I had just turned 20 the winter I passed as a man. I was backpacking through Europe alone. Others I knew at my study-abroad program in England had found travel companions, but I had decided to venture out by myself, armed with an unlimited train pass and a small amount of cash. My strategy was to sleep on the night trains to save money. It was both a brave and a stupid plan. (Mostly stupid.) It certainly didn’t occur to me in advance that I would need to alter my appearance.

But the night trains wanted to have their way with me. My first evening alone, I found a cabin where an elderly gentleman sat. We spoke for a while in Spanish and in French, and then he took one side of the cabin and I took the other. I woke up to find him standing over me, fondling my breasts.

Over the next few days, men made kissing noises at me, bumped up against me and aggressively chatted me up, asking me for sex. I’d been to American fraternity parties in the past two years; I’d seen harassment. But it was harder to tell people to go away when you didn’t speak their language and didn’t have a home of your own.

I looked at what made me a target. My breasts, for one. My American-ness, another. That backpack let everyone know I was from somewhere else. What weapons did I have? None. All I could do was hide my vulnerability.