But I wanted to prove to myself that I could recall my old face without shaking my confidence in my womanhood. The more my skin prickled at the thought of imagining myself as a man—instead of a woman like before, or a white American instead of an albino Filipino before that—the more I wanted to play that game again. Being in that room, in that place where I had spent so much time as a man, I wondered if I could recover my old self, at least for a moment.

I faced the mirror and imagined my prominent brow, my angular jaw, my flat chin, the features that made me fear I would always be perceived as a man when I started transition. I took one step toward that mirror, and then another, when I noticed that my jaw was no longer so sharply angled, as fat had settled on that part of my face and turned what was once a line into a shallow curve. Another step and I noticed my rosy cheeks, another the natural pucker of my lips. So by the time I got close and leaned against the sink, I found myself unable to maintain the sensation that this face was a man’s, or that I by extension was a man, even when I understood what Sean meant when he said that I looked the same, my essential features more like they were twenty years ago than the other people at that reception. None of the reflections from outside could unmoor my own perception of myself, one that I’d honed and maintained over many years like a delicate, well-tended plant.