In college, Jess met a woman named Debbie Gray, whom she started dating after they went to a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show together. Jess was up-front with Debbie about her secret cross-dressing habit. From time to time, Jess would get dressed up, only to get so embarrassed she’d stop for six months. Debbie, though, found the cross-dressing to be kind of a turn-on. Bad boys come in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes they come in heels. Even before they were dating, “I got this vibe that Jess is like the main character,” Debbie told me—the “transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” played by Tim Curry. “I kind of liked it.”

As a teen, Jess thought she was the only person like her on earth. Anything involving gender-bending in the popular media was abhorrent and scary. Norman Bates, the Psycho villain, wore his mother’s clothing in an effort to subsume her identity. In The Silence of the Lambs, Buffalo Bill is a “transsexual” who plans to make an outfit out of women’s skin. Books Jess found on the topic deemed gender dysphoria a mental disorder. Sometimes, she watched Monty Python and, noticing that it occasionally featured men in drag, thought maybe she could find people like her in England.

After Jess and Debbie married, they lived in small towns all around North Texas and Arkansas. In 1989, they had their first daughter, Alexandria, and a second girl, Lauren Elizabeth, came eighteen months later. The girls, work, and life kept Jess too busy to sort out her soul.

When she traveled for work, she would sometimes dress up in the privacy of her hotel room. But then she’d be faced, once again, with the all-consuming shame. Why am I doing this? she’d think. I should just stop.

The feelings would linger, though, because, as she puts it, “You want to be something, and you’re making yourself not be that.”

Once she got the Internet at home, she found a site called Crossdressers.com and, nervously, signed up with a fake name. She was pleasantly surprised to find thousands of others like her. She suggested that maybe they should all go out in public as themselves sometime, stop hiding the pantyhose and lipstick at the bottom of their dresser drawers.

“Are you kidding?” the other members responded. “We’ll get killed.”

Several years went by before she found a Meetup.com group called “Dallas Feminine Expressions.” The image on the home page depicts a group of middle-aged transgender women smiling in a bar with football-helmet decals on the walls. They could only look more “Texas” if one of them was stirring a pot of chili. It occurred to Jess that this is what she was. This is what she had been looking for all along.

The site required applicants to fill out a form about themselves, but Jess was too mortified to do it. She closed the browser window.