Casey Plett

These were the ideas David discovered in his early twenties, and it made a future feel possible. If he wanted to be trans—whatever that meant?—David could maybe do it and keep his weird little Davidness.

A lot of girls were coming out in her city, which she’d just returned to after years on the coast. Some of the girls were having a rough time, and some were having a rougher time.

How gruelling was the adjustment to life on hormones with grinding workweeks and no time or energy—not just the wringer of bar work but also the basic physical demands of living here, of taking the stairs and riding trains and carrying groceries up four flights. Yet this was paradoxically not without positives: the obliterating tiredness that now lived in David’s body became a passageway through which he learned about that body.