Each semester, she throws herself into her work, teaching an overload of classes while keeping up with her research. I’ve seen ecstatic superfans at rock concerts, and I’ve seen Beverly speculating about gender norms, and the two affects are strikingly similar. She likes to do one exercise with her freshman classes in which she asks them to free-associate what they think of when she says the word “feminist” or “member of the National Organization for Women.” After the students offer up all the horrible stereotypes—man-hater, etc.—comes the big reveal: “You know, when I was a student here, I was a member of the National Organization of Women!” she says, pealing with laughter.

“It’s just fun to make them question what they think,” she tells me. “It’s fun stuff.”

Beverly’s journey to the academy was not that unusual. Growing up in Ohio, she was the kind of nerd who loves people. Her father was a Democrat and a truck driver, and her mother’s side was all Republican. Her father mostly raised her, and as so often happens, Beverly began to see politics from his point of view.

After she graduated high school, she followed her first husband, who was in the military, to Texas to study sociology, also at Midwestern State University. She would be the first in her family to attend college. She didn’t always know very much about gender issues. During her graduate training, she traveled to a workshop with students from all over North America. When one Canadian student mentioned the “glass ceiling,” Beverly had no idea what the term meant.

I told her this reminded me of that same gender-studies class I took in college, which I thought was going to be a cakewalk but was instead a daily reminder of how little I knew. I told her a story about how my professor, in one of the first lectures, talked about “canonical bodies.” I was so bewildered, not least because I didn’t even know what “canonical” meant.

“Did you ask?” Beverly said.

It had never occurred to me to do that.

I told her I had decided to google it later, but then I realized I couldn’t, because I wrote down “conical” instead of “canonical.”

“But you didn’t ask anyone?” Beverly asked again.

“I was very petrified that everyone else knew something that I didn’t know,” I explained, “because they were all from New Jersey or wherever and I was from Texas, and I was gonna look like this redneck if I asked my questions.”

“That was my experience in the workshop,” she said. “Oh my gosh, there’s a knowledge out there that I’m supposed to know, and I don’t have any idea about gender.”

Suddenly I felt a deep desire to have spent all my life thus far by her side, so she could have reassured me at the million other moments like this one.