IT was snowing in Maine on Jan. 9. I’d been to the dentist’s the day before. The staff there were pleasant enough when I changed genders 12 years ago. “We’ll just change your forms,” the receptionist had said, cheerfully. “It’s no problem.”

That day, Papi Edwards, 20, a transgender woman of color, was shot to death outside a hotel in Louisville, Ky.

If you’d told me in 2000, as a transgender woman just coming out, that I was a person of privilege, I’d have angrily lectured you about exactly how heavy the burden I’d been carrying was. It had nearly done me in: the shame, the secrecy, the loneliness. It had not yet occurred to me that other burdens, carried by other women, could be weightier.

On Jan. 17, I moved into a new apartment on 106th and West End in Manhattan, in anticipation of the spring semester at Barnard College, where I teach English. My son Zach came down with me, helping to carry my luggage. He was heading back to college the next day. We had lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant called Awash, on Amsterdam. I pointed out the window at the building across the street, where I’d lived with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman in the early 1980s. I wasn’t out as transgender then; I couldn’t imagine it. Yet here I was, 30 years later, a Barnard professor, having lunch with my son, who is a drama major at Vassar.