So much has changed since then. In some ways, this country has become safer, as more and more of us step forward to proclaim our realness.

In other ways, we’re more threatened than ever.

When I came out, no one had yet been schooled on the finer points of hating me; most bigots in this country didn’t know a trans woman from the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Because my existence was so far off their radar, few people had bothered to come up with laws to make my life worse.

She asks herself a question that I’ve been asked too: if you had known what you know now, if you had known the hatred and ignorance that would become part of your everyday reality simply for existing, would you still have come out?

Would it have deterred me, if I had known for certain that the world would also contain truly heartless and terrible people, at least one of whom would eventually become the president? It would not.

I would still have gone about the business of becoming myself.

That would be my answer too.