“So I’m a little bit confused as to why we are doing these things, because they are already covered,” she said.

This was typical Jess style, to not dwell on the splashiest thing in the room: the fact that she is transgender and, if I’m being brutally honest, recognizably so. Instead, she addressed her opponents logically, rationally, patiently. As a fellow public official, she is oftentimes in their shoes. Won’t they put themselves in hers?

One recent summer, I drove past acres of pastureland and trees that look as though they’re reclining. I pulled up to Jess Herbst’s ranch-style house in New Hope, a town that’s about fifteen minutes away from McKinney, where I went to high school. It’s more rural and less hopping than my hometown, to the extent that McKinney, which was dry until recently, can be described as “hopping” at all. Kids in my high school sometimes called it “No Hope,” because if you’re from the world’s most boring suburb, you insult the second-most.

Jess answered the door looking polished, in a black blouse, red lipstick, and gold earrings that twinkled through her long, blond hair.

It took me a moment just to take in the scene: Jess, a gun owner, with the large hands of the man she presented as publicly just a few years ago, flipping her hair back and standing in the infernal Texas heat, in an area where Jesus is most certainly the reason for the season.

Does she feel unique? I asked right away.

Not really, she responded. According to her, there are three other transgender people in New Hope, population 635.

In fact, Jess thought I was the strange one. When I told her I had attended American University, her eyes bulged and she cried, jokingly, “Are you a spy?!” (I know, it sounds fake.)

Jess was born “Jeff” in 1958 in Greenville, Texas, a small town fifty miles northeast of Dallas. She’s known she was transgender since she was a toddler. That’s also when she was first informed that being transgender was considered weird. She would try on her mother’s dresses until her parents caught her and told her to stop. When she was twelve, her father caught Jess hoarding her mother’s undergarments in her room and took her to a special therapist, who recommended a strict exercise regimen to break her of the habit. When she wouldn’t do the exercises, her father paddled her.