She asked him about the pergola—a wooden awning over the picnic benches. The man had worked on the park’s landscaping. “What’s wrong with this?” Jess asked him, pointing at the structure. “This is not matching up.”

“Well, when they were building that,” he said, “I told them they should have done this.…”

With that, she was able to rewire their connection. “He completely forgot that I was me now,” she told me happily.

She sensed the man’s discomfort, and like a politician, or maybe like a parent, she offered a way to make him feel better. Along with the hair and makeup, putting people at ease was another new form of labor that came with this life.

Maybe it was because Caitlyn Jenner had come out, showing everyone that trans people could not only be normal, but extremely accomplished, but people listened to Jess in council meetings. Everything settled back into the sleepy routine of small-town life.

At a town council meeting not long after she came out, a D Magazine reporter78 described the scene: “To my right, a man is making a list of restaurants on a white legal pad, so far only writing down Buca di Beppo and Fadi’s. In front of me, a man named Duke plays solitaire on his phone. A man to my left in a Vietnam veteran cap softly complains about people shooting off fireworks inside the city limits…It is boring. It is normal. It is exactly what Jess Herbst has always wanted.”

Still, Jess wanted to be elected, not simply appointed because of a past mayor’s death, so in 2018, she ran for mayor officially. She wanted to be the first transgender elected official in the state.

It would be, in part, a test of whether people in psychologically tight, rural Texas would be willing to loosen their norms enough to elect a trans person.

Jess took a class in campaigning, which advised her to find the people who had voted in the past two elections and target them. And that’s exactly what she set out to do.

Chapter 3

The Exclusion

Jess, Part II

Jess Herbst lost her election by forty votes, to the former mayor’s widow. (The loss is not as narrow as it seems: there are only 476 registered voters in New Hope.) Jess partly blames herself, saying she focused too much on likely voters and didn’t think about the people who never vote. The mayor’s widow, she suspects, targeted extremely conservative never-voters by emphasizing Jess’s gender identity.

“She knocked on all their doors and got them all riled up about me,” Jess told me. People who supported Jess told her that some people were saying they couldn’t vote for her because it was against their religion. (The new mayor did not respond to requests for comment.)