Who My Child Was and Would Be

“What do I know about being a woman?” Nat said. “Sometimes I have to ask myself. The thing is, I don’t know shit about womanhood.”

It was December of 2019. For most of the previous decade, I had understood Nat as a gay man, his identity blurred only by the erosion of the old rules about sex and gender that had shaped my youth. Now my twenty-six-year-old son intended to become a woman. We were on FaceTime—I in New York, Nat in Berlin. His hair was long, the light of the laptop whitening his eyes. He wore an orange tank top, silver necklaces, and dark nail polish, and sported a tattooed eye on his biceps that seemed to study me in return.

A few days earlier, Nat said, he had been hit hard by the idea that transition might be an affirmation, not an escape, as he had thought. “I wept buckets,” he said. “I never do that. I never cry.” He thought estrogen might open this well.

I wanted to protest—wasn’t the association of women and weeping a cliché we had spent decades dismantling?—but said nothing. I only looked and looked at him, sadly wondering if this version of Nat, with his faint stubble and familiar shape, was about to slip away.

As if reading my mind, Nat said, “I’m not sure where this ends up.” Whether he would follow up the hormone treatments with surgery was still an open question. He also intended to keep his current name, and lots of his current wardrobe. “I like the silhouette of my clothes,” he said. “I’m going to keep wearing them.”

I clung to that. Same name: good. Same sweaters and corduroys: also good. But the physical being would be transformed, and perhaps the soul, which didn’t go its separate way but was always a co-conspirator with the body. Each conversation, then, felt like a goodbye.

For many trans people, the misalignment is there from the start, a stark sense of having been born into the wrong body. That kind of clarity makes for a simpler story, a simpler diagnosis.

That wasn’t Nat’s story, or so his mother and I thought. He had been a funny, extroverted child, performing “Hit the Road Jack” on his bed, then a theatre kid who grew taller than his parents and, in high school, took on demanding roles. In “Fool for Love,” he was a smooth-talking seducer, and, in “Othello,” he was Roderigo, whose frustrated desire for Desdemona drives him to despair: It is silliness to live when to live is torment. These roles required an adult grasp of lust and jealousy and nihilism. They also involved playing a raging heterosexual—a dramatic flex of the imaginative muscle.

During his sophomore year in high school, you see, Nat had come out. What emerged from the chrysalis of confusion was, it seemed, a young gay man, who went off to college at Oberlin, and then moved to Berlin, a queer Valhalla long before Christopher Isherwood. To all appearances, the riddle of identity had been posed and solved.

But it had not, as I discovered in November of 2019. Chatting on FaceTime one day, Nat mentioned that he was visiting a nearby L.G.B.T.Q.-aid organization to explore the feminine side of his personality. At first, I assumed it was identity tourism, a kind of dabbling in alternate selves. Then he made clear that he wanted to be changed utterly—to become a woman.

This came as a shock. To me, he was a man, a lovably androgynous person with a Y chromosome and a visible Adam’s apple. Why did he want to become a woman? Nat tried to explain, and at first his wish seemed entangled with his periodic depressions—which were deeper and darker than I had realized. When lost in their depths, he told me, he felt absolutely hollow. “I don’t feel like I have any reason to live,” he said.

This was a painful exchange. Melancholy, we often believe, is an occupational hazard for creative people, and Nat, a poet, visual artist, translator, and d.j., certainly fits into that demographic. But “melancholy” is also a pretty word for depression.

Of course, depression, for many people on the brink of transitioning, can be a red herring. Friends and family will often counsel against making such a weighty decision in the midst of emotional turbulence, not grasping that a profound sense of misalignment is what is feeding the turbulence in the first place. I went down that road myself, urging Nat to tackle the depression first.

“I understand that you are responding to a deep impulse,” I wrote him in a long e-mail. “An impulse that deep and consistent should not be ignored. But what is it telling you? I don’t see how a regimen of hormones, or smoother skin, or a redistribution of body fat, is going to ease the sort of disquiet that you were telling me about.”

