“Isn’t it weird,” Kit observed, “how she changed genders and looks more like she did twenty years ago than any of us?”

I chuckled then. I used to look really different when I wore heels, dresses, and a full face of makeup nearly every day. But as I put more and more of my thoughts out into the world, I also grew wary of the need to conform to that world’s expectations of me. So the heels came off, then the makeup, then the girly clothes, until I was left presenting myself in much the same way I did before transition, except hormones had given me breasts that allowed people to identify me as female. Though I hoped my belief in my own womanhood also came across, regardless of how I looked.

When I noticed a break in the drizzle, I walked away from the Lowell House courtyard where the reception was, across Massachusetts Avenue, and back to Adams House, where Harvard was housing me for the weekend. A concrete gargoyle whose mouth opened out onto a small fountain, long out of use, greeted me before I opened the heavy, carved door to my old undergrad dorm. This grandness was a remnant of a time when Adams was known as the Gold Coast apartments, housing for the richest among Harvard men. I walked down the marble-tiled hallway to the room I’d been assigned, its door also heavy as I opened it, with a ceiling at least eleven feet high and a giant fireplace whose marble mantel reached above my head. It was next door to FDR’s old room back when he himself was a Harvard man, which alumni of the house had lovingly restored with Persian rugs and period furniture.