My Google search led me to a web forum for trans women, where someone had asked the exact same question: “What if I think I’m transgender, but I don’t want to be transgender? How do I not be transgender?” I breathed a sigh of relief. Here, surely, I would find out how to make all those thoughts of being a girl disappear. Alas. Reply after reply related the same old story: “Oh, I thought drinking would help me ignore those stupid thoughts, but it didn’t. So I tried drugs instead. I became addicted. I lost my job, my marriage, my home, and almost died from suicide. 30 years later, I finally just accepted I’m trans, and I transitioned, and now I feel so much better! Why didn’t I just transition 30 years ago?!” The replies on this web forum felt like an omen: if I didn’t transition now, I would be doomed to a life of suffering and loss.

I was so scared. I thought that if being trans really isn’t a choice, then I’m powerless. I simply have to accept it. But how would I tell my family? My friends? My students? Would I be kidnapped, tortured, and murdered as portended by so many gruesome headlines? Would I be ostracized by my community?

I began to reflect on memories from my past.

One day, five years earlier, I got off a plane in Detroit. As I walked to the baggage area, I passed by the bathrooms.

“I should go in the women’s room,” I thought to myself.

“WHAT?!” my thoughts continued. “Why would I think that? I’m a man, not a woman. Why should I go in the women’s room?” I shook my head and kept walking.

But then it happened again, and again, and again; every time I walked past a women’s bathroom, I’d think to myself, “I should go in there. WHAT?! That’s crazy! Am I crazy? I’m a man, not a woman!”

And then things got weirder. I’d be sitting in a 

stall in the men’s room and then panic that I’d gone into the women’s room by mistake. I’d open the stall door to check for urinals, a sign I was in the right place, and sigh with relief.

Soon, I would panic every time I entered a public bathroom, even before I’d made it to the toilets. I’d turn around and walk outside to double-check that the sign said “MEN” not “WOMEN.” Eventually, I wouldn’t even make it inside – I’d have one hand on the door – before turning around and checking the sign, twice, thrice, sometimes four times, just to be sure I wasn’t accidentally going in the women’s bathroom.

Why? Was I losing my mind? There was no explanation. It made no sense.

Nowadays, when people ask how I know I’m a woman and not simply a man with feminine interests, I tell them about my bathroom anxiety. Why did I crave, for years, to use the women’s bathroom? And why did I panic, for years, every time I entered a men’s room? Bathrooms have nothing to do with gender roles or stereotypes. Nothing to do with aesthetics. Nothing to do with hobbies or interests. It was a feeling deep inside me – a gut feeling telling me that I belonged in the women’s room, not the men’s room.

And then, in 2018, when I was 31 years old, that gut feeling finally told me what I’d been so afraid to admit: I am transgender. It was a normal, sunny day at our family’s timeshare in Florida. We were at a resort with a fancy pool, enjoying our last day of sunshine before returning to our wintery home in New England. Off in a corner, next to the gift shop, stood two cardboard sculptures of a cowboy and a cowgirl, with the faces cut out so tourists could take silly selfies.

My wife said, “Why don’t you take our toddler over, so I can take a fun photo of you two?” So I did, with a mischievous grin, and stuck my head through the cowgirl’s face. Wouldn’t that be funny, I thought, to have a photo of a cowgirl