Yesterday I was in a car accident. I’m really OK (some mild brain injury and bruising), the car is not.

I had gone running, so I was wearing a t-shirt and leggings with an athletic skirt to cover my bits, I had no makeup on and was perhaps the least feminine I could be.

What surprised me was that the EMTs, firemen, and police all saw and interacted with me me as a woman, and not in that “being polite” way that some trans affirming liberals can be, I just think they had no idea I was trans. My gender survived even having to talk to the emergency responders, answering questions, etc.

In some sense none of this is new, people on the phone have correctly gendered me as a woman for maybe six months, but it doesn’t stop my brain worms from making me hear a boy. Likewise with countless interactions in public now where people seem to see a woman. Still, all I see in a mirror is a boy most days.

In the ER, the nurses and office workers all assumed I was a woman. I was asked twice by the doctors if there was any possibility I could be currently pregnant.

All I’m saying is that yesterday was one of the most gender affirming days in my life. I don’t think if they suspected I was trans they would treat me the way I was treated, I just managed to seamlessly navigate the world in ways that I never thought was going to be possible. It’s not real to me, but I’m definitely just going to keep replaying those interactions over and over again. Maybe it will sink in.

Less than a year ago, the equivalent experience would have been very difficult, I was very much not passing and I looked like a man dressed as a woman to most people. I assumed it was just going to be like that the rest of my life, and that’s still what it’s like in my head.

I felt pretty emotional about it yesterday, about the culmination of so many hours put into voice training, struggling without a sense of hope about the future and arriving here anyway. I feel like I owe the trans community my whole life.