I wondered about my boyfriend’s masculinity. Was it real? Was it enough? Was my sense of what makes someone a man skewed by having grown up with a father who had her femininity to hide and her masculinity to prove?

Before my father came out, I thought masculinity looked like baseball on TV, Coors Light in the hand, and anger and unhappiness lurking beneath the surface. Throw in a crew cut, stoicism and frequent shouting, and as far as I was concerned my father embodied the essence of manhood.

I didn’t yet know that the anger was a side effect of the strain of my father’s smothered identity, nor did I know how that anger would begin to fade during her transition. The crew cut and Coors Light went away, too, replaced with a blonde bob and IPAs. Her love of baseball remains.

My boyfriend’s outward display of gender was different. He got choked up during scenes of heroic sacrifice and sappy father-son moments in movies. He was a sucker for United States Army commercials. Unafraid to show affection, he would hug his guy friends and had no qualms about saying he loved them.

He wasn’t afraid to say he loved me, either.

In a darkened movie theater, seconds after the end of “The Social Network,” with his arm around me and my shoulder wet from his perspiration, he said, for the first time, “I love you.”

Confused, I said, “Is this related to the movie?”

Over time, it got easier for me to say it, too.

I understand why my father kept her identity hidden for so long. If she hadn’t been born in the ’50s and had more accepting parents and siblings, if the rigid views and definitions of gender had been softer, if she had known a name for what she felt back then — maybe things would have been different. But given the constraints of her situation, she did what she felt she had to do: play the part. She did it to perfection, until she couldn’t.