I was fighting it. That’s obvious. In my e-mail, I cast the impulse to alter his body as naïve literalism—as if the body were just an industrial container for the interesting person inside.

Yet Nat had already begun to say goodbye to his old body. He had been struggling during those weeks with pneumonia. This meant long days at home, full of fatigue and shallow breathing. He binged “The Sopranos,” drank bone broth, took numerous baths. In the bath, he told me, he would study his body in the water, and recognized that he would be leaving it behind. He felt a kind of grief, he told me. But this didn’t change his mind—it was just the cost of changing, of sloughing off the old self.

I sensed myself tiptoeing through in our next few exchanges. I didn’t want to drive Nat away. I also didn’t want him to turn into a woman. It was that simple, which is to say, not simple at all.

For weeks, I felt an impending loss: the precious fact of having a son was about to be taken away. I wasn’t hung up on dynastic issues. Yet I think there’s something raw, some product of the primitive brain, that makes a father identify with a son. You see yourself in this other, beloved being. I was afraid of losing that.

The fear entered my dreams. One night, I was a woman, alone in an apartment, a stalker waiting outside the door. Myself-as-woman was both Nat and me: she vulnerable in transition, me powerless to stop it. I told Nat none of this. I could grieve for the son I was losing while preparing myself to have a daughter.

I meanwhile chose the crisis-management technique favored by most bookish people: books. I read Jan Morris’s “Conundrum” (1974), marvelling at the hypermasculine roles Morris had inhabited before transition—soldier, climber of Everest, political journalist, father. She had transitioned so long ago that the vaginoplasty was performed in a mysterious clinic in Casablanca. Yet her description of awakening in a dark room after the procedure, the indecipherability of the space a metaphor for her slippery self, could have been written yesterday.

I also read Rachel E. Gross’s “Vagina Obscura” (2022), with its portraits of the gynecologic surgeon Marci Bowers creating, with almost sculptural skill, vaginas attentive to pleasure. It left me wondering how long before the bespoke became indistinguishable from the “natural,” and whether Nat, despite his hesitations, would someday alter himself that way, too.

Not long after my talk with Nat in December, I met a friend I’ll call Ajay, a poet and a teacher, for dinner at a Lebanese restaurant. Over kibbeh nayyeh, raw meat served with onion and mint, I told him what was going on.

“So you were taken by surprise?” he asked.

“Absolutely. I’m very confused.”

Ajay nodded. He had several trans students, he said—his best students. They were serious, precise in their language. “They’re the only students with whom I can have a conversation about the soul,” he insisted. “For the others, that’s a narrow religious concept.” For the trans students, it was an obvious way to talk about identity. They had already made the definitive discovery that the body was malleable, which suggested that some integral part of oneself was other than corporeal. “These people represent the next stage of evolution,” Ajay said, not entirely serious but not quite kidding, either.

He knew that parents could go through an emotional wringer in the process. He mentioned one trans woman distressed that her parents had kept the relics of her boyhood—I imagined photos, toys, the odd Little League trophy. Did these souvenirs seem counterfeit to her, awful reminders of her long imprisonment in the wrong body?

Nat, meanwhile, was beginning a transformation of his own. Twice a day, he rubbed an estrogen gel on his arms and belly, which seeped into the bloodstream and began its slow, invisible work. “I’ve initiated this huge change,” he told me. “And it all comes down to this transparent jelly on your fingers. It’s really drippy. But it’s nice that there’s no, well, apparatus between you and your body when you’re applying it. It’s tactile.”

In January of 2020, I flew to Berlin with my girlfriend, Nina. We met Nat for dinner, my first glimpse of him since he had begun estrogen. I studied him carefully. I saw no dramatic change, not externally. His hair was lustrous, his skin had a pink glow, and he looked happy: all gender-neutral qualities. On the other hand, Nat was wearing a white ribbed sweater with a zipper, and when he unzipped it partway before dessert, we could see a black camisole underneath. So an inner transformation was under way. Or not, since I could pretty much imagine him wearing the camisole before any of this stuff happened. We didn’t really discuss his transition. It was just there, like the low light and the good cheer and the bumper-car sound of German consonants colliding in the air.

