CHAPTER 2
“Hi, I’m Andy….I think we’d get along pretty swimmingly.”
Coming out to my parents was, up until that point, the hardest thing I had ever done in my life. And yet, because of my privilege, it was still relatively easy compared to many others for whom coming out means losing their job, their family, and, potentially, their life. Indeed, family rejection of a child coming out is one of the leading factors in the high rate of homelessness among LGBTQ young people, who make up as many as 40 percent of all homeless youth.
My fortune was perpetually reinforced as I came out to my friends and other family members over the coming months. Each response was different, ranging from grief to shock to excitement, but all were affirming. And all kept my secret in our circle.
Next to my parents, the hardest person to tell was Jack Markell. Jack had become like family and I was worried about disappointing him, particularly since he had spent so much time and energy mentoring me. Our relationship was also well known after my public role in his campaign a few years before, and so I even worried that our continued friendship could be a liability for him.
I had delayed telling him until a few months after coming out to my parents, but eventually it was time.
Given that he was governor, I wanted to make sure I reached out at a convenient moment. Pacing around my bedroom, I first called Jack’s right-hand man, Brian Selandar, a political operative who had helped orchestrate Jack’s rise to the governorship.
Brian was up in New York City with the governor when I reached him.
“I’m not sure how to say this, but I…uh…I’m transgender,” I blurted out to Brian after a few pleasantries. “I’m hoping you can help me tell the governor. Maybe you can even tell him and then let him know to give me a call if he has questions? I don’t want him to feel like he needs to spend a lot of time on this.”
“Of course,” Brian kindly responded. “He’s on Morning Joe,” referring to the MSNBC morning talk show, “but I can tell him on our way back to Delaware.”
My stomach was in knots all day as I anticipated a call from Jack after he got the news from Brian. I had run up to campus for a few student government meetings, and as I walked back to my apartment building, my phone rang. It was Jack.
“Well, that’s big news,” he announced as I answered the phone. I could tell there was a smile on his face as he talked. Phew.
“Yes, Governor! It’s something I’ve known for a really long time and I’ve finally come to terms with it,” I replied quickly, thinking he didn’t have much time to talk.
“Tell me about that. I want to hear all about it.”
I recounted the journey, from self-loathing to self-acceptance to the fear for my future. The call lasted thirty minutes and Jack repeatedly reassured me. “Carla and I love you just as much,” he said, referring to both he and his wife, the first lady of Delaware. “We are here for you just as much as before.”
I told him that Carla should feel free to call me. And he closed by asking if he could call my parents. The answer was yes, of course.
While I talked with Carla for over an hour, Jack talked to my parents. He reached my mom first, catching her as she walked through a bustling shopping mall just outside of town.
“Sally,” he began, “it’s Jack Markell.” He told her we had just talked and repeated the message he had expressed to me. “Carla and I love you all and we will be there for you,” he told her.
Overcome with emotion, my mom fell to the ground. Sitting on the bright white tiles in the middle of the mall with shoppers walking around her, she began to cry. It was probably the first time she had cried from happiness rather than sadness in our family’s still-short journey.
When I had told my mom I was trans, she confessed that she feared our small but tight-knit community would disown us, but here was our governor—the symbol of our state—standing firmly beside us. It was a sign of things to come, and it immediately became a powerful tool in our family’s quest to remain an integral part of the community we so loved.
Most people are good, no doubt, but when we are faced with issues we haven’t yet thought about or interacted with, we often look to one another for how we should respond. Our behavior models for others the acceptable reaction; acceptance creates an expectation, while rejection provides an excuse.
My parents knew this, and in discussing it as they sleeplessly lay in bed the night after I came out, they resolved to make crystal clear to the world that they loved and affirmed me. They created a standard for others to meet. And with Jack and Carla, we not only kept valued friends, we also gained visible allies who amplified that standard to our state.
In the weeks after I came out to Jack and Carla, we grew even closer than before. Despite being governor of an entire state, Jack would call me every two weeks to check in.
“Sarah, it’s Jack,” he’d start, using the name my friends and family were slowly adopting. “I just wanted to see how you were holding up.”
Each time I came out, it felt like another step in becoming myself, and each step made me feel a little bit more whole. But telling people did only so much. People now knew about me, but I was still hidden.
