I asked her a question that I had been suppressing since I first walked through her door and took in this incredible, cheery, Southern fish out of water: Why not move somewhere else? If she had moved to San Francisco in the ’90s, I pointed out, she could have come out much sooner. Hell, she might have been governor of California by now.

She reminded me that she didn’t know what transgender people were in the 1990s, or that they might live in San Francisco. Besides, there’s no use crying over what happened or didn’t.

“Things just had to work out the way they did, I guess,” she said.

What a perfectly normal, Texan thing to say.

While it’s impossible to know for certain if prejudice played a role in Jess’s loss, it certainly played a role in the marginalization of trans people like her throughout history. But where does prejudice itself come from? For that, we turn to a psychologist named Henri Tajfel.

Tajfel, whose birth name was Hersz Mordche, was born Jewish in Poland in 1919. As a young man, he moved to France to study, and when World War II broke out, he joined the French army. A year later, he was captured by German soldiers. Seeking to be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp rather than a concentration camp, he somehow convinced the Germans he was French, rather than a Polish Jew. The prisoner-of-war camps, though harsh, were at least not as deadly. Being sent to a series of POW camps was probably what saved him, and it underscored for Tajfel how a person’s group membership can have enormous consequences. When the war ended in 1945, Tajfel took a train crammed with other freed prisoners to the Gare d’Orsay in Paris.81 There, he learned his entire family had died.

The trauma of World War II seemed seared into Tajfel: he dedicated his life to understanding the animosity and mistrust that drive rifts between people.82 He would go on to develop the study of social identity theory, or how groups relate to one another.

When the extent of the Nazis’ atrocities was revealed, it was thought that it would take a nation of very disturbed personalities to commit such violence. At the time, some psychologists thought Nazism arose in Germany because of the strict style of parenting that was popular there at the time. Authoritarian child-rearing, writes Michael Hogg, a professor of social psychology at Claremont Graduate University,83 was thought by these psychologists to foment “a love-hate relationship between children and their parents that produced people with authoritarian personalities who worshipped power, authority and conformity and redirected their hatred onto those who were weak and different.”