We saw each other for the first time in two decades at our 20th high school reunion. "I mean, you have tits now," he said.
What I wouldn't give to understand -- from his perspective -- how the change in me changed things.
Adam played on the football team, and was about as all-American as they come. By our sophomore year, he had already grown big and bulky, and, once we were juniors, he was a stud. Just as vital as the physique he sported, his mind shone with interest in lots of areas, while his affinity for the television version of gay author Armistad Maupin's Tales of the City tantalized me with the possibility that he might be receptive to my crush. I spent a whole semester of history class waiting for an opportunity to present itself -- until finally I just showed up at his house in the middle of the night, knocked on his bedroom window, and, after a half hour of dithering around, managed to offer up the burden of a secret from my heart to his.
Let me back up. I went to two 20th high school reunions because I graduated high school in three years. As in other aspects of life -- yes, like my gender -- I was in both classes at various points, but in a way a member of neither.
Anxiety about the first reunion had lifted once I saw a number of my friends at a memorial service for one of our group, a couple of years before. We lost a source of light when she passed away, but we regained memories when the loss brought us back together like boomerangs.
In the car to the airport after the service, one of the three guys I was with -- all of whom I had known since at least seventh grade, and two since elementary school -- asked who had changed the most. I lost out despite my certainty that a gender transition would carry the day, when they all agreed that, in fact, I had not changed at all.
I gazed out the window at the San Francisco Bay, thinking about how all three of these guys had been married with children for years at that point. Perhaps they were right: I was the same solo person I had always been.
For more than a decade up until then, I had believed that changing my sex changed me more than it did: I relished the first time I dove into a swimming pool after surgery and felt my body -- every square inch of it -- free underwater. I clung to my mom's observation, during a conversation about boy trouble in my early 30s, that I "just don't understand men." There was the admission from a law school classmate that she liked Zoe a whole lot more than the male person I'd lived as, and the remark from a family friend that I was smiling in all my pictures now, which she couldn't remember me doing since I was a little kid. And there were all my new paintings of boyfriends and me together in moments of joy, whereas my artwork as a teenager was of other people, separated by the distance of emotions, and alone.
These changes were real.
Weren't they?
Any traces of doubt had dissolved by the time the second reunion rolled around.
Following the main event, we coalesced at the childhood home of another former football player, Adam's teammate, whose parents were out of town just like so many weekends we ended up there during high school.
In the kitchen around midnight, finally the chance came to thank Adam for taking my disclosure of feelings so gracefully, and with a maturity that exceeded his then 16-and-a-half years, so long ago.
He remembered our conversation, he said, and was glad that my transition had worked out.
I smiled, placed my hand on his shoulder blade for an instant, and let the moment pass into what had been.
On the ride back to the house out in the countryside where four girlfriends and I were staying the night, one of them, a friend I had not seen since graduation, looked over at me.
"Why the tears?" she asked.
I explained how Adam remembering a conversation so important to my life really touched me, and, with a poignancy I struggled to bear, how speaking to him all these years later caused me to wonder whether, had I been born in the right body, with not just tits as he noticed now, but with everything inside and out where it was supposed to be from the very beginning, he might have liked me back -- which, in turn, led me to think about how everything would have been different, life itself.
Mercifully she did not feed my self-pity.
"I can relate," she said. Then she told me about how, when we were in high school, she felt guys did not see her for who she was, either -- self-confidence took time.
I took tissue paper to bed in anticipation of crying myself to sleep. Instead I drifted away with the consolation that being transgender only drives me apart from others if I let it; at the heart of identity is human experience, which is something we all share.
Still, a sense of longing lingered the next day, and the next -- and then it rose to the surface again less than three weeks later.
To be continued...
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This blog post is from my essay Transgender No More.