By now, our fears of rejection were slowly diminishing, and while my parents had come to know that I wasn’t going away, they were still a long way from truly feeling that way. With each hug, I could feel that they were squeezing just a little longer and harder. With each look, I could tell they were taking me in “one last time.” And whenever I’d hang out with a different friend, my mom would ask hopefully, “You aren’t going to tell them, are you?”
I thought I was done with secrets, but the secrecy had shifted to my parents, particularly my mom. The shame and fear she initially felt as I slowly shared my news was hard to bear. I had been so used to my parents being proud of me.
When I returned to Wilmington one weekend during the months between coming out to my parents and coming out publicly, I drove up wearing a women’s pea coat and ring.
I called my mom in advance to prepare her. She sighed at my clothing choice.
“Pull into the back,” she told me, referring to the empty and secluded alley behind our house that we never use.
They still didn’t want it to be real. It had seemed like they were making progress, but now it felt like my mom couldn’t even handle a jacket and a ring. What would happen when I started living every day, totally, as the woman I had always known myself to be?
These comments hurt. But honestly, I couldn’t blame her. I’d had twenty-one years to overcome the shame.
I had constantly told them that I was still the same person, but I was starting to feel like I was competing with myself. The sense of living someone else’s life that had become so unbearable persisted. I wanted them to love me as their daughter, not as the person they thought was their son. I wanted them to see and love me as me.
Each of us has a deep and profound desire to be seen, to be acknowledged, and to be respected in our totality. There is a unique kind of pain in being unseen. It’s a pain that cuts deep by diminishing and disempowering, and whether done intentionally or unintentionally, it’s an experience that leaves real scars.
Within most cultures, when a baby is born, we look at the child’s external anatomy and make a determination. Anatomy that looks one way means the child is a girl and anatomy that looks another way means the child is a boy. For the vast majority of people, the assumption of their gender identity largely aligns with the reality of their gender identity, but for a portion of the population—those of us who are transgender—we are assigned a gender identity that doesn’t fit.
Even for the most well-intentioned person, it may be difficult to separate an individual’s gender identity from the sex assigned to them based on the appearance of external anatomy. We’ve been taught and raised to believe that these two concepts are inextricably joined, that one not only leads to the other, but that they are actually one and the same.
This challenge—to decouple concepts previously perceived as permanently and inalterably linked—is not a new one. In the nineteenth century, the notion of “gender roles” would have seemed redundant, as a person’s sex inherently came with certain roles. In the first half of the twentieth century, the terms “straight” or “heterosexual” didn’t exist because one’s sex and who they loved were inseparable parts of each other. The words “straight” or “heterosexual” were unnecessary—the words “man” and “woman” covered it.
Slowly but surely we have learned to separate what was once deemed inseparable. Increasingly, we are coming to grips with the reality that the sex someone appears to be at birth does not dictate their gender identity.
It is this trend that links the fight for gender equity with the fight for gay rights with the fight for trans equality: ending the notion that one perception at birth, the sex we are assigned, should dictate how we act, what we do, whom we love, and who we are.
When we finally separate that perception from those expectations, we allow ourselves to witness the wholeness of other human beings. This effort—coupled with the overlapping fights for racial justice, disability rights, and equality for religious minorities—shares a similar thread. We are fighting to be seen in our personhood, in our worth, in our love, and as ourselves.
And while I was now out, I still wasn’t seen by my parents, by my friends, and by the broader world. I couldn’t blame them; when I looked in the mirror, even I still didn’t see myself. And after finally checking off the last part of my “coming out to-do list” (telling the AU and broader Delaware communities), I was finally ready to take the steps I felt I needed to take in order to no longer feel hidden and to have my gender identity expressed to the world.
Not everyone in the trans community may know exactly what steps, if any, they need at the start of their journey. Transitioning, the term used to describe the process of having our gender identity seen by the outside world, isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience. For many, this likely includes adjusting aspects of our gender expression, such as clothing and hair. For others, it may include taking hormones or undergoing different kinds of surgery.
I started hormones shortly after coming out to my parents. Slowly, they began to have an effect on things like my skin and my fat distribution, but mostly on my psyche. Even though I had started on hormones and they were having an effect, I was still presenting as someone I was not. I had held off on adjusting my gender expression until I had come out to my school and the public. Now that was done and I was ready to live as myself.
