The following morning, I came out of the closet, too.

Although in this in this instance it was a literal one. I was bare-chested, my hair damp from my recent shower, and carrying two T-shirts on plastic hangers. Samantha, whose waking-up process usually took a good half hour or more, was still in bed, propped up by pillows, scrolling through the news headlines on her iPad.

"Which one do you think I should wear?" I asked. Just because our relationship had become painfully strained didn't mean that I didn't continue to consult Samantha on my fashion choices. I held up both hangers to give her a basis for comparison. On the left, my classic Pink Floyd Dark Side Of The Moon T-shirt with its iconic prism, on the right my classic Pink Floyd The Wall T-shirt with its iconic screaming face. Both were outstanding choices and I simply could not decide between them.

Samantha didn't bother to look up from her iPad. "Isn't today the day that Tom — excuse me, Tamara — is going to the office dressed as a woman for the very first time?"

"Good point," I conceded and smiled at my own foolishness. Tom would be showing up at DuckGoose in a dress. Nobody was going to give a shit about my stupid T-shirts.

Although for the record, I went off the board and wore my classic Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here T-shirt with its iconic fiery handshake.

(I figured you wanted to know.)

But it was interesting going into work and being a fly on the wall, watching the reactions as Tammy walked by in a coral ruffled silk blouse and denim culottes — a word I am sure I had never heard in my life until that day — trying not to seem self-conscious under the appraising gazes of her coworkers. As I suppose I should have anticipated there was a pronounced gender split in their assessments.

The men were supportive — bless their hearts — offering smiles, thumbs up and the occasional generic compliment. But it was clear to me that they were also a little freaked out. Which I knew from the looks on their faces and, also, because throughout the day, I would be approached by them, one at a time, all asking variations of the same question:

Am I a bad person for thinking this is really fucking weird?

They weren't being mean-spirited; they were just trying to make sense of it — not just what Tom had gone through, but why it bothered them — and as someone who had spent months wrestling with these very questions, I was the closest thing they had to an expert. And I won't lie: After so many months keeping my mouth shut, I welcomed the opportunity to pontificate.

First, I reassured them that they weren't bad people. (Even if they were bad people, which some of them decidedly were, this didn't seem like the time to start a fight.) "I went through the same thing," I'd explain, "but after a while, it seemed perfectly normal." The use of the past tense was a bit of a lie, actually. Yes, much of the time it did seem reasonably normal-ish, but there were still plenty of times that it still seemed quite strange. For instance, Tammy's voice. It was no different than Tom's... until she got a phone call, at which point it would suddenly go up two octaves. I understood the reason: When she didn't pitch up her voice on the phone, people thought she was a man. But it was always jarring for me: One moment, a baritone. The next, Betty Boop.

As to the why of it all, I offered up my own overblown theories on homophobia, transphobia, fragile heterosexuality and toxic masculinity. I'm not sure any of it was valid, but at least I was finally getting some use out of my stupid psych major. But I also had another, simpler theory, based on my (admittedly statistically insignificant) discussions with men about why it was so upsetting.

The Surgery.

I am not revealing any state secrets when I say that men tended to be rather protective of their testicles. And while we all found it hilarious — don't ask me why — when we kicked each other in the nuts (believe me, it was always a real crowd-pleaser at the dojo) the idea of having them cut off, much less choosing to have them cut off was more than our male brains had the capacity to process.

But that was nothing compared to the unspeakable horror of parting — voluntarily or otherwise — with One-Eyed Jack, man's true best friend. Growing up, Jack was an endless source of fascination and entertainment. Boys would talk about him constantly, sing songs about him, recite limericks, draw pictures or simply drop their pants and point.

Look! I have a boner! (And we'd all look. Because, you know, he had a boner.)

I remember late night conversations at summer camp where the consensus was that we'd all rather die than live without Jack. Jack was integral to our identity, our raison d'etre, distilled masculinity in a sausage casing.

Which is not to say, as some claim, that we were his slaves, that Jack did our thinking for us. He simply made suggestions about what we should do and we — rational creatures that we were — would weigh the pros and cons and make an informed decision. Yes, we almost always did what Jack wanted, but that was only because he had such great ideas. Granted, they're usually the same ideas — Stick me in there. Rub me against that. Show me to that lady. — but that was fine, because Jack understood that the classics never go out of style.