During the week, we shared meals—trout and potatoes at his apartment, Chinese food one night when he confided his loneliness. He longed for a relationship but couldn’t seem to meet the right person. “The worst people on earth still manage to find their opposite numbers,” I said, with the exasperation of a parent who can see what the world is missing. “And you’re awesome.” Nat drooped over his plate, then rallied with a laugh at his fortune cookie, whose slip of paper read: You have a great sense of humor and love a good time.

One afternoon, as we were walking together, he mentioned that the estrogen gel was working. His skin was smoother, and, he added matter-of-factly, “My nipples are getting bigger.”

I found myself asking, “Do you mean wider or more protruding?” I was genuinely curious.

“They’re getting more conical,” Nat said.

When we returned to his apartment, his roommate was watching a video about Buck Angel, the trans man and porn star who has sometimes argued that only those who medically transition should be referred to as trans. I could see the logic. Yet I also grasped how offensive the argument was to any number of self-defined trans people along the endlessly subdivided spectrum of queerness. The trans community itself was as fissured as any other, full of arguments about purity and authenticity.

I had once met Angel in Los Angeles, as it happens. Online, this hugely divisive figure looked like a cartoon of masculinity, muscles bulging as he swung kettlebells. In person, he was smaller, unexpectedly sweet. With his bald head and meaty arms, he registered as a man, but also as somebody you couldn’t pin down at once, or maybe at all.

We returned from Berlin on January 17, 2020. Three days later, the first U.S. COVID case was confirmed. Nat had scheduled a visit for March, but amid the viral mayhem that plan collapsed. To be honest, I thought it was safer for him to stay in Germany, a technocratic nation run by a fully functioning adult (and a quantum chemist). Yet I hated keeping him away. A year and a half would pass before we saw each other again.

Meanwhile, we lived on FaceTime. As the weeks passed, he didn’t look especially female to me, but he said he felt blurry in the eyes of others. The gel was doing its work—its stealthy reconstruction of skin cells and follicles and mental states. Of course, it didn’t banish the gusts of sadness that had always bedevilled Nat. You can feel as desolate in the new body as you did in the old one.

By May he was despondent. “I’m ashamed of my body,” he said. With salons closed, he had tried waxing himself, leaving welts and acne. “I have these little-girl tits with hair on them!” he wailed. Then, softening: “Well, I’m going through a second puberty. What else can you expect? I’ve got the emotional life of a thirteen-year-old girl.”

So the months went: a sequence of vignettes, like an epistolary novel. More and more, his friends noticed subtle changes. “Your skin is so soft,” one said. Another told him he looked strahlend—radiant. Nat laughed and said, “There’s a pink mist coming off me.”

In August, I learned that Nat was now leaning toward female pronouns. “It’s not really a policy,” Nat said. “Just where I expect to end up. Some friends still use he, some use they. I’m open to anything at the moment.”

The female pronoun wasn’t the shocker it might have been, because Nat and his friends had often used it in a camp way. What seemed novel to me was the idea of using it sincerely, quietly, without the implicit mockery of gender categories.

That same morning, Nat had watched a video of three trans women being attacked in Los Angeles, the assailant egged on by bystanders. “I see my friends in that video,” he said. “I see my friend Yves.” To calm down, Nat told me, he preserved lemons. Later, he went out in tiny shorts and a ripped tank top that was practically backless: a declaration of change.

From here on, I will call Nat a woman. Some readers may wonder why I didn’t from the start. It’s because pronouns aren’t only grammar; they’re metaphysics. To retroactively call her she at every stage would erase the boy she once was—the son with shaving cream and Axe deodorant, the teen-ager I fitted with a blue prom suit. It would suggest that Nat’s whole existence as a boy had been ersatz—a sad and constricted prelude to her real life.

This is exactly how some trans people do feel. They want nothing more than to sever the connection to an earlier era, during which the body was a prison of misalignment. I don’t question the logic. But Nat hadn’t yet changed her name. Nor, in my understanding, had she renounced her past as a boy, a teen-age male, a young man. Even if she had, there was the additional question of my relationship to that past, which was, after all, shared. It wasn’t going away. There would be no airbrushing of the old photos, no silent emendation of the letters from summer camp. (“We crushed Camp Walt Whitman at softball!”)

