Trans, Actually

A trans story without the culture war

I was traveling through Japan during the holiday season when a friend asked me a simple favor: “Can you arrange an LGBTQ+ day? A tour, something meaningful.”

If you’ve ever tried to arrange anything during the holiday season in Japan, you know what comes next: polite dead ends, fully booked schedules, and that quiet logistical panic where you start wondering if the best you can do is point at Google Maps and call it a day.

Then I found Tiffany.

Tiffany is a trans woman who said she could make time to guide us. She agreed to meet us at our hotel in the morning, which meant she arrived when the city still had that early hush—half awake, half glowing.

When she walked in, I greeted her the way I’ve greeted a hundred people in a hundred cities: warm, familiar, human. I gave her a kiss on either side of her cheek. No hesitation. No internal pause. No “wait—what’s the right protocol here?” She was simply our guide. A person showing up to do her job. Another morning. Another meeting.

And then, a beat later, something landed in me: this ease I felt wasn’t performative. It wasn’t me “being good.” It wasn’t me proving anything to anyone. It was older than that. Deeper. Like a muscle that had been trained quietly, years ago, without me realizing it.

When I was sixteen, my first job was selling suits. And in that shop, I was more or less the only straight teenage guy surrounded by several gay men who found it endlessly entertaining that I was fresh meat. I was teased. I was laughed with. I was brought into their orbit and made to feel, in the best way, slightly out of my depth.

What I didn’t understand then, but understand now, is that those men did me a kind of lifelong favor. They gave my nervous system an education.

Because when you’re young and you’re dropped into a room where you are “other,” one of two things happens: you armor up, or you relax into being human. And by some combination of luck, kindness, and comedic humiliation, I relaxed.

Years later, we have research language for this: in-group and out-group bias. We tend to feel more empathy for people we experience as “us,” and less for people we experience as “them.” It’s an ancient human feature, not a modern moral failure.

And the wild thing is how malleable “us” can be.

There’s that famous story about a KKK member who befriended a Black man. The KKK member still said horrific things about Black people, but in his mind, his friend didn’t count as Black. His friend had migrated into “us.” Which is curious, and also revealing: the category can shift when relationship enters the room.

So there I was in Japan, spending the day with Tiffany, and it was… special in a way I didn’t expect.

Part of my interest was genuine curiosity—how dating works, what daily life is like, what kinds of prejudice she runs into. And part of it was almost an absence of interest, which I mean as a compliment. I wasn’t studying her. I wasn’t collecting evidence. I wasn’t trying to “understand transness.” I was just enjoying a day with a person I liked.

We walked. We talked. We moved through the city. It was easy.

Then she shared some of the hardship she’s lived through.

What stayed with me wasn’t the content alone. It was the way she delivered it: matter-of-fact, integrated, almost light. Not dramatic. Not asking for pity. Not packaged as tragedy. Just… reality.

And that hit me later, after we’d parted ways, like an ache that kept returning.

Because I know myself. If I carried a story like that—if people had tried to harm me, not just with comments but with real, physical threat—I don’t think I’d be able to talk about it so cleanly. I’d have more charge in my voice. More fear at the edges. More vigilance.

Tiffany spoke the way someone speaks when they’ve had to metabolize what happened because there was no other option. When the alternative would have been to fall apart, and she simply didn’t have the luxury.

It pulled something open in me.

Not in a “her suffering is worse than anyone else’s” way. Suffering is not a competition and it doesn’t need a scoreboard. But in that specific kind of sorrow that comes from realizing how casually some people are targeted—how easily other humans decide someone is permissible to mock, to threaten, to hurt.

And then the strangest part: none of the culture-war topics were central to our day.

Sports. Schools. Bathrooms. Politics. All the loud, click-fed arguments that bounce around the internet like broken glass—none of it was what we were doing.

It was just three people walking through Japan. Having a beautiful time. Listening. Laughing. Eating. Being present.

Which left me with a simple, almost naïve thought that I can’t shake:

If the world were built more on that—on actual proximity, actual conversation, actual life shared in normal ways—so much of the heat would evaporate.

Not because differences disappear. But because the nervous system stops treating “other” as danger.

And I feel sadness when I watch how quickly polarization turns fringe ideas into mainstream identity, simply because outrage pays. I feel sadness that we’re being trained to react to strangers we’ve never met, instead of being curious about the human standing in front of us.

That day with Tiffany didn’t make me “more correct.” It made me more connected.

It reminded me that the most powerful antidote to dehumanization is not winning an argument.

It’s a morning hello that carries no fear.

It’s a kiss on both cheeks that doesn’t require a script.

It’s the quiet realization that the world gets better when we stop auditioning for moral purity and start practicing something simpler:

presence, curiosity, and a little bit of humility about how much we don’t know until we actually meet someone.

Tiffany's Podcast | Tiffany's Instagram | Tiffany's LinkedIn