Before my childhood best friend transitioned, they talked about the guilt they felt at “leaving women behind.” I didn’t see my friend leaving anything behind (when did my friend stop being a woman?), only seeking to live & be seen in a different way. But my friend meant it.

What do you do with that sense of guilt that's also a reminder of what you're trying to escape or deny?

You can expiate it by erasing the very language that would express what’s being renounced. You can pretend that there was nothing you left.

That any kind of person can get pregnant or ‘bleed,’ and that nothing binds these individuals across time and place.

In other words: You never were part of that, whatever it was, if there was ever anything to it at all.

Through transition, my friend’s features changed less than their expressions. My friend developed new postures, new habits—including a tendency toward labeling—labeling me, packaging my experience for me so that I no longer recognized the things I had once confided in my friend.

I became 'cis' for my friend, no matter how many times I rejected that made-up word. My experiences thus had nothing to do with my friend's experiences. My friend indicated that I had ultimately accepted the things we once railed against together.

Our shared past underwent a brutal revision. The person who had been my best friend had never existed. When we’d talked about our experiences as girls and young women, my friend had never known what we were talking about, as though I’d been talking to myself all along.

How insensitive of me to assume that a single word of it was shared!

But in fact we had been young women together.

When my friend transitioned, we both said: you’ll still be the same person. But it wasn’t true.

Transition turned my friend into someone else: not a man, but a person who wears a mask that can never be removed, a person with a fictionalized autobiography, forged not once but over and over and over again.