Maybe it was the election of Barack Obama that made it seem, fleetingly, as if there were no more glass ceilings, for offices from president to pontiff. While the president’s golden aura has dimmed considerably since 2008, the fact that an African-American occupies the highest elected office in the country remains a source of pride. Whether the 45th president is a woman (Hillary Rodham Clinton?) or a Latino (Marco Rubio?), it still feels, on a good day, as if we’ve entered a time when there are fewer limits on what men and women can aspire to.

As a transgender woman, I was incredibly proud when, in 2010, Amanda Simpson became one of the first transgender people appointed by a president to an administrative position (a senior technical adviser in the Bureau of Industry and Security). In 2008, Joy Ladin became the first openly transgender professor to teach at Yeshiva University. While I have no skills in either industry or security, and I can barely explain the differences between Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, Ms. Simpson and Ms. Ladin’s accomplishments meant the world to me. Their triumphs felt, in a small way, as if they belonged to me, too.

Still, I suspect that some institutions continue to view diversity as they view cholesterol — there’s a good kind and a bad kind. I attended a meeting of college department heads some years ago in which I, among other campus leaders, was urged by a dean to recruit faculty members from more “underrepresented groups.” I had to ask: “What kind of diversity are we talking about? Are you really telling me you want more transgender men and women?” There was, unsurprisingly, a little ripple of laughter in the room, as if the very idea of a community needing more people like me was amusing. The dean, to his credit, said: “Yes. We want everybody.”

My grandfather, James Owen Boylan, never lived to see an Irish Catholic become president. But his great-grandchildren live in a world where an African-American is president and a pope speaks of gay people with what sounds like compassion. That’s progress.