Just a Person, Talking

What I learned from Maeve DuVally about the transgender community

This is an essay about a transgender woman I met named Maeve DuVally.

I wanted to meet her and try – however clumsily – to understand what it feels like to be her. And then maybe write about it, not in a way that “explains” her (as if she were a riddle or a reportable event) but in a way that honors the strange, tender act of two people trying to reach across a gap and actually hear each other. Because most of what I hear about trans people comes through a kind of national foghorn – Joe Rogan opining on cage fights, or cable news roundtables declaring that the Democrats lost Wisconsin because they couldn’t stop talking about bathrooms.

And meanwhile, there are people – actual people, with coffee orders and favorite songs and longings they don’t quite have language for – who are just trying to live without being constantly turned into metaphors or warnings or examples. So I reached out to Maeve. Because it seemed like the decent thing to do. Also because I was curious. And maybe because I wanted to be proven wrong about the story I’d been told – that this topic was too complicated, too radioactive, too loaded to approach with anything other than outrage or silence. Turns out it’s neither. Turns out it’s just a person, talking.

I remember when Maeve made a kind of corporate splash at Goldman, back when we were both there – me in the Dallas office, which, if you don’t know it, was basically this weird sociological terrarium full of guys named Blake or Mason or Taylor who wore monogrammed polos to brunch and had very strong opinions about brisket and golf. A lot of them had that Dallas-by-way-of-SMU pedigree – blessed from birth with good teeth, bad depth, and an end goal in life of being admired at frat reunions and if things really broke their way, owning a second jet ski they could refer to as “the little one”.

Anyway, Maeve was in New York. And she transitioned. Not in some quiet, HR-approved, beige-memo kind of way, but publicly. Visibly. She was a senior executive. And to Goldman’s credit, they didn’t bury it. They put her on the internal homepage. They named the thing. Said it out loud. Got her the care she needed. Celebrated her courage without doing that corporate thing where they pretend to celebrate you and then quietly banish you to a satellite office in Jersey City with no windows and a vague title like “Strategic Content Alignment Lead.”

And I remember – I remember this vividly – one of the Dallas guys, this dude with perfect hair and a jawline you could teach geometry with, leaned over and kind of half-whispered, half-smirked: She wasn’t always a she, you know.

And the way he said it, it wasn’t cruel, exactly. It was more like the sound a kid makes when he finds out Santa isn’t real and wants to ruin it for everyone else. Like he thought he was sharing a secret, when really what he was doing was revealing a gap. In imagination. In empathy. In what it means to actually let people be who they are and look them in the eye when you talk to them instead of through them like they don’t exist.

Whatever the reason, a week ago I sent a desperate LinkedIn message to Maeve. I really wanted the chance to talk to her so I could write something meaningful instead of another tepid Substack post about “productivity hacks that changed my life” written by a man who’s never folded a fitted sheet or cried during a movie not involving a dog. It probably came across as a breathy, obsequious, maybe a little amusing; a plea that referenced an email exchange she and I once had which she could not have possibly remembered, and discussed why I wanted to be a writer. I wrote her almost a damn Substack essay in its own right, about why I thought talking to her could build a bridge, using words like “acceptance” and “courage” and she responds with only this:

“I’d be open to that. How would you like to proceed?”

A few days later, I was on Zoom asking her if she could hear me alright, and we were off to the races. I started by telling her why I wanted to talk to her. I said I was in the Army and got out and ironically landed at Goldman as a “diversity” hire in their veterans’ onboarding program. I said that being a tall, white, straight man who went from being an Army officer to Goldman Sachs – not because I was bright but because America rolls out the red carpet for veterans – gave me the unearned respect from people who will usually take my calls or ask for my opinion.

It gave me this low-grade imposter syndrome after I left Goldman, the kind that hums in the background like a fridge. Because anyone paying attention could see I wasn’t the best financial modeler – God help me, especially not when the screen share started and all those little colored cells started squirming like ants – and yet somehow I had this weird, unearned deference. People listened to me in meetings. Nodded at things I wasn’t entirely sure I understood myself. Meanwhile, folks way sharper than me – quieter, more deserving – were just kind of hovering on mute.