Of course, transformation works both ways. A change in the person you love changes you as well: a toddler’s newfound independence, a teen’s leaving home. There is a shift in what I can only call the emotional weather—air moister, light different, mornings oddly new. Part of you embraces the change. And part of you remains tethered to the past, stubbornly loyal to the older version of the person.

At one point, Nat mentioned a bookish inspiration of her own, Paul Preciado’s “Testo Junkie,” which she had read several years before. Preciado’s self-administered testosterone was less a bid to become a man than a total denial of whatever society wanted to make of him. Nat was fascinated by that refusal of categories. When I read the book, it seemed to clarify things: perhaps it wasn’t womanhood that interested Nat, but an effort to elude the cast-iron confinements of gender identity?

Well, that turned out to be another red herring. In the end, she wanted exactly what she had once said she didn’t know shit about: womanhood. More specifically, she wanted to be a woman with a man.

By late 2020, she had found one. He was a bisexual Danish guy named Christian, who had just moved from Copenhagen to Berlin. In comparison, she said, her earlier attempts at love felt flimsy—they were “a kind of device for feeling something, often at the cost of feeling nothing at all.” Now the temperature was lower, she told me, the pace more leisurely. They were in no hurry.

“Finally, we’re together. And I didn’t know you were so handy with a weapon.”

Cartoon by Harry Bliss and Steve Martin

By early 2021, Nat and Christian were still together, despite the inconveniences of lockdown. He was allergic to the cat she was minding, and would retreat to the bathroom for sneezing fits, then reëmerge, the cat creeping arthritically away to the other side of the apartment. Nat allowed that their relationship was full of “emotional spasms.” She had also concluded, earlier on, that all meaningful persons might suddenly flicker in and out of your life—a lesson sadly conveyed by the collapse of my marriage when Nat was five. But now she was learning over and over that a loving person could stick around.

Had hormones unlocked that possibility? I wasn’t sure whether to credit biology, psychology, or some combination of the two. What I knew was that Nat had been modifying me since infancy. When my wife, Iris, went back to work six weeks after Nat’s birth, I became the primary caregiver—bumbling, unqualified, but transformed by the baby’s olfactory arsenal, which is released from its scalp. The effects on a man in the caregiving role are well documented. Testosterone ebbs, prolactin rises, the pink mist makes you what you are. Exhausted, often alarmed, I was happy. Now it was Nat’s turn. Happiness arrived amid the bleakness of COVID, compressed into domesticity: cooking, staying in, a few friends.

Just as Nat seemed settled, she scrambled the circuits again. She got married—and not to Christian, though she continued dating him. The marriage, to a German woman named Christina, was meant in part to stabilize her residency. I tried to discourage it, but Nat had made her choice.

They went to Copenhagen, where weddings are notoriously easy. “The Las Vegas of the E.U.,” Nat said. Over FaceTime the day before, Nina and I met Christina. She was smart, pretty, and fashionable. I wasn’t sure what to say to her. Nina stepped up very nicely: “Welcome to the family!”

The ceremony itself, in the Copenhagen city hall, was over in ten minutes: a vase of tulips, a bottle of sanitizer, vows read from a sheet of paper. Nat wore a slinky blue dress, which suited her willowy frame. Christina wore a more masculine outfit, a beige suit, with her hair slicked back. I sensed an affectionate parody or maybe a burlesque of the plaster couple on top of the wedding cake—a bit of anti-heteronormative performance art. But I knew my daughter: she could not recite vows and mean nothing by them.

The love here was not the kind that builds a household or makes plans for children. It was love as generosity, a declaration that even loose bonds could count as family, whether the marriage lasted or not (and this one eventually foundered).

On June 11th, after a year and a half apart, I saw Nat in the flesh. Nina and I waited at J.F.K., half starved for her presence, unsure what to expect. Male, female, androgynously in between? Then she appeared, tall, long-haired, her nail polish blue, her voice reassuringly deep. I hugged her hard, grateful for solidity after so many pixels.

