“Do you ever miss the option to present like that?” I asked my friend Julian, gesturing at the stage.

He looked at me blankly, then asked me to repeat myself. “No. No. I didn't…,” he started. “I wasn't,” he continued, shaking his head, waving his hand, looking for strong enough words to describe how there was not one second in his life, though he'd been raised female, when he had tried or considered presenting like that. He'd been butch and awkward then, but several years into transition now, he was a heartthrob, mussed hair, cute scruff. Masculinity so unquestioned that—incredibly—the first time we met, a waiter told us a joke about what it's like to have a dick and then nodded at Julian, saying: “He knows what I'm talking about.”

I had waited. I had waited and deflected and denied and waited more; I had held out until my chances of continuing to survive were zero.

I wouldn't have identified myself as someone who looked like the woman onstage, either—I didn't wear makeup, and frequently left the house in sweatpants—but at five feet nine, 120 pounds, with delicate features and often long hair, whatever I did and didn't do to project a popular conception of female desirability, I was made out of it. We were at this karaoke bar, though, so I could sing my go-to number (okay: “Redneck Woman”) ceremonially. Finally. While I could still reach the high notes. The next day, I was going to start injecting testosterone.

I had waited. I had waited and deflected and denied and waited more; I had held out until my chances of continuing to survive were zero. Until years after it'd already gotten bad enough for me to tell a therapist that all I wanted was to saw my breast tissue off with a jagged blade and smash it into a stone table with my fists until it was particulates of pulp, dust. Until I'd gotten cis-hetero-married twice, wearing long white dresses, and finalized my second divorce and continued to fight it still.

Until, several months before, I'd bolted upright in the middle of the night, having seen myself, again, as male, and started panicking (Not this again). But instead of pushing it away, again, I didn't, and then managed, after another brutal month of making peace with my own inside war, to say to myself in a burst of light and relief: I'm trans.

“The solutions are imperfect,” a gender therapist, who is also trans, said to me about medically transitioning after I'd already decided that I would do it, had to do it. And though I understood what he meant, lying in bed later with the sun coming through the blinds and my body full of bright shimmer, I'd thought: Not for me. For me, they are perfect.

By the time I got to karaoke, I recognized that femaleness was slowly killing me—sometimes not so slowly; I'd spent the several hours before walking out the door curled in a sobbing ball, breathing myself through the pain by clutching the little vial of hormones I'd start shooting soon, soon.

But I did not know, until I started dismantling that femaleness, that I thought that if I wasn't a pretty girl, I was worthless. I'd been indoctrinated to believe that if you're gonna be a person with a vagina, the most important thing to be is nice to look at. By an entire misogynist culture. By movies, where pretty girls became objects of obsession and efforts to save, frequently without even talking. By a formative figure, who used to snake his arm around my waist with his fingers gripping my pelvic bone and ask people, “Isn't she beautiful?” No amount of higher education or professed feminism or professional success, apparently, had managed to mitigate it.

Indeed, my career as a journalist had often only reinforced it. At a variety of fancy functions, my very presence at which might imply I had other talents, multiple high-ranking editors brazenly talked about my body or having sex with me; a senior male colleague regularly reminded me where my merit lay when he put his hand on my upper arm, my lower arm, my waist, my thigh, my thigh, my thigh. On location, a cameraman leaned his body into me until a producer intervened and said, “I'm gonna need you to tighten it up, man.” Before an interview, a source offered me his hotel-room key; after the interview, he kissed me on the mouth. That's an incredibly truncated list. You could argue that it was just the purview of predatory men, but that would put aside the female superior who regularly commented on my weight, and it wasn't until I started transitioning that I understood how thoroughly I, too, had internalized the message that desirability wasn't an asset but the asset.

I saw that what the figure had long told me in private—that I'd be killed if I didn't play nice, play pretty—was true.

At the tiki bar that night, and for months afterward, I was nauseated by the certainty of my impending loneliness. As hormones started to take effect, a friend came to visit, and I fretted to her for hours that no one would love me after I shed my slick female packaging. When she tried valiantly to reassure me that they would, I fought with her. “You cannot know that,” I said. And she couldn't. Not for sure.