The child stared at me with a mixture of confusion and wonder. We were in a Gap store in Freeport, Maine, 20 years ago. I was trying so hard not to be a spectacle. “Mom!” the boy cried to his mother, looking at me in my graceless wig. “Who is that?” “That, honey,” she said, “is a human being.” Trans people have been part of human history for as long as there has been history, and for as long as there have been humans.
But with the exception of a few brave souls, until relatively recently, trans individuals were rarely in the public eye in the United States.