The other day, I found myself mesmerized by someone in an office—a person whose presence radiated such beauty and ambiguity that my first instinct was to wonder: was this a beautiful woman or a beautiful young man?
My second instinct was to catch myself in that moment. To feel a little sadness that the question arose at all—and, at the same time, a flicker of hope that someday, no one will be preoccupied by such curiosity.
I have always thought of myself as open-minded, someone who resists the reflex to categorize. Years ago, I took the Harvard bias tests mentioned in the book Blind Spot, which I’ve written about before. I wanted to see if my unconscious mind harbored shadows I couldn’t detect in daylight. And yet, here I was, wondering about someone’s sex as if it should matter to me at all.
In that quiet realization, I reminded myself: how someone expresses themselves—how they choose to inhabit their body and their story—should be none of my business. My hope is that, as humans, we will graduate beyond the reflex to classify a person before we see them. That we will care first about the kind of human someone is, not whether they are she, he, or they.
I don’t know how long it will take for us to arrive in such a world, but I believe it is worth imagining.
This week, I watched the documentary Enigma on HBO Max. It follows two women. One, an openly transgender woman who was forced to make defending her womanhood her life’s work. The other, a performer who was rumored to be transgender but never confirmed or denied it. She built her entire persona on this cultivated ambiguity. And good for her—because a person can be anything, or nothing in particular. They can live unspecified and unlabeled.
That’s the stance I admire most. And I hope society will catch up to it. Because that is the world I want to live in.
In all my travels, the place that feels closest to this future is Berlin. Strange, isn’t it? A city once infamous for the terrors of eugenics has become one of the most unbothered and accepting places I’ve ever experienced. Not just tolerant—accepting. There’s a difference.
How beautiful it is to be mystified by life in all its expressions. To meet something or someone unfamiliar, and to feel curiosity rather than fear. To relinquish the need for clarity at all times and embrace the possibility that the unknown could be, in fact, astonishing.
And even if the unknown is more than we can handle, how precious it is to know we are not alone in our aloneness. That the feeling of being misunderstood never lasts forever.
Imagine all the people living life in peace. Imagine a world where each of us has the freedom to be autonomous in deciding how we want to be—and the freedom to change our minds.
I often wonder why we are so quick to celebrate commitments to others—marriage, loyalty, allegiance—but so slow to celebrate the commitment to ourselves. Why we praise the clarity of stasis but look with suspicion on the messy in-between. One cannot exist without the other.
How do we really integrate this knowledge? How do we begin to live our lives—and respond to the changes in ourselves and others—with more patience, more grace?
I remember a moment in Enigma, when someone remarked that all the entertainers in the Parisian transgender performance scene were “sisters,” because they had gone to the same surgeon. Over fifty years ago, and yet I’m reminded of my old Equinox spin classes in the late 2000s, looking at the first row of riders who all seemed like sisters, too—bodies and faces molded by the same aesthetic ideals.
Some impulses are so profoundly human, they persist across generations: the desire to belong, to be recognized, to be beautiful in a way that makes sense to others.
Perhaps in a few generations, our differences will no longer need to be “tolerated,” because the concept itself will feel irrelevant. There will be no antonym to tolerance—because no one will think to define the world in those terms.
As April Ashley once said:
“If you are going to impress someone—impress them with your own self. Be truthful to yourself and you will be magnificent. If you are dependent upon labels—you will be trash.”
May we all learn to be magnificent in our own ways.