The next day, we went to the Union Square Greenmarket. Men glanced at her sideways, caught by her ambiguity; she enjoyed it, playfully tugging her wide-necked shirt off one shoulder. “How did that happen?” she said.

We filled our bags with herbs, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, scallions, strawberries, and rustic-looking asparagus (different lengths and curvy, as if nobody could manage the parallel lines). Nat talked a lot about how lucky she was to be dating Christian, especially while transitioning. “This is gold,” she said. “It’s amazing to have somebody who actually loves the flux you embody.”

Yet Nat also aired some concerns about how the hormones, plus the testosterone blocker she was now taking, were getting in the way of sexual intimacy. Part of it was the fact that her body was becoming softer, more rounded—more feminine—and therefore less of an ideal love object for Christian, who was still powerfully drawn to men.

“There are things I want to do with him,” she said. Suddenly, she removed her glasses and wiped her eyes. “Look at this,” she said. “I’m crying.” In a droll tone slightly at odds with the tears running down her face, she added, “The hormones are working.”

“Things will be O.K.,” I said, and gave her a hug.

Of course, I wasn’t sure how these hormonal complexities would sort themselves out. For that matter, I had never discussed my sex life with my own parents. Everything was changing so fast!

She explained that injections worked better than gel, but the Germans didn’t sell estrogen in injectable form. So she found a woman in Ukraine who sold injectables for bitcoin. I immediately pictured a D.I.Y. setup in a Kyiv apartment, a chain-smoking woman making the equivalent of bathtub gin. But the package arrived, neat and effective. Wrong again.

By now, I had learned to distrust many of my reflexive judgments about Nat’s transition. This meant unlearning all sorts of things I’d got wrong the first time around. Even the small things were telling. I mentioned earlier, for example, that Nat’s performance as Roderigo in “Othello” had originally struck me as a stretch, since it called for a lunatic level of masculine resentment. But Nat’s teacher, who was well aware that Nat was gay, had helped her to craft a sexually ambivalent version of the character, whose intensity might plausibly flow from her attraction to Othello, and whose stylized, sashaying walk was a source of some confusion for my father, who wondered, as a physician, whether Roderigo was suffering from some kind of hip displacement.

This was a minor bit of incomprehension on my part. A bigger one was my assumption that Nat had accepted her progression into manhood as a natural thing. In fact, as I was to learn from a subsequent conversation in Berlin, she had never felt herself to be a man at all. “I certainly was a boy,” she told me. “And, like many trans women, I had a protracted boyhood. You see this in gay men, too—the aging-twink syndrome. Anyway, it was when that started to end, and the horizon of manhood approached, that the dissonance became all too clear.”

Until the moment she uttered these sentences, I was in the dark. I had been so for many years. Now I could begin a process of correction, which was likely to be slow.

What confused me most was that I was dwelling simultaneously in the past and the present. The whole long history of Nat’s boyhood was alive for me, and the most trivial elements were precious, because only as you get older do you realize how terribly finite are the hours you will spend with the people you most love. So I couldn’t always think clearly about what was going on before my eyes.

One evening during her stay in New York, she was set to d.j. at the Lot Radio, in Greenpoint. I was impressed that, after an absence of eighteen months, my child was immediately in demand—and in a location that had previously invited the likes of Talib Kweli and George Clinton to work the booth.

The set didn’t start until ten o’clock, so Nat was still hanging around as Nina and I were heading out for a bite nearby. When Nat came out in a gauzy top, her breasts clearly visible, I felt the classic discomfort of a father confronting his daughter’s sexuality. I looked away. What I worried about, though, wasn’t propriety but danger: the subway at midnight, the city’s supply of transphobic thugs.

Nina tried gently: “Maybe you want to wear a bra?” Nat declined. “A bralette?” Also no. Over burgers, Nina suggested that Nat still harbored a young man’s pride in his body. In fact, it was the opposite, as I would learn later—after Nat had read a draft of this essay. “It felt more alienating to wear a bra,” she told me. “I didn’t fill it out—not with those budding prepubescent trans-girl breasts.”

