As a trans person, I hated being misgendered. When a stranger accurately called me a man for the first time, it changed everything for me.

• When I started transitioning, I wore men's clothing, but people still misgendered me.
• When a store clerk called me a man, it helped ease my feelings of frustration and invisibility.

Before I started taking hormones, I socially transitioned — that is, I cut my hair short, began wearing men's clothes, and bought a pair of more-masculine glasses. Doing this was supposed to help me feel more like myself. But ironically, my first forays into the world of male gender expression made me feel more invisible, instead of less.

I wore blue dress shirts, suspenders, dress pants, and men's work boots, but I was still read as a woman whenever I walked into a restaurant or store. It was incredibly frustrating to constantly hear variations of, "How you doing, ma'am?" when I thought it was obvious I wasn't a "ma'am."

That all changed when I went to Marshalls one day to buy some more men's shirts. After grabbing as many button-down shirts and men's pants as I was allowed to try on, I went to the fitting rooms.

The clerk didn't realize what an influence she was about to have on my life

This store had one fitting area, with the men's fitting booths to the right and the women's to the left. A clerk was sitting at a desk directing traffic and holding on to returned items. She looked up as I approached and told me, "Men's room is to the right."

It's hard to describe the effect those words had on me. For the first time in my life, someone recognized me as the man I was. I didn't have to debate over whether to correct somebody or let it go, nor did I have to seethe in silence or drive my friends up the wall ranting about how I'd been misgendered again. Someone saw me — not the person that society had conditioned them to believe that I was but the person I really was.

This experience of being seen had such a profound influence on me that I still remember it over a decade later.

Being seen changed my feelings about being misgendered and gave me hope

Until that experience, I always had an extreme reaction to being misgendered. It happened all the time, and it never failed to upset me.

It also exhausted me. Whenever I went out in public, it triggered a battle within me. I had to decide every time it happened — sometimes multiple times during the same day — whether to speak up or remain silent. Neither choice felt good. Even if I asked someone to call me "sir," it didn't give me the visibility I craved; it just made things awkward. It wasn't as if they'd seen me. They were just trying to be polite and refer to me the way I asked.

But after my interaction with the clerk, it didn't matter to me as much if everyone saw me for who I was. The cashier misgendered me when I bought the clothes, and it didn't faze me because someone else had seen me, and that's what counted.

Being seen for the first time gave me hope. I'd lived in the world as the woman I wasn't for 33 years, and when I finally decided to be myself, it was painful to realize that people didn't automatically see me that way. The more I got misgendered, the more convinced I became that I would never be seen as the man I was. That left me feeling depressed, angry, and hopeless.

That all changed, thanks to that clerk gendering me correctly.

I realized I had more control over how I was seen than I thought

It wasn't an accident that someone had seen me — not entirely, anyway. That day, I had chosen to dress in a way that matched my gender identity better. I also decided to go into that store and shop for men's clothes, even though I hated being in public because I was so often misgendered.

These were small choices but courageous ones, and I had to keep making decisions like that if I wanted to experience visibility. Eventually, that grew into deciding to come out to my family and friends, get on hormones, and share my experience with others.

It all started because one person saw me for who I was. That simple act of being seen gave me the strength, courage, and optimism I needed to keep going and make all the other choices that allow me to live a happy, productive life to this day.