The family attended church service every Sunday and most Mondays and Wednesdays. Fox said they regularly spoke in tongues. They believed they could heal through prayer and “cure” lesbians and gays. Sometimes, Fox borrowed clothes from her mother’s and sister’s closets when no one was around.

Art gave Fox an avenue through which to explore the larger world, beyond Ohio, away from church. She spent hours in her room, drawing and painting and studying comic books and anime. Jim Lee was her favorite artist, his work for Marvel Comics crisp and detailed. She appreciated the new worlds he created.

Fox often pictured herself in New York City, in a loft downtown, an easel in the corner, her artist apron on. When she told her parents of her plans, they told her she would find the devil there.

She first heard the word “transgender” when she was 17, on daytime television, and realized that there was a term for what she had been feeling inside. As Boyd Burton, she took a year off after high school, married and had a daughter. She said she married because of the pregnancy. She did not divorce her wife until 2007, according to public records, after she had become Fallon Fox. She served four years in the Navy. She went to technical college and enrolled at the University of Toledo.

All the while, she felt trapped, confined, and she started to research gender dysphoria. She read about other transsexuals who waited years, even decades, to transition, about how it became harder over time. Then her hair started to fall out.

“Looking in the mirror, it was destroying me,” Fox said, before pausing to compose herself.

To tell this part of her story was difficult because it is not easily understood and would inevitably be translated into the cookie-cutter version of her life. She took a deep breath and dived back into her tale: to the two years she drove an 18-wheeler across the country, saving money and researching transitions and taking hormones in “this in-between stage”; to the gender reassignment surgery in Thailand in 2006.

Upon her return, the odyssey continued, the search for meaning, for her place in the larger world, more heightened than before. She drove a school bus and worked as a diesel truck mechanic. She lifted weights and studied jujitsu and stumbled across a video on the Internet of Megumi Fujii, a female mixed martial artist. She consumed videos of Fujii and her opponents for days on end.