Sometimes I don’t even remember to get nervous before I leave the house anymore. 

It’s nice. 

On days like today, I can almost forget that I’m trans. It’s not at the forefront of my mind. For a while I’m just present in the moment, sitting outside, reading, feeling the warmth of the sun.

Then as I’m walking home, I pass a man standing on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. And as we make eye contact, I see his eyebrows raise and his expression change to that expression I’ve seen a million times. Sometimes I hear it in my head as “You’ve got to be kidding me,” sometimes as “What the fuck.” And then I remember that I am trans, and I feel a knot of tension in my stomach, one part fear–is he going to say something? is he going to do something?–one part something that might be a fucked-up kind of shame, as if I’ve done something wrong by making this man think about the fact that he has to share the world with people like me. And this pulls me out of the moment, out of the sun.

And then I think how incredibly fortunate I am as a woman who is transgender in this world if the worst thing that happens to me today is that a man looks at me like I’m not human.