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A Woman at the Boys’ Reunion

A sculpture on the campus of the Haverford School.Credit...Mark Makela for The New York Times

MY friend Mark and I were in the suburbs of Philadelphia, on the campus of the all-boys Haverford School, where we’d been students 40 years earlier. In the intervening years, I’d become a woman, and he was now in a wheelchair. A lot had changed.

One day, when I was a sophomore, somebody put me in a headlock and hauled me around the campus for a half-hour, a helpless, flailing thing. We had been friends once, my headlocker and I. But the way I figured, not anymore.

At last he dropped me, in tears, on the ground. He called me a few epithets — the ones reserved for gay and trans people — and said, “That’s what you get.” Then I got up and went to class; I was late for bio.

It’s reunion season, and many of us are returning to the site of our adolescences. What drives us to revisit days that are almost universally remembered with a cringe?

This wasn’t the first time I’d been back. In the 15 years since I came out as trans, I’d found myself surprisingly embraced, if not exactly understood, by my former classmates. In spite of everything, I had a lot of affection for Haverford, not least because it gave me the education I would need to survive my own life. Plus, there were my friends: guys with big hearts and weird nicknames like Basi and Linky and the Bees. The Bees and I had been particularly close once, but he’d kept his distance since my transition.

The event was taking place against a national conversation about transgender identities, the question of individual dignity mortifyingly reduced to a hallucinatory debate about North Carolinian toilets. Plenty of my classmates are conservatives, which is fine with me, although I’d assumed that most of them voted Republican because they liked the idea of small government and low taxes, rather than because they hated immigrants, gay people and the poor. My parents had been Republicans like this, and once so had I.

But a Facebook exchange with a classmate suggested things weren’t so simple. My old friend Robert adored me now, he said, as did my classmates. But he was less comfortable with transgender people he did not know. “Predators aren’t stupid,” he said. “We’re being asked to dismantle what has hitherto been a barrier to their efforts.”

At the reunion, Robert came up and gave me a big hug and a kiss. I couldn’t quite bring myself to feel anything but love for him, even if he did seem to think my existence constituted a Get Out of Jail Free card for predators. Was it only because I’d known him since he was 12 that I felt such affection? Maybe it’s just impossible to hate someone whose history you know. If so, was my classmates’ acceptance of me more the result of loyalty than compassion?

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One of the 24 virtues engraved along a walkway on the campus.Credit...Mark Makela for The New York Times

Mark and I ate shrimp. He’d been a quadriplegic since a surfing accident when he was 28. Behind an assortment of cheeses, a slide show was playing; our younger selves looked out at us.

“You know, when I look at these pictures, it’s like I’m looking at some whole other person,” Mark said. He glanced at me in my black and blue dress. “You and me, we both had a before, and an after.”

The same could be said for most of the 69 boys who had graduated in June 1976. One died of AIDS. One served in the George W. Bush White House. Another played for the New York Giants. Two came out as transgender women.

Suddenly, the Bees appeared. “Listen, Boylan,” he said. “I don’t have any problem with you. It’s just that I miss Jim — that guy you used to be. He was my bud. I don’t need Jenny. Jim meant a lot to me.”

I said, “But the person you miss is still right here.” The Bees just gave me a look, as if this could be true only if there was no actual difference between men and women.

I thought about having hurt feelings about this exchange. But I knew what it was like to miss the younger version of someone I had loved. I wanted to say, listen, my brother: Sometimes I miss the person you used to be, too.

Later, Mark drove me away from the school in his wheelchair-adapted van. Sitting shotgun, I wondered if the biggest difference between who I am now and who I was then is less the result of gender than of time. Is it because I’m female now that I’ve become more interested in compassion than righteousness? Or is this simply what the years do to you?

I wished that my headlocker had come to the reunion. I’d have told him I forgave him, that I understood that whoever he was back then was surely not the person he was destined to remain forever.

I looked over at Mark. A wave had picked him up and left him changed. But then a wave had lifted us all.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and special adviser to the president of Colby College.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: A Woman at the Boys’ Reunion. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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