“I had a boyfriend and ended up liking a girl for the first time, even though I wasn’t supposed to. The thing that made it more complicated was that I hadn’t always been a girl myself—I was raised as a boy then changed genders eight years before—and struggled with my attraction to other girls. And all this liking and falling, this aime-ing and tombe-ing, it was happening fast in French, a language I spoke at a third of the speed and ease of English.”