In her book about parenting while trans, the writer Jennifer Finney Boylan explained how she ended up with the parental moniker “Maddy,” which is halfway between the feminine “mom” she was transitioning to and the masculine “dad” she was when her kids were born. “Let’s call you ‘Maddy,’” one of her children336 said. “That’s like, half Mommy, and half Daddy.”

To be sure, both Jess and Vivienne are real women; they’re not between genders. But their experiences reflect the fact that gender transition is not always a smooth flip between identities. There are still elements to their lives that cis women never have to contend with.

There is, for example, the role of explainer, guide, and activist that trans people are often thrust into. It’s as if by the very nature of their existence, trans people are “pro” something. “I didn’t want to be a revolutionary,” Boylan writes. “A lot of the time, more than anything, I just wanted to be like everybody else. I still want that, sometimes.”

As Audre Lorde writes in Sister Outsider, “oppressed groups”—people of color, older people, women, and the working class—are often forced to be the gap-bridgers with what she calls “the oppressor.” “Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them…I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children’s culture in school…Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world.”337 Until the world fully understands and accepts these “other” groups, they will forever be explaining themselves.

Merle Miller, a gay writer and editor, was also pressed into the roles of unlikely revolutionary and unwitting explainer. It started when, in the September 1970 issue of Harper’s, the writer Joseph Epstein wrote a long screed against homosexuality. Epstein dwelled on how gay men seemed, to him, to be hopelessly weird. “They are different from the rest of us,” he wrote,338 in searing italics. He would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth if he could. “Nothing [my four sons] could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual. For then I should know them condemned to a permanent n****rdom among men, their lives, whatever adjustment they might make to their condition, to be lived out as part of the pain of the earth.” Again, it was 1970. To give you a sense of how recent this was, the first personal computers were released within the decade.