All of which is to say that we were very attached to our penises. And we wanted to keep it that way. Although Tammy hadn't actually had the surgery at that point the very idea of it was an assault on everything they held dear, in the most literal sense. It also illustrated the profound depths of Tammy's convictions. Because every now and then, some guy would ask me if Tammy was really sure she wanted to be a woman. And my answer was always, "Think of it this way: Is there anything in your life that you are so sure about that you'd be willing to slice off Mr. Happy?"

(Technically, as Tammy pointed out, Mr. Happy isn't really "sliced off," but in fact "hollowed out" as part of the surgical process of becoming Ms. Happy. Which, I have to say, somehow sounds even worse.)

By contrast, when the women saw Tammy in feminine garb, they were not just supportive, they practically hoisted her on their shoulders and paraded her around the room. If I were to use a single word to describe the feeling it would be: Victory. To them, Tom turning gender defector in the war of the sexes was living proof that women were better than men. (Which, by the way, they were.)

But it didn't stop there. Tammy was showered with gifts — clothes, shoes, cosmetics — and invited to participate in Girls Night Out. There were also a number of women (let's say three) who vied for the opportunity to be Tammy's Official Guide to Womanhood, to make her over in their own image.

Tammy basked in all the attention, but she wasn't especially discerning in those early "out" days — and her mentors (womentors?) did not necessarily have the the best aesthetic sense and, also, they were all at least fifteen years younger than Tammy. This led to some unfortunate choices, for instance wearing six-inch Ferrari red fuck-me pumps to work. Not only had I once seen those exact shoes on an exotic dancer named Blaze, but Tamara had bitten off more heel than she could chew and took a pretty nasty fall in front of everybody. There were no injuries other than pride, thankfully, but I couldn't understand why she let them talk her into wearing this stuff in the first place.

But that, I came to understand, was not really what happened. She hadn't been talked into anything; she had been given license. Tammy had been so repressed for so long that the idea that she could wear anything she wanted, anything she fantasized about, was positively intoxicating. She had a sense of freedom that she had never before experienced. I liken it to my daughter Hannah's first birthday party. Up until then, she had never tasted refined sugar. Samantha and I reasoned that it would keep her from developing a craving for it, but it had the opposite effect. When we brought out her cake, she cautiously sampled the icing. Her eyes went wide and you could practically hear the crackling of the synapses in the pleasure center of her brain. Hannah looked at us accusingly: What kind of monsters are you to withhold this ambrosia from me for a whole year? — and then she dove into the cake, face-first, gulping down huge mouthfuls and smearing it on her face and in her hair.

It made for some good pictures.

What Tammy went through was the tacky, tarty, much too young and way too tight version of the same thing. It was understandable and, I suppose, necessary as well, to gorge for a while on all that delicious sugar.

But I don't want to pretend that it was all smooth sailing for Tammy. I was heartened by the response of Tammy's coworkers and friends, but upon reflection it shouldn't have been surprising. They weren't that close to Tammy, so her transition didn't dramatically impact them. It cost them nothing to be magnanimous. It was the people who knew Tammy intimately — or at least thought they did — that struggled the most. Whitney. Me. And especially Tammy's mother, Annie.

Annie was the last person Tammy wanted to tell, and was in fact the last person she did tell. Initially, Tammy procrastinated — with all she was dealing with, did she really need to add mom stress into the mix? — and by the time she had gotten up the courage to face her mom, Tammy got some news. Annie had multiple myeloma (cancer of the bone marrow). The doctors had caught it late and the prognosis was poor. A few months, max. It was horrible, but... it also meant that there was no longer any point in Tammy coming out to her mother. So, silver lining.

But then, to everybody's surprise, Annie went into remission. Which was fantastic, but... it also meant that Tammy would have to tell her after all.

Then there was another problem that Tammy had not foreseen. Tammy had wanted to fly to Pennsylvania so she could tell her mom in person, but the process of updating her I.D. to reflect her new name and gender was positively Kafkaesque and it was months before the whole thing got straightened out. So finally, on a three-day weekend, Tammy took the skies and headed to her childhood home.

It went about as badly as it possibly could have. For starters, Tammy decided to show up at her mother's doorstep dressed as a woman, which even at the time seemed to me a tactical mistake. But in Tammy's defense, by that time she was living as a woman full time and it felt wrong to go backwards. More important, she was now a woman on her driver's license which she'd have to show to the airline in order to board the plane and then again to the rental car agency, and possibly to a police officer if she was pulled over for some reason, which had already happened to her once in Los Angeles when she was a man presenting as a woman. (The cop looked at Tammy, then at the license, then back at Tammy, then back at the license, then back at Tammy, then back at the license...)

Who knew that the logistics of being transgender were so complicated?

Prior to the trip, Tammy told her sister Darcy — who still lived with Annie even though she was pushing fifty — about her transition. "You can't say anything to Mom. You have to keep it a secret. "

Darcy laughed. "You think I want to be the one to tell Mom that her precious baby boy is now her precious baby girl? Fuck that noise! It'll probably kill her." A ray of sunshine, that one.

When Tammy arrived and Annie opened the door, she didn't even recognize her. "Can I help you?"

"It's me, Mom," Tammy said. And then — Tammy swears this really happened — Annie fainted, hitting her head on the tile floor.

Darcy rushed over. "Jesus fucking Christ! You did kill her!" And for the next few horrifying moments in which Annie didn't move, Tammy thought so, too.

On the upside, after she was whisked to the hospital by ambulance and subjected to a battery of very expensive tests, the doctors concluded that she had not sustained a serious brain injury. But as a precaution, they wanted to keep her overnight for observation.

On the downside, Annie did not accept her new daughter.

At all.

Annie refused to acknowledge Tammy as a woman. And when anyone on the hospital staff came into the room and said, "Are these your beautiful daughters?" referring to Tammy and (ironically, I would guess) Darcy, Annie would be quick to say, "I only have one daughter."

"She's still a little disoriented from the fall," Tammy would say.

For hours, Tammy did her best to reason with her mother, but she wouldn't listen."You're my precious baby boy," she insisted, "and you're always going to be my precious baby boy." To Annie, the whole idea of transgender was completely preposterous. "You can't just up and decide one day to be a girl. That's not how things work."

"It is for me," Tammy said.

"I just thank God," Annie said, "that your father didn't live to see this." An ice pick to her heart. Then Annie turned away and shut her eyes, and went to sleep. Or maybe pretended to.

When Tammy and Darcy left the room, Tammy was devastated. Darcy, though, was in high spirits. "Looks like I'm finally the favorite."

Tammy returned to Los Angeles despondent. She knew that coming out to Annie wasn't going to be easy, but she never imagined this. "She'll never accept me." I understood why she would think that — she had taken a brutal hit — but I was uncharacteristically optimistic that things would eventually work themselves out.

I believed that because I had recently witnessed something similar on Samantha's side of the family when Cousin Joni came out as a lesbian (or "lasagna" as my father-in-law Vic referred to them). The younger generations were unfazed, accepting her without a moment's hesitation. On the other hand the older generation was shocked, which I found pretty hilarious because outside of Gia, The World's Loudest Lesbian, I had never met anyone more stereotypically sapphic than Joni (she was a gym teacher, for God's sake, not to mention a huge fan of The Indigo Girls). And I promise you, you've never seen such hand-wringing in your life, especially among the more devout Catholics, which made it particularly bizarre when Joni's mother begged her daughter to a least try sex with a boy once. Or ideally, twice, since the first time is never that great.

"You might like it, honey," she said hopefully. "Please? For me?"

It was a weird thing for any mother to ask of her daughter, but it was even weirder in this case because in Catholicism sex out of wedlock was a mortal sin which would damn you to Hell for all eternity. But apparently still preferable to homosexuality.

Priorities!

Naturally, Joni wasn't on board with this particular plan. It was insulting and demeaning and also potentially awkward, approaching some random guy: Hey, listen, you have a penis, right? Great! Would you mind having sex with me a couple times so I can convince my dumb mother that I really am a lesbian?

Random guy: Sounds great!

Anyway, the family elders continued to agonize for a few more weeks. But finally, these good-hearted people made the only real choice they could make: They decided to embrace Joni's decision. It didn't necessarily go down easy, especially since Joni was dating a black woman at the time — yeah, that was a fun Thanksgiving — but the family did what families should do. They came together and welcomed the lasagna in their midst. And I suspect, had she not broken up with Joni, they would have found a way to be OK with the black woman, too.

I felt confident that Annie would also come around in her own time. Which, by the way, she did. It took a while, and she never referenced, much less apologized for the hurtful things she said to Tammy. But Annie slowly waded into her new daughter's waters and made peace with the new normal. Because just like Joni's mom, Annie discovered that she simply couldn't unlove her child.

In theory, that was the last big hurdle in Tammy's journey. But as we were about to find out, there was another one lurking on the horizon. And this one threatened to destroy everything.