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From The New York Times and WBU are Boston, this is Modern Love.

Stories of Love, Laws, and Redemption. I'm Lisa Mullins in For Manga Chakrabardi.

16 years ago, Jennifer Finney Boylan came out as transgender. The family she created with her wife and two young sons inevitably evolved as well. But not in the way you might think.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, the writer, academic, and activist, reads her own essay, Maddie Just Might Work After All.

In the last year of my father's life, he started the sleepwalk. I was 27 back in my parents' house to help with his care.

In the middle of the night, I'd hear his heavy footsteps coming up to the third floor, where I lived in a room locked with a deadbolt.

He'd creep through the hallway and open the door to the spare room, diagonally across the hall from mine, and lie down in the guest bed.

After a while, he'd start to snore, and I'd know he was okay, at least until morning, when he'd wake up, confused, and angry.

God damn it, he'd say. Where am I? What the hell am I doing here?

He didn't know I was transsexual, or if he did, he never said anything about it.

A daddy even knew the word transsexual, or transgender, unalmost surely could not have explained the difference between the two.

But that's okay. For a long time, I couldn't figure it all out either.

Once, though, when I was in high school, my father was clicking through channels on the TV and came upon the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

This is the scene where Frank and Furter is waltzing around in fishnet stockings, singing, well, you got caught with a flat. Well, how about that?

...