That was the lesson. Transition meant a new body but none of the cultural muscle memory that usually comes with it. Some feminists saw that as presumption, skipping the long price of admission—slights, salaries, stares. But to me this panoply of injuries seemed itself a poor form of validation, and the dangers facing trans women were plenty. When we returned home, Nat changed into a halter, still feminine but opaque. We didn’t talk about it. Maybe our mild response had simply reminded her of the world’s perpetually prying gaze.

Back in Berlin, in July, Nat gave herself her first estrogen shot, unfazed by the needle. “It’s in a very fleshy part of the body,” she reassured me. The effects came faster than with the gel—tender breasts, mood swings. “I’m P.M.S.-ing all over,” she said, with the delight of someone who had longed for that badge of femininity. Nina laughed: most women would pay to avoid P.M.S., she pointed out.

But this leads back to the contested issue of what makes a woman. When Jan Morris described her transition in “Conundrum,” she embraced the familiar trappings of femininity—cosmetics, high heels, brightly colored jewelry. Society had defined womanhood that way; why not accept the definition, especially if it gave her pleasure?

By 1974, though, many women had already discarded those notions as instruments of domination, psychic equivalents of the whalebone corset. Reviewing “Conundrum” in the Times, Rebecca West dismissed Morris’s enthusiasm for these tokens of womanhood as a parody of femininity: “She sounds not like a woman, but like a man’s idea of a woman.” West, herself a hard-charging foreign correspondent, missed the courage it took to write about a sex change in the first place. Her critique also reflected (and amplified) a widespread suspicion—that trans femininity was always a performance, a costume.

“One feels sure that she is not a woman,” West insists, having been particularly offended by the author’s description of her hormonally enhanced (perhaps the word is conical) breasts. What, then, would West have made of Nat’s body, even concealed under a halter top? What of her height, her glossy hair, the estrogen-softened skin? And what of her voice?

The voice box, a tube of cartilage, muscles, and ligaments which takes its final shape at puberty, doesn’t change with estrogen. For boys, a surge of testosterone enlarges it, and drops the pitch about an octave—hence the deep voice Nat acquired at thirteen, which I loved as much as her pale eyes. Estrogen gave her smooth cheeks and wider hips but left her voice untouched. So she still spoke in that low, confiding register, leavened with campy inflections she’d learned in her days as a gay man.

Some trans women cultivate a new voice. Pitch, resonance, and intonation can all be reshaped: men tend to a narrow range and flat melody, women to coloratura leaps and flourishes, turning thought into small songs. The process is like learning an instrument. Nat, being a poet, knew this intuitively: the voice was something you played.

In March of 2022, I flew to Berlin, my first visit in two years. On my second night there, Nat made asparagus risotto at the place where I was staying, on Böhmische Strasse. She invited both Christian and Christina—boyfriend and wife, with their confusingly similar names.

Christian, gentle and curly-haired, talked of his music while Nat stirred the pot. On the wall, by coincidence, hung a photograph by a friend of theirs, who had once shot Nat and Christian for what she called an “ethical porn collective.” I felt the usual parental unease: How’s this going to go down when you apply for that job at Lehman Brothers? But Lehman Brothers, founded in 1850, is gone, along with so many rules of personal deportment that go back just as far. Where my generation hoarded privacy, Nat’s seemed to dissolve it. The photo shoot, for them, was simply a record of two bodies, both of which would change dramatically over time. Why not share it?

Then Christina arrived, chic and funny, my improbable daughter-in-law. She edited a small German quarterly, and we found it easy to talk and grouse about the task of making writers do what you wanted them to do. She was, she said, coming to New York in June with her . . . she hesitated.

“Go ahead,” Nat said, laughing. “Say it!”

“With my boyfriend,” she finally got out.

My impression was that the word was too dull and bougie to be uttered. Perhaps even the relationship, the dusty old dyad of man and woman, was now slightly antique.

For the next few days, I went out every morning to a coffee shop on Sonnenallee, often with a battered copy of “The Great Gatsby” that I’d found on a bookshelf at the apartment I was renting. I was struck by Fitzgerald’s line about Gatsby’s “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”

I think I was drawn to the book because Nat was one of those machines, a creature who could pull in a signal from far away, and because Gatsby’s reinvention of himself made me think of Nat’s. Gatsby was a social climber, but also something more—there was an artistry to what he did. Nat was always pursuing several things at once: showing graphic work in Madrid, lecturing on house music in Vienna, writing the text for a queer variation on Schubert’s “Die Winterreise.” Maybe Nat’s new life was also a work of art, in some strange, sweet, conceptual sense.

One night, I visited the bar where Nat worked twice a week. There she was, wearing a halter top. You took your shoes off at the entrance. In slippers, I stood at the bar and she made me a gimlet, which I gratefully drank. On the bar was a tip jar in the shape of upended buttocks—you fed your coin into the anus.

I remained at the bar for a while and watched her. My daughter was making drinks, energetically shaking the shaker, sometimes consulting a cheat sheet—did she need a drop of Pernod? The customers didn’t seem to begrudge her this learning curve. They liked her, and I could bask in that, relax, enjoy my secret status as a proud father.

Nat admitted that she and Christian had had a fight before my visit. “It’s all about your career!” he’d complained. “Everybody else is just an extra in ‘The Nat Show.’ ” When I saw Nat and Christian together, though, they seemed close. Christian had given her bird-of-paradise flowers on International Women’s Day, a small but perfect endorsement of her womanhood.

There were complications. Christian’s previous long-term relationship had been with a woman. Now he was involved with a person whose body had slowly been changing during the entire course of their relationship—or, to put it another way, with a woman who had a penis and smooth skin and a rounder face, owing to what Nat romantically described as “new fat deposits” in her cheeks. Sometimes, Nat told me, Christian had rubbed some of the estrogen jelly into his skin. I assumed that he was curious about his lover’s experience, and perhaps tantalized by the prospect of rearranging some molecules of his own. (In fact, Christian has since transitioned.)

One evening, the three of us lingered over dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant. We drank some orange wine, and I tried to recall how it got that color—something about the contact with the skin of the grapes. I watched them holding hands across the table, tender and at ease, and felt myself waving Christian inside the familial tent. I felt real warmth for him, and gratitude that he loved Nat for exactly who she was. He loved her skin and what was inside it.

It was time to go home. The airlines still required a negative COVID test, and Nat took me to the testing site on Richardstrasse, explaining my situation in brisk German that made me feel proud and feeble at once. I let the nurse push the swab high into my sinus cavity, the bristles tickling what felt like the outer lining of my brain. She could have been collecting a sample of my emotional life, some strange residue of regret and amazement and love.

We stepped back into the sunlight. Everywhere, there were Germans with strollers, serious vehicles with five-point harnesses and expandable canopies and suspensions like you found on a Mercedes sedan. In each stroller was a pink baby. Sometimes there was a toddler, too, looking big and worldly, but actually helpless, just like me.

Nat had work to do, and we arranged to meet later. In front of my rented place, I watched her round the corner onto Niemetzstrasse and disappear. Only then did I notice that somebody had left a cardboard box near the entrance.

Not very German, I thought. These people don’t leave stuff by the curb. They disperse their belongings, their very history, into lots of color-coded bins, and the bigger stuff, the Sperrmüll, gets picked up right on schedule. The evidence of having lived is spirited away.

I peered inside and saw a wooden puzzle—the kind where you fit animals into the appropriate slots: lion, monkey, giraffe, kangaroo. We had given Nat a puzzle like that long ago, had watched him, or her, make big decisions about who belonged where. A child’s deliberations are beautiful to behold. I stood on the sidewalk and tried to remember those moments. They were in my brain, discharges of electricity, a shower of sparks. They were private. What was public was the box, a small tabernacle on the sidewalk, and the tears that were sneaking up on me. I looked and looked into the box, and then I went upstairs. ♦