And I told her: at some point I stopped being embarrassed about that. Or maybe I just got tired of being embarrassed. And I thought, okay, if I’ve got this accidental megaphone, maybe I use it to make someone else louder. Maybe I jump in when someone’s being talked over for the third time. Maybe I say, “Hey, sorry, I think she was still talking.” And maybe that’s the gig. If I’m not great at the job-job, maybe the job is this – making space. Handing the mic over. Being a decent human being in a place where decency tends to get edged out by quarterly results and people who say “value-add” with a straight face.

I told her a little about how my son had autism and was unable to speak, and how it felt when he desperately wanted to tell me something, and the look on his face said why can’t anyone understand me? And how the experience of being his father made me instinctively want to amplify the voices of people not being heard. That’s why I wrote about the Uyghur genocide in China, because –

“I read it”, she says.

I’m stunned.

“Wow, thank you so much for doing that”, I say.

I regain my footing from her errant kindness, and told her how I struggled with depression, and how my writing journey began when my therapist told me I needed to find a hobby, because I didn’t have any other than working and bickering. I told her she was the first trans person I’d ever met, and that didn’t think people understood it very well. And if it was okay, I wanted to, I guess, you know, ask her some questions about her life.

And after that, she seemed unshielded – like the forcefield of guarded professionalism flickered for a second, and we were just two people, mutually startled by how much tenderness can live inside a really awkward question.

I’d spent 10 years in Texas, where “trans issues” were mostly assumed to involve a Chevy Silverado and a bad mechanic. And I believed at the time, and still believe, that people don’t really understand what it is.

So I asked her the question. The Big Earnest One. The kind that makes you feel like an idiot even as you're asking it, like you’ve walked into a cathedral and shouted, “Where do you keep the snacks?”

I said, “How would you define what it means to be transgender?”

She paused. Looked offscreen, maybe at a window. Then she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that question, believe it or not.”

And that – that was the moment. That was when everything tilted just a little.

Because, really? No one had asked? After all the speeches, the press, the memoir? It struck me as both tragic and completely typical. How many people in this world have spent their lives explaining themselves without ever being asked?

She didn’t launch into theory or politics or statistics. She said, very quietly: “First of all, I always didn’t like myself. As a matter of fact, I hated myself for most of my life. I wasn’t really sure why…but I never really liked anything.”

She talked about alcoholism. About using it to keep the real her submerged. She said she didn’t know she felt more like a woman from a young age like some do. It was a generalized self-hatred that she drowned in booze, so she wouldn’t have to come up to the surface and confront who she really was.

Then, in 2018, she sobered up and had an epiphany.

“I realized a truth about myself,” she said, “that I had always wanted to be a woman.” Like it had been there the whole time, behind the curtain, waiting for her to stop trying not to see it.

Then she redirected the lens back to me, to us, to everyone. “I tell cisgender people that I think self-discovery and self-actualization is kind of the center of the experience. And it’s true for everybody.”

It wasn’t defensive. It wasn’t even really about being trans, in the end. It was about the basic human project: trying to be okay in your own skin. And the space between us – the usual gunk of assumptions and language and online nonsense – just…cleared out. There was a warmth now that didn’t exist a minute ago. As if she was relieved someone had opened a door instead of demanding she walk through one already built.

So I told her – kind of offhandedly but also kind of with the quiet urgency of someone who’s maybe trying a little too hard to seem like he’s not trying too hard – that my audience is mostly young white guys. And not in a demographic-chart sense but in that “these are the guys who talk to me about stoicism and deadlifts and whether it’s okay to still like Louis C.K.” kind of way. And I said I wanted her to tell them – them being this slightly adrift but ultimately decent cohort – what most people get wrong about the trans community.

And as soon as I said it, she sort of locked in. Like the way a really good therapist locks in when you accidentally say something real. There was this tiny pause. Not hesitant, not wary, more like recognition – and I knew that she got the subtext without my needing to annotate it with 3-5 emotionally clumsy clarifiers: Build a bridge with me, Maeve. Help me reach them. Help them see.

