2. Secret withheld

A yellow-framed photograph of Marilyn Monroe was one of Luke’s favorite possessions when he was a boy. He carried it around with him everywhere he went.

He was also fascinated by majorettes, and fancied taking baton and dance classes some day.

Tossing in bed with insomnia, he became preoccupied with the idea of escaping his male body until he eventually dissociated from it and fell into a dysphoric malaise.

But Luke’s difficulties may have begun years earlier, prior to birth.

After their son was born, Giana Eden, a free-spirited potter, and John Eden, a social studies teacher, learned that a second placenta was discovered during delivery. It was possible, they were told, that Luke may have been a twin in utero, but the embryos had coalesced into one during the early stages of development. Today some scientists believe the merging of male and female zygotes in utero may result in homosexuality and transgenderism. It is a theory that Lucy embraces.

In any case, Luke came home to a nurturing environment in Eugene, Oregon, the first of John and Giana’s two children together. When John’s father died of a heart attack in South Georgia three years later, the family uprooted to Jesup, a flyspeck town between Savannah and Brunswick, to live with John’s mother.

A free-thinking family, they eschewed church on Sundays for studying Buddhist teachings and meditating on the front porch. Luke grew up feeling like an interloper in the community. Once at a friend’s birthday party, a man led a prayer circle to save Luke’s soul.

Giana wasn’t concerned that her creative, headstrong little boy was best friends with girls, enjoyed pushing Cabbage Patch Kids around in baby carriages and wore colorful clothes and funny hats.

But by grade school, Luke realized he’d either assimilate or be bullied. He learned to lower the pitch of his voice and avoid a feminine gait, and he mimicked what the other guys did, cracking rude jokes. He befriended two football players and formed an alliance they called The Manly Triumvirate. To deflect negative attention, he bullied others. One year a girl from England was in Luke’s class, and he shouted in her face, goading her to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

As convincing as Luke may have been to others, his feminine tendencies continued to stir a mixture of confusion and sadness in private. He envisioned himself a knight in armor protecting the princess inside, but often he thought, There’s just something wrong with me.

Luke was a fixture in gifted classes, but he had a subversive side, too. One time, he inserted a name of someone who didn’t exist into the school yearbook.

He wasn’t “like typical high-achieving exemplars,” said longtime friend Emily Strickland, also a transwoman. He “relished defiance and liