“But I could still be cis,” Jodie says, slowly and uncertainly. “Not cis like Victoria or Paige, where they hate it, but cis like Julia and Yasmin. You know them? They’re just down the corridor — only not right now; right now they’re at work — and they’re cis in the world, but to each other they’re just… Julia and Yasmin. They don’t have to pretend with each other like Victoria did with you, and they get the benefits of being, you know, cis.”

“But you don’t want to do that, because…” Lorna says, and pauses for a moment as she decides exactly how she wants to continue. “Because! Jodie, you’re not cis! None of the people here are! And the more I learn about you, the more of you I meet, the clearer it becomes to me that you have trans experiences. Trans lives. ... It doesn’t even matter that you pass well enough that you can fake being cis! Because this country — fuck, most of the fucking world, Jodie — imposes from top to bottom a gendered system on bodies and lives that are incredibly diverse, and when you go out there you’re going to have to survive in compliance with it. You’re going to have to live in a world premised on an assumption that’s hilariously false, that takes as a foundational component the belief that man and woman are two simple and separate categories with no crossover, no complication, no nuance, no third or fourth or four-thousandth option… You’re going to have to exist inside that system just to earn money, to pay rent, to live, and that’s before you even think about actual personal fulfilment! And facing all that down alone is hard, Jodie, it’s so fucking hard, because when you’ve seen the eighth and ninth and tenth colours of the rainbow, you can’t go back. You need the community, because we create little bubbles of reality in the mad, structured chaos of the cis world; places where you can exist as yourself, people around whom you don’t have to keep up the act. ... Community is safety, but it’s more than that. It’s a place, and it’s a conceptual space, and it’s a huge group of people who are downright excited for you to be yourself, no matter how weird and delightful that is, and who will help you live that way. We’ve housed people; we’ve funded surgeries; we’ve provided guidance and roadmaps and medication and— and fucking love, Jodie. When I say I wouldn’t be cis, even if it meant no-one would treat me weird in the street any more, even if it meant better employment prospects or not bracing for a heart attack whenever I open Twitter, it’s because I can’t imagine giving up the community. Giving up the knowledge that there’s more to life than cis gender mythology. Giving up all those extra colours in the rainbow. I love being trans, Jodie, because it’s me and because it’s real. I love it! And I think you will, too.”