After all these years, I was suddenly on the receiving end of the male gaze. I had enjoyed — in a facile, superficial way — the validation this gave me, at least at first. But pretty soon, validation had turned to irritation. All at once, it seemed, I had arrived in a world in which men were incapable of leaving me alone.

I had been a feminist before transition, so the many ways in which women are both vulnerable and unsafe in this world didn’t arrive as shocking news to me. But it’s different when it’s you.

It took me a while, but in time I did learn, as Laura had suggested, how to tell off certain men when I felt myself to be in their cross hairs. But if I had gotten used to putting up my shield when it came to the attention of strangers, there was something else that took longer, that in some ways I still haven’t figured out.

This was the way my friendships with men had changed. Some had been my companions since childhood; others I had met in adulthood. But in almost every case, negotiating the difference between a guy-guy friendship and the kind between a grown man and woman turned out to be more complicated than I’d expected.

Take my friend Curly, for example. I had known him since college. A few years after my transition, we had met up in Rome while I was doing an article for a travel magazine. We had visited the Vatican, tossed coins into the Trevi Fountain, and bantered with guys in gladiator costumes at the Colosseum. In the afternoon, I had knelt at the grave of the poet John Keats and wept.

Later, back at the hotel, Curly had turned to me unexpectedly and said that he had “a gift” for me. I hadn’t slept with a man at that point in my life, and given my long history with Curly (I had been the best man at his wedding), I hadn’t realized that this might change.