Because the truth is most of them – us – aren’t willfully ignorant. They’re just downstream of a culture where “trans” gets deployed like a rhetorical speedbump – something podcasters toss out with a sigh, as if the entire category of existence is an inconvenience, a kind of conceptual clutter that distracted the Democrats from winning Michigan.

But if they could be here – if they could sit in this pixelated little Zoom square like I am now, and hear her voice – this soft, measured voice that carries the kind of weight you only recognize if you’ve ever had to live with a truth no one was ready to hear – they’d feel it. The steadiness. The grace. The unmistakable sense that this person has had to become fluent in herself in a way most of us never will. And they'd know: oh. This isn’t a distraction. This is the whole damn point.

Maeve nodded in that way people do when they’ve been asked the same question enough times that it’s not offensive anymore, just predictable, like a low-stakes pop quiz that still somehow determines your entire GPA. And then she said:

“Really the only thing that most transgender people are asking for is the basic human right of acceptance.”

Not tolerance. Not indulgence. Not applause. Just – acceptance. As in, the ability to walk through a revolving door without someone behind you muttering “Jesus Christ” under their breath. Or the freedom to exist without your identity being treated like some sort of controversial programming update that everyone has opinions about but no one actually understands the source code of.

“There might be some people who are asking for special treatment, but I'm certainly not. I just kind of want to be accepted and have the freedom to live my life and have the rights that everybody else has.”

Then she laid down what might be the most quietly incisive line of the whole conversation, and it had lodged in my ribs like a splinter.

“Accepting trans people doesn’t mean taking opportunity away from cisgendered people.”

Which is one of those statements that sounds, at first glance, so blindingly obvious it shouldn't have to be said at all – like saying "Allowing left-handed people to use scissors doesn’t mean right-handed people are going to lose access to cutting" – and yet here we are, in a culture where equity is somehow seen as a threat instead of a correction.

And then – God bless her – she detoured for a moment into something so calm and lucid and etymologically grounded that it felt like being offered a glass of cold water in a room that’s been on fire for hours:

“And by the way, the term ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ – Elon Musk got all crazy about it – but, you know, those are Latin terms. Cis means on this side and trans means on the other side. They’re used in chemistry. They’re used in medicine. They’re used in all sorts of places.”

This was, to me, the moment the interview sort of snapped into place – like the lens finally focused. Because what she was doing there wasn’t just linguistic housekeeping. It was a miniature moral parable: that the words themselves aren’t the problem. The meanings aren’t scary. What’s scary is the part of us that thinks we have to fight everything we don’t already recognize. The part of us that hears "trans" and flinches, not because it threatens us, but because it asks us to imagine a self beyond the one we were assigned and rehearsed for.

Right before we finished, she pointed out that she lives a comfortable life, and gets to do things most people don’t. Then she said “You acknowledged the advantages you had when we started. I want to acknowledge that, too. I’m white, and I have money. I have resources a lot of trans people don’t. I’ve had a relatively easier experience because of that.” She wasn’t apologizing, just naming it – like I had. It felt like a small act of solidarity. Two people holding up their Amex Platinum cards like flashlights, trying not to blind each other, but just to see the shape of the room more clearly.

Everything she said to me was delivered with a calm steadiness, like a battalion commander I had in the Army who never yelled but wielded a quiet authority. She wasn’t asking for pity. She wasn’t demanding I signal my virtue. She was just telling the truth. And it was so real yet so gently delivered, that it made me feel – briefly, painfully – like the entire internet was a tragic misunderstanding of how people actually talk to each other when they’re not trying to win.

Maybe the takeaway from all this is just a plea to shut the laptop, step away from the algorithm, mute the podcast where two guys named Chad and Brent argue about whether acknowledging trans people cost us the election, and actually talk to someone. In real life. Look them in the eye and ask them who they are. What they’ve carried. What they want you to know. Because when Maeve looked at me – not with bitterness, not with some theatrical moral high ground, but with that calm, lived-in certainty that only comes from having survived something – and said all she wanted was the basic human right of acceptance, it didn’t feel political, or ideological, or even especially complicated. It felt clear. Like a bell in a quiet room. And the truth is, it’s shockingly easy to admire someone when they’re telling you the truth and not asking for applause, just a little room to breathe. The love comes quicker than you think, once the fear gets out of the way.