All names have been changed in this essay, not for each person’s privacy — just for fun.

I’m under the impression, based on the stunning aggregate of books, songs, poems, movies, and even body sprays about the subject, that I’m not the only person who truly was at a crossroads at age 17. By way of possible explanation, for many more years of my life than I’d like to admit, I labored under the very firm and very erroneous impression that I needed to be perfect in order to deserve love. What is even more absurd is the fact that, to preserve this external façade of imperturbable perfection, I believed I had to hide, disguise, or elaborately lie about most of who I was.

But by 17 years old, this had reached something of a fever pitch, the world having grown so much more complex and rife with nefarious but terribly desirable options. For example, I was a newly-minted cigarette smoker, having discovered that cigarettes were the missing piece in my anxiety repertoire. They created a self-reinforcing feedback loop in my neuronal network in which I smoked to relieve anxiety, and then smoking made me more anxious — a glorious oscillation that kept me jangly and on the edge of my seat, but also hiding episodically in the Harbormaster’s bathroom during school lunch to smoke, so no one would know I was a smoker.

For as long as I’ve been writing, and that’s been for about twenty years or so, reader, I’ve made my contact information available for people to reach out to me with questions and comments about what I write.

A couple of months ago someone sent me a message through Instagram saying that I have privilege because I can pass as a cisgender woman and also asked why I haven’t used that privilege by being more visible in the trans community. I take every question seriously—well, all the serious ones, at least, so I’ll take my time here to answer.

Passing is complicated. Even the word is complicated. I don’t use it. I blend. And there was, of course, a time when I didn’t. Being misgendered hurts. And there are trans women who are routinely misgendered throughout their transition and I’m acutely aware of that because of my own experiences early in my own transition. Is there privilege in blending? I suppose there is. Does it make my life easier? Undeniably. When I’m out in public, my identity as a woman is not questioned or rebutted at a restaurant or at a grocery store, at the clinic or anywhere I go. It gives me access. It gives me peace of mind.

One of the means of control my father used in his abuse (of my mother, my sisters, and me) was what I have come to think of as the “Public Complicity Trick.”

I’m going to describe this trick from my childhood, though I am a man now and it happened decades ago, because I need to speak about how I’ve seen what seems to be a similar effort recently from a man who I once thought of as a friend. This person chose to call into the podcast of a prominent national celebrity to enter the public sphere of discussion about cancel culture. I won’t repeat the details of his call; Allison Morse has outlined that story.

When I was young, my family would sometimes be out somewhere in the community, and my father would launch into one of his Big Lies. He would tell a friend about some great thing he had accomplished in his younger days—being a champion boxer in the military; or he would tell the head of the small-town Nebraska volunteer fire department that he had saved three people from a fire while serving as a volunteer during one of our cyclic moves between Texas (where he was from) and Nebraska (where my mother was from); or he would tell some new acquaintance from the evangelical church about a vision he claimed had helped him kick drugs and booze. (That brings back my memory of finding his jar of black capsules of some drug—not a prescription—in the kitchen cabinet when I was about 10. I carefully opened each capsule, dumped the powder down the drain, and closed the empty capsules to return them to the jar.)