Again, it’s important to note that this process looks very different for everyone. Some transgender people may already feel comfortable with how they are expressing themselves. For instance, a transgender man—a person assigned female at birth but who is and identifies as a man—may already be presenting in a more masculine way before he comes out as trans. And just as a cisgender woman may wear her hair short, many transgender people will not express their gender in strictly feminine or masculine ways.
For me, it was a rather stark and abrupt change. I had set the date that I would begin living as myself more visibly: five days after posting my coming-out note. It was a day I had looked forward to for a very long time, so I decided to throw a party and be surrounded by some of my best friends. I was starting a new wardrobe from scratch, a surprisingly significant undertaking, so I also asked friends to bring presents: an old top, a new dress, a cheap necklace. Anything that could help me fill my closet.
When the night of the party finally arrived, my new apartment in a town house in central Washington, D.C., which I had moved into a week earlier, was filled with people. They were mostly friends from college, but also many of my best friends from Delaware.
My ex-girlfriend, Jaimie, who I had dated for about a year, had remained my friend after our breakup and was there. A beautiful and smart brunette with a strong resemblance to a young Katie Holmes, Jaimie had broken up with me a few months before I came out to my parents. We were both very understanding people and never found ourselves mad at each other, but in the somewhat rocky weeks leading up to the end of our relationship, she made the apt observation that she felt more like she was dating a girl than a boy.
Our breakup was a turning point in my path toward coming out. It was the first extended period of time in years that I had been single. For a while, the presence of a girlfriend had been one of many factors keeping me in the closet. Sparing others from humiliation was a constant theme in my mind.
Jaimie and I had hung out a few times after our breakup, and so when we hung out in the days after my Christmas coming out, I told her my news. As we drove in my mom’s old Toyota Highlander, I started by telling her that I was dating a boy, a classmate who had served as my chief of staff during the first half of my term as student body president. And like my gender identity, which I had known for as long as I could remember, I had always known that I liked boys. While they are two distinct concepts—sexual orientation refers to who you love, while gender identity refers to who you are—I kept both inside, knowing that grappling with the first would almost instantly precipitate the second.
“Oh my God, we’ll be like Will and Grace!” she exclaimed, referencing the iconic television characters who had dated and remained best friends after Will came out as gay.
“Well,” I cautioned, “I’m not gay. I’m actually transgender.”
“Oh. Oh! Okay!” she responded, working to quickly turn her shock to excitement and then to support.
Jaimie echoed my brother Dan’s comments while we were dating, adding, “I guess this makes a lot of sense. I was actually just learning about gender identity and trans issues in my gender-studies class.”
Jaimie, along with a few friends from college, would help teach me to do my makeup during the following months, and she was with me in the hours leading up to my coming-out party.
As I greeted my guests in a white lace dress I had purchased online, the atmosphere at the party was euphoric. No more secrets. No more hiding. It was a pure celebration of love and authenticity, of friendship and life. I felt liberated. It was a true birth day. And my smile, which had faded over the previous year, was back in full force.
And in the weeks following the party, finally living as myself, my euphoria gave way to an almost meditative state. The constant homesickness that had cluttered my mind for years was finally gone. I hadn’t come out to create a positive, but to remove a negative and to alleviate that nearly constant pain and incompleteness. Transitioning wouldn’t inherently bring me happiness, but it had allowed me to be free to pursue every emotion: to think more clearly; to live more fully; to survive.
And while I had experienced fleeting moments of this freedom growing up, with the Cinderella dress or on all those Halloweens, it was now permanent. I didn’t have to dread that stroke of midnight.
This. This is what it feels like to be yourself, I thought.
I had never felt that way before.
Coming out and transitioning was a decision that I had no choice in making. I had to do it. And while it helped me in many ways, there is no question that in living my truth, I faced a new set of obstacles. I was stepping into a world built for men as a woman.
There is no question that my path to womanhood was unique. Every woman’s path is different. Each of us travels with different kinds of privileges and challenges.
I had always been someone who tried to think about the prejudice and bigotry in the world. So I thought I generally understood what to expect. But in the end, I was so focused on the transphobia I might face after transitioning that I didn’t fully realize just how pervasive the sexism and misogyny would be.
