Since coming out in 1995, I’ve spoken to many audiences about being transgender in my role as an author and teacher. One common question on those occasions has always nagged at me: Given that people don’t tend to read me as transgender, why do I insist on being so publicly out? My answer has shifted over the years, but the recent focus on the sexual harassment and assault that women face has given me my clearest answer. It’s important that people know I grew up as a girl and young woman because my experiences in that gender identity have shaped and still shape who I am today: someone who is not and will never be comfortable being called or considering myself a man.

I only lived 17 years as a girl and a young woman, and I grew up in a safe environment: a small Maine town with loving parents who raised me to speak up and be self-empowered. Though these factors do not shield one from sexual assault — nothing truly does — I am fortunate not to have suffered such abuse.

But as I read the #MeToo entries on social media sites and news outlets, they cast me back to my adolescent years. At 11, 12, 13, I was just outgrowing the category of tomboy that had granted me some self-explanation, and had given me a little room to maneuver in my childhood. I was just beginning to come into a body that, more and more, felt inescapably like a woman’s.

I remember that body; how every woman I saw reminded me: I would grow up to look like them. I dreaded that future. Even more, my body suddenly became subject to public commentary, as if it were on display for others to evaluate. I remember hearing, “I wouldn’t have thought you’d have bigger boobs than Ann,” from one boy at school, as if my being a tomboy had any correlation to how large my chest would get. “You should wear a bra,” I heard from a wide range of mothers and fathers of my friends. Eventually, I figured out a sort of proto-binder — at first a couple of undershirts, extra small, and later the kind of compression shirt worn when you’ve broken a rib — that I donned through the end of middle school and beyond.

When I went off to boarding school in ninth grade, it was an intense relief that most students didn’t go to the dances, where I’d learned in middle school how much boys liked to press up against any girl they could; I was delighted that many of the girls in my dorm preferred to work on their history papers or watch The Princess Bride on a Saturday night. But I was having a hard time with math that year, and I remember telling an older student that I’d made an appointment to meet with my teacher. “Who do you have?” she asked me. I told her my teacher’s name — let’s just call him Mr. P. "Don’t go by yourself," she warned.

I enlisted another girl from my dorm, I’ll call her Donna, to come to tutoring with me, and the two of us sat side by side in the math classroom with Mr. P standing behind us. He put his hands on my shoulders and leaned his face between us as he commented on our work, occasionally touching Donna’s arm and hand as she wrote out her solutions. He patted our backs and squeezed our shoulders as he told us about quadratic equations. I remember the two of us scurrying back to the dorm that night, giggling and chattering: gross, weird, kind of nasty. We ran to the older girl, the one who had warned me about Mr. P, and she just rolled her eyes. “Come to me for help next time,” she said, and then named a few other teachers we shouldn’t go to alone.