My Wife Didn’t Know I Was a Woman Until Over a Decade Into Our Relationship

The first Valentine’s day gift I gave to Laura—an illustration of me (presenting as a guy) handing her flowers. You know, because actual flowers are passé.

I met my wife at the beginning of college. We were both part of the incoming class of 2009 at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. It was late summer. The heat was inescapable.

Having grown up in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, I had become accustomed to a certain sort of heat. The heat in Colorado was almost always the…