And it truly was everywhere. From the subtle to the blatant, I had entered a world of impossible double standards and endless contradictions.
In exploring my own womanhood, it became clear that if I was “too feminine” I was inauthentic, a presumption in even progressive spheres that masculinity is some sort of natural state of being, a preference. But then, if I wasn’t feminine enough, I wasn’t a “real” woman. Television, movies, pop culture, fashion, and politics are all trying to tell us what it means to be a “real” woman.
The experience of each woman—cis or trans—is different, but a similar thread underpins it all: the policing of gender. The devaluation of lives, hopes, and one’s body. The threat of violence.
It took me some time to find my own niche in the infinite ways to express one’s gender. Young women and girls often work through this in middle and high school. I was doing it in my twenties. Like many young women, my first burst of individual gender expression was a kind of hyperfemininity—pink dresses, more makeup than I needed, and jewelry. Part of this was a release of the pent-up femininity that I had not felt free to express before, and part of it was the imperfect actions of an imperfect human living in an imperfect world that so often demands conformity from everyone.
Over time, though, I eventually landed in my own sweet spot: a gender expression that was my own and where I felt comfortable. Feminine, still, but more muted. But navigating my own gender expression—and all the expectations, prejudices, and double standards that come with it—only began to scratch the surface.
The first few months after coming out were a rude awakening. I could no longer merely exist in the world. Now I had to actively navigate through it, every minute of every day. Every decision carried with it a greater weight, consequences that would impact everything from my emotional well-being to my physical safety. And going anywhere new added additional stress.
Growing up, my default face had always been that smile, but now I had to consciously train myself not to smile anymore, lest I invite unwanted attention from men on the street. And I’ll never forget the feeling the first time I experienced street harassment.
I never realized just how disempowering, unsafe, and unsettling it would feel to have a stranger assume they were entitled to comment on my appearance or my body. Walking by a man could elicit an unwelcome comment, an invitation for objectification for having the audacity to walk down the street. If I’m not smiling, I’m told to smile. If I am smiling, it’s seen as a request for more comments. And then there was the man in an airport who repeatedly chastised me for smiling too much. The sexism had come full circle.
Somehow society manages to treat women like both a delicate infant and a sexualized idol in the same moment. Our thoughts are dismissed and our emotions minimized. And the mundane decisions that I never had to think about when I would wake up before I came out—the clothes I’d wear, the route I’d take, and all of the other tiny decisions one makes just merely going about their day—now became central to avoiding a thousand judgments or, worse, violence.
I finally had come out of the closet, only to find myself stuck in the kitchen.
And while the pain and mental clutter of being in the closet was gone, I also became hyperaware of my identity as a transgender person. Much like stepping into a world built for men as a woman, I was also stepping into a world built for cisgender people as a transgender person. And with each new person, I’d wonder, What do they think of people like me?
Walking down the street, I could feel the stares as I went to the grocery store or to my summer internship at the Victory Fund, an organization dedicated to electing LGBTQ candidates. The smirks on the faces of passersby would sometimes turn to laughter as they walked past me.
After moving into my new apartment with friends far away from campus, I found myself jumping through hoops to hide my transition from the landlord, who had first met me before I transitioned. I worried that I would become one of the many trans people—one in five—who has lost their housing due to their transgender identity. Coming home from my internship, if I saw the property manager’s ominous white pickup truck in the driveway, I’d circle the block in my car for thirty minutes until he left. I’d do anything to avoid him finding out that I’m trans, a realization that leads to discrimination for so many.
And then there was the fear of violence. That nearly ever-present worry as a trans person was often wrapped up in the harassment and experiences I faced as a woman. These two identities—being a woman and being transgender—interact with each other in a way that serves to compound the animus that comes trans women’s way. This reality, referred to as intersectionality, recognizes that we all live our lives with multiple identities intersecting with one another, creating a mix of privileges and challenges that all people carry with us. Race, gender, economic background, religion, immigration status, family acceptance, and so much more create a complex matrix that sometimes erects obstacles but other times ensures support in overcoming barriers put in your way.
When I faced harassment, the feelings of disempowerment and the lack of safety I felt as a woman were met with a deep fear of escalating violence due to my trans identity.
