I’ve only seen Eve in person once since college, in 2012, when I came to her city for a conference. She looked pretty much the same to me as she did at Harvard, presenting as male in a polo shirt, using her long bangs to shield herself from the world. I had always interpreted Eve’s downcast eyes as shyness, but I’ve come to realize that it’s about something more: she doesn’t want people to pay attention to a body she doesn’t feel belongs to her. In a cafeteria at the convention hall, while disconsolately spearing beans with a plastic fork, she came out to me as trans.

“Facebook has become my lifeline,” she explained in her naturally high voice. It’s there that she’s built the trans community she lacks in real life, a community that affirms her female identity. Facebook and Twitter allow Eve to maintain relationships with online friends and interact with more members of the trans community, who often friend each other for support even when they’ve never met in real life. “I can basically live a full social life [online],” she explained. Eve uses Facebook the way many people do, as a way to share information about her life, articles of interest, and to message with friends. The only difference is that many of those friends assume they’re interacting with a person who also presents as female in the physical world.

“All of my identity as Eve is based on these services right now,” Eve said. “They’re the only viable way to maintain the relationships that I do. So if I were to lose that, well, it would be like losing the entire Internet. It would be devastating. It would be like actually losing Eve.”

Eve views her female identity as complete and all-encompassing. “I don’t think people can peg Eve as a fabricated identity, at least not on casual inspection,” she told me over Gchat, which lets her present as female without her body getting in the way. In the physical world, Eve’s masculine characteristics fuel her gender dysphoria. Putting a dress on her male body and looking in the mirror just reminds Eve that she would never live up to her own expectations of what a woman should look like. The most Eve’s ever done is wear jeans that were made for women; she’s also bought a bra and a gaffe (a device to hide male genitals when wearing women’s clothes) but has never used them. “I feel good dressing. I don’t feel good looking at myself dressed,” Eve told me. She yearns for transition, yet insists she’s unlikely to go through with it. And one reason is that the body she has doesn’t align with the body she and others imagine Eve having.

Eve was able to hide her feelings of dysphoria from her wife for a long time, but, six years into their marriage, her wife eventually found the bra and gaffe. In a fraught conversation, Eve finally told her wife about her feeling that she was meant to be a woman. Eve assured her wife that she wouldn’t physically transition, and they’ve barely discussed the issue since. They have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which is easier to maintain when there is virtually no physical evidence of Eve’s womanhood. Though Eve’s wife knows she’s seeing a gender therapist for her dysphoria, they don’t discuss the details of her treatment.

Eve cares for her wife deeply. She’s an immigrant like Eve, from China instead of Korea, and they met in college and dated for a long time before getting married. She considers her wife the person she’s meant to be with, except that Eve is with her in the wrong body. A huge part of why Eve doesn’t feel like she can transition is because of the pain it would cause the most important person in her life.

And then there is Eve’s family. Physical transition would be a grave affront to her traditional parents, who belong to a Korean Methodist church and lead predictable lives, with her father working as a pediatrician while her doting mom stays at home. Eve has a younger brother and sister who both also went to Harvard. Eve’s entire family is thus an iconic image of immigrant Asian success, and Eve fears that her parents and siblings cannot absorb the knowledge of her transition.

Eve’s daughters are too young to know what the person they think of as their dad struggles with. It’s particularly hard for Eve to see her daughters grow up. “My daughters are far away from adolescence, but they continue to look eerily similar to me when I was a child,” Eve said. “So it’s hard not to imagine that I’m witnessing the what-if in front of my very eyes.”

At the same time, Eve fears that she would risk losing too much if she transitions. “I’ve known since I was very young that I wanted to have a family, find a soulmate, have children,” she said. “And I’ve basically managed to achieve all of these things. I love my children more than anything in the world, and I love my wife. I’ve never felt more sure of anything, except for the feeling that I should have been born female.”