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But if people perceived me as female and treated me the way they treated women in general (even if this was polite, respectful, or deferential), I felt invisible, as if I didn’t exist. It was hard enough living with this myself and with my partner, but to inflict this on children, to ask them to carry the burden of the dichotomy that was my physical being, was asking too much. I wanted an acknowledged father relationship with my children: how could I ask them to treat me like a woman and a father simultaneously while outsiders were calling me their “other mother,” something I could never be?

I still thought I understood what was involved, and the idea of taking hormone injections for the rest of my life, which I thought might cause cancer, and the fear of being judged incompetent or insane were serious impediments. I still couldn’t admit to Samantha or to myself the intensity of the appeal that changing sex held for me, like the distant point of light that I crept toward as I felt my way along dark rock walls. I didn’t know enough yet. I didn’t know enough about the biological facts of transition, nor about the nature of my own fears, yet I could only keep moving.

I seriously doubted that. Before long, Meg/Michael returned to the city where Samantha and I were living because the university hospital there was one of the few places where female-to-male (FTM) sex reassignment surgery was performed at that time. I saw how happy Michael was, being perceived socially as a young man. Even Samantha noted, while riding in a car, seated between Michael and me, that she felt I was male, too, which made me feel seen and acknowledged. I began to wonder whether he had been right that I would like it, too.