Sitting in the backseat of a taxi one day a bit later in my transition, I noticed the driver smiling at me in the mirror.
“I’ll give you a free ride if you take your top off,” he creepily offered.
“No. No, I’ll pass,” I hesitantly replied.
He kept asking, telling me it was a good deal.
When he asked what I was doing that night, I told him I was going out to dinner with friends.
“Oh, you’re going to be naughty,” he said through a sinister laugh. “I’ll want to find you after you’ve had a few drinks.”
When I recounted the story to friends, mostly all cisgender women, they rebuffed me for not standing up for myself and other women. I should have thought to take down his medallion number. I should have thought to rebuke him.
His actions were disgusting and I wanted to tell him off, but instead I shut up and made myself as small as possible. I didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself.
As a woman, I was scared for my safety and I just wanted to get to my destination as quickly as possible. And as a trans person, I was profoundly afraid that he’d realize I was trans. There are few things more dangerous to a transgender woman than the risk of a straight man not totally comfortable in his sexuality or masculinity realizing he is attracted to her.
Transphobia tells these straight, cisgender men that being attracted to a transgender woman makes them gay (it does not). Society’s homophobia tells them that being gay is bad (it is not). These prejudices mix in their mind, threatening both their sexuality and their masculinity. One step too masculine, one stride too manly, one word too deep and I risk the violence that often comes to a trans woman who commits the crime of attracting the interest of a straight, cisgender man.
But in the same way that my gender as a woman and my identity as a trans person intersect to foster discrimination or violence, my other identities combine to provide me with a cloak of privilege not offered to others.
While trans people are twice as likely to live in poverty than the general population, trans people of color are three times as likely to live in poverty. Dozens of transgender people are killed each year in the United States and every year trans women of color make up a majority of those killed, a significant overrepresentation that results from the toxic combination of racism, misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia, a blend that can have deadly consequences.
As a white person, my race provides me with certain securities that are refused to people of color. My family and friends provide support structures denied to those who are rejected by their communities. My economic security grants me resources to escape situations that would put me more at risk. And even if my landlord had found out that I was trans and responded negatively, I never feared that I wouldn’t be able to land on my feet and find and afford housing that would welcome me.
Having certain privileges does not mean that your life is easy or that you do not face challenges. It just means that you don’t experience specific kinds of obstacles or barriers faced by someone with a different identity or background. And our empathy should require us to acknowledge the plight of others in both its similarities to ours and in its differences.
Indeed, as lifesaving as transitioning was for me, it was also life-altering. The relief was profound when I found an affirming space. The overwhelming fear and anxiety that would fill my mind in more public spaces would wash away.
I was fortunate to have those places. American University was one of them, in large part because of the relationships I had forged as student body president.
But it was another space—an unexpected one—that quickly became a refuge in the months after I came out. It was a building that I worshipped so much throughout my childhood, the one that had sparked my initial interest in politics: the White House.
I had been on tours of the president’s home while growing up, and as student body president, I had attended a small outdoor press event there; but like most people, I had never been to an event inside.
Three weeks after publishing my coming-out note, and the swirl of media around it, I received an email from the White House Social Office, the staff tasked with hosting events at the White House. I opened the email to see an invitation topped with the gold seal of the president of the United States. Under the seal, it read, “The President requests the pleasure of your company at a reception in celebration of LGBT Pride Month to be held at The White House.”
In addition to serving as the home and office of the president and the first family, the White House’s bottom two floors, known as the State Floors, serve as a large, ornate event space. Presidents traditionally host receptions and events commemorating different groups and communities, but it wasn’t until President Obama that the LGBTQ community had been invited for an annual reception honoring and celebrating our lives and basic dignity.
Walking into the White House for the Pride event three weeks later was awe-inspiring. Uniformed Secret Service agents greeted guests as we made our way through the small East Wing, down a long windowed corridor, and into the central part of the White House, the famous structure that appears on the twenty-dollar bill.
Drinking from a champagne flute, I took in the grandeur of the rooms I had intensely studied as a kid. The State Dining Room, with its portrait of a thoughtful Lincoln. The oval Blue Room, constructed at the request of George Washington and the inspiration for the construction of the West Wing’s Oval Office. And finally, the East Room, a large ballroom adorned with stunning gold curtains and three large chandeliers.
