In honor of Pride Month, Traveler asked some of our favorite writers to pen love letters to the spaces—explicitly queer or not—in New York City that have made them feel completely at home. To plan your own trip, check out our ultimate LGBTQ+ guide to New York.

The pickle is the Judy Greer of foods: always a supporting player, never the star. The humble dill spear often gets overshadowed by a deli sandwich thicker than the complete works of Tolstoy. The bread and butter pickle chip, demure and sweet, hides amid the fattier layers of a cheeseburger, begging not to be noticed or, worse, plucked out. Rare is it that a pickle gets the chance to stand up and say, “Here I am. Eat me.”

But for me and many other transgender women, the pickles are the point.

Our love of pickles binds us together. Memes about our affection for fermented cucumbers are so prevalent on social media that some transgender friends have admitted to me that they feel a little excluded because of their ambivalence toward the gherkin.

For those of us who fit the pickle-fanatic stereotype, though, there is salvation in the form of Jacob’s Pickles, an Upper West Side establishment that doesn’t belittle our beloved ingredient and instead gives it top billing.

My wife and I stumbled upon the restaurant after an appetite-building walk around the Central Park Reservoir. We endured the wait—and the threat of communal seating—for the promise of a restaurant with pickles in its name. Even still, I thought the pickles would be a side dish—a featured side dish, maybe, but a side dish nonetheless.

Nothing could prepare me for what followed: I ordered a biscuit sandwich called the Honey Chicken and Pickles, expecting some crinkle-cut pickle chips atop a fried chicken breast. When the server set the sandwich in front of me, though, I could barely see the chicken beneath a pile of Jacob’s Hot Sours, shaved into countless thin slices. The ratio of pickle to meat was nearly one-to-one. The pickles, permeated with the heat of chiles de árbol, cut through the sweetness of the clover honey. I devoured the whole plate, lost in a transgender rapture.

Popular theory has it that transgender women develop our pickle-lust when we start taking spironolactone, a blood pressure drug that also has anti-androgenic effects. In layman’s terms, “spiro” blocks testosterone, paving the way for prescription estrogen to do its beautifying work.

But spironolactone is also a diuretic, which means that it can make you “excrete more sodium,” Emory University endocrinologist Dr. Vin Tangpricha told me when I asked him to help me make sense of the cravings. If you’re losing salt in your urine, Tangpricha says, you could hypothetically “want to make up for that loss by eating salt.” What better saltier food than a cucumber that has been swimming in a brine for God knows how long?

To be clear, there’s no scientific data that connects the dots between taking spironolactone and craving pickles. Researchers haven’t studied the issue and Dr. Joshua Safer, who runs Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, burst my bubble by telling me, “I’m not saying it isn’t true, but it does seem unlikely.”

But in my own experience, the salt cravings were real. When I started taking “spiro” in 2012—a few months after coming out as transgender—my body wasn’t the only thing that started changing. Little by little, pickles became more appetizing. I nibbled on dill spears from the deli instead of throwing them away. I ordered burgers with extra pickles instead of picking them off.

I went off of “spiro” after I had sex reassignment surgery because my body no longer made that much testosterone anyway—but the pickle craving has remained, growing into a deep and abiding appreciation for all things fermented. It wasn’t about the salt anymore; it was about the flavor.

By the time I arrived at Jacob’s Pickles that first time, I was in the throes of full-on pickle-mania. That sandwich, with its near equal parts chicken and pickle, seemed like it had been made just for me.

In a funny way, I had waited my whole life for that moment.