I seize the doorknob. I’ll drive him to Philly, wait in the car with a book while he socializes. But I can’t lurk in proximity to such cool, self-actualized young people. I’ll kill myself. I’m glad Sunny got hormone blockers, of course I am. I’m proud of my sister for realizing what was going on, for getting him to a specialist before puberty started, for not giving in to the anti-trans panic that’s hyped up even more since the election. The technology was new even to me. But sometimes I can’t bear the fact that, if I were born a bit later, all I would’ve needed was injections. That my body never had to bloom into these curves.

I sometimes half-wake in a panic, convinced I’ve just turned thirteen, that my breasts have pushed against the skin, that I’m one day late for intervention. That now I’ll be stuck in this body forever, terrified of sex because my shape could never bump up against someone else, so my crushes burn out like stars. When I blink awake and I’m forty-seven, the option for blockers having passed thirty-four years ago, it’s not comforting.

Would Sunny have snorted if I’d told him I want to live between the genders? Would he have said, “So trendy”? If I’m not going all the way, he might think I’m not serious. And I don’t want a beard. I don’t want a bald spot. I fear what anger T could draw out. I sink under my sheets, braiding my legs so I don’t wet the bed.

The conference is far enough outside the city that there aren’t even sidewalks. We enter the massive bubble of a building under a double banner of the generic queer rainbow and the specialized trans rainbow. Doors all around the giant mushroom atrium discharge hip youngsters. Girls who still read as boys with hair swished into elegant up-dos, colt-like in their heels, boys who still read as girls with mop heads and high athletic socks.

There are kids here who even I, with my YouTube research, cannot identify as trans, trotting so easily in their gender it’s like they never had to win it. There are kids aiming for and achieving a space so exactly in the middle that you couldn’t guess what color birth blanket the doctor once wrapped them in: baby faces with voices that dustings of T or hours of training have frozen into a curious, second-look register too low for a girl, too high for a guy. Their hair sculpted into short shapes stuck between butch and fey, their bodies either skinny or overweight, because it’s the weights between, I’ve learned, like my own, that telegraph gender most clearly.