You could feel the history in that room. Presidents have been inaugurated there. The legendary painting of George Washington hangs on the wall. The bodies of Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Kennedy lay in state in the center of the room after their deaths. And in 1964, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. looked over the shoulder of President Johnson as the Civil Rights Act was signed into law there.
President Obama was scheduled to address us from a lectern placed at the far end of the ballroom, but until then, I mingled with the guests. It was the first time I had been in a space filled with this many LGBTQ people. Same-sex couples were walking around holding hands. A transgender person proposed to their significant other in the central hall. The feeling in the room was celebratory. And standing in the White House surrounded by people like me, I felt at home.
A bustling at the front of the East Room signified that the president was about to speak. As I made my way up to the front of the room, I bumped into a young man, a handsome twenty-six-year-old transgender attorney named Andrew Cray.
“Oops, I’m sorry,” I apologized and moved forward as the announcer boomed, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.”
The president, greeted with rapturous applause, made his way from a side room, up onto a stage, and to a lectern marked with the seal of the office.
“Now, each June since I took office,” he opened, “we have gathered to pay tribute to the generations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans who devoted their lives to our most basic of ideals—equality not just for some, but for all.”
I had heard the president speak at rallies and on health care, but I had never witnessed him speak entirely about LGBTQ people. It was an empowering experience, and as he spoke, it felt like he was speaking to me.
“And as long as I have the privilege of being your president, I promise you, you won’t just have a friend in the White House, you will have a fellow advocate for an America where no matter what you look like or where you come from or who you love, you can dream big dreams and dream as openly as you want.”
It was an affirming and memorable experience, but I didn’t fully realize how pivotal the White House would become in my own journey, beginning with that young transgender man I had bumped into just before Obama’s speech.
Frankly, I didn’t think much about that chance encounter with Andy. It didn’t really register until a message popped up on Facebook two months later.
“Hey, Sarah! So…I’ve seen you at more than a few events around D.C. But I am a little shy about introducing myself—so hi, I’m Andy,” he continued. “Despite being pretty bad at introducing myself, I’m actually not that shy, and if you’re interested in getting coffee or drinks or something sometime, let me know. I think we’d get along pretty swimmingly.”
The message appeared in my Facebook inbox on August 14, 2012, just as I was getting ready to leave my internship for the day. I’m not usually one to fully engage with strangers on Facebook, particularly while at work, but for some reason I felt compelled to. Maybe it was the fact that we were both transgender, or maybe it was our list of mutual friends, or his adorable use of the word “swimmingly,” but it was clear from the start that he was someone special.
Over the next several weeks, we chatted on and off over Facebook and by text messages. I learned he worked on LGBTQ equality at the Center for American Progress, a prominent advocacy and research institution known in D.C.-speak as a “think tank.” I found out that we both loved terrible reality television, James Cameron’s Titanic, and Star Wars (although his love for the trilogy was unlike anything I have ever seen!). We had both studied film earlier in our lives, I as a high school student attending a creative and performing arts school and he as a film major in college for a period of time.
After weeks of chatting and escalating flirtation on Facebook, he finally asked me to dinner. “Please don’t take this as pressure, but just as a testament to how great I think you are—I haven’t locked in any plans for tomorrow. Would you like to go out?”
Like any twentysomething girl, I was anxious about taking that next step, to go from flirting online to a real-life relationship. Despite how wonderful he seemed, I wasn’t yet sure how I felt about him. But that wasn’t why I was so nervous.
I was nervous because this would be my first first date since transitioning, since taking the initial steps to live as Sarah. At the time, I still worried that people—even those who hadn’t known me before coming out—saw me as a walking costume.
My natural hair wasn’t in a place where I felt comfortable with it, so I was still wearing a dark wig that fell to just under my collarbone. I had been on hormones for only a few months. And while none of those things should invalidate my gender identity, I worried that Andy, even as a transgender man, would be disappointed. I worried that, to him, I wouldn’t be the woman I knew myself to be and the woman he had so clearly built up in his mind.
But of course I said yes.
Our first date was on an unseasonably hot early fall evening in 2012. It was a clear night and probably slightly cooler than it felt to me due to my nerves.
It was just after dusk when I stood impatiently on my front stoop waiting for Andy to pick me up. The restaurant was only about six or seven blocks from my house, but Andy, obviously wanting to make the date feel as traditional and perfect as possible, picked me up at home.
Our chance encounter at the White House Pride Reception hadn’t registered with me, so I had never truly seen him in person, just in pictures on Facebook. As he stepped out of his spotless black Audi, I couldn’t help but be taken aback by just how suave he seemed to be in person. He was immaculately but casually dressed, clean-shaven, and wearing square glasses with big black rims that can be described only as nerdy-chic.
He walked me to his car, and we took the short drive over to the restaurant, which actually was closer to his apartment than my house was, making his gesture to pick me up all the more ridiculous and sweet.
We parked and walked half a block to the restaurant. With every step, as with all my public adventures, it felt like a thousand eyes were staring at me, wondering the same question: Is that a man? Much of it was in my own mind, but some looks were undeniable.
Andy and I sat down at our table at a small tapas restaurant on the main drag of Adams Morgan, a lively, colorful D.C. neighborhood filled with restaurants, bars, and, at that time of night, young professionals beginning their drunken evening out. Our table was imperfectly situated for my insecure self, located just on the edge of the restaurant’s small outdoor patio and in the line of sight of everyone tipsily walking by.
Our server approached from behind Andy, catching a glimpse of me and making a face I had grown to know all too well, a look that might as well have included the verbal confirmation “Oh, you’re transgender.”
The server was kind and didn’t do anything out of the ordinary following the initial, subtle look, but I could tell she knew. I wondered what she thought about Andy, handsome and not “visibly transgender,” clearly out on a date with me. I could imagine her inner monologue. How disappointed this guy must be in his date.
As proud as I had grown to be transgender, I was still struggling with the same insecurities that a lot of transgender women face. The message we so often receive from society is that to be “read,” as we call it in the trans community, as transgender is an implicit and negative statement about your beauty.
Sitting there, I envied Andy. He seemed so cool and comfortable in his own skin, so unworried about the world around him. As someone much further along in his transition than I was, he carried himself with a confidence that I had not yet mastered. I did a good job of hiding the insecurity, doing my best to come off as the confident person I’d presented online to Andy.
The server took our orders and left. Andy and I continued our conversation until a few seconds later, when he stopped mid-sentence, tongue-tied, clearly overtaken by something. I braced for the worst.
“I’m sorry, but, my God, you are beautiful,” he blurted out.
And with that, in that moment, my insecurities washed away.
In the three months since coming out publicly and living as my authentic self, I had never genuinely felt seen until that point. In every other interaction, I still felt as if others saw me as either the person they previously had perceived me to be or, entirely, a trans person at the beginning of my transition.
With that simple comment, Andy was the first person who seemed to see me and be interested in me as Sarah. He was the first person who showed me that in transitioning I could still be loved and could still find a partner, something I had worried was out of the question.
In that moment, Andy was the first person to make me feel genuinely, remotely beautiful in my own skin. It wasn’t the validation of a man, it was the true recognition of myself by another person that felt so good.
The rest of the dinner was a blur of comfort, laughter, and good food. Following dinner, we hopped into his car and drove back to my place.
On the short drive, Andy, who had told me that he loved to make mix CDs, put on his most recent. The first song was new to me. I asked him what it was and he replied, “ ‘Safe and Sound’ by Capital Cities, and I bet it’s going to be pretty popular soon.” I listened to the lyrics.
Even if we’re six feet underground
I know that we’ll be safe and sound.
The song would eventually become our song, returning at some of the most dramatic points in our relationship, sometimes by chance and sometimes intentionally.
We pulled up to my home as the song ended. Andy quickly got out of the car and ran over to open my door. As I stepped out, I felt Andy’s hand connect with mine. When I looked at him with a smirk, he appeared terrified, wondering if he had done something wrong. Andy raised his eyebrows to ask if it was okay for him to hold my hand. My smirk turned into a smile, I squeezed his hand tighter, and we walked to the door.
And that’s where we first kissed, for a few seconds, then ten, fifteen, and twenty.
As we separated, trying to play it cool, I wished him a good night and thanked him for the amazing date.
“Can we do this again?” he asked with almost childlike excitement.
“I would love to, Andy.”