the college friend I sang Miss Saigon with all those years ago. She was now Eve but, because of her traditional Korean family, was still not publicly disclosed as trans. In a room of more than a hundred queer Harvard alumni, who in theory accepted trans people, I still found myself alone because of so many barriers that kept us from being in that room—the bullying in school, the lack of parental support, the social isolation, the discrimination at work, the judgment of the world. I worked hard to be able to count myself as a person who could be raised up as worthy of imparting wisdom to groups of people, but I could never forget how much passing has shielded me from the worst effects of being trans.

I woke up the following morning at a hotel near MIT that the alumni group had booked because there were no affordable rooms in Harvard Square. Improbably, my eleventh-floor room looked out onto the path I habitually took with Richard during that feverish time when I couldn’t tell whether I was in love with him or with the feeling of womanhood I got from him. I walked down the path that morning, sat on the same bench Richard and I used to sit on, though it was May and the oak trees above me were verdant, the straight lines of the building behind it comforting instead of cold. I last saw Richard a year before, when he came to New York for a talk, and I caught up with him over dinner, where he told me about his wife and kids, his professor job at a small liberal college in Pennsylvania, a life I didn’t want. Both of us had lost touch with Lenora, who moved to New York for her art MFA the same year I moved to San Francisco, and sent me an email a few months later letting me know that what happened with Richard had not been okay and she didn’t want to be friends anymore. It took time, but she did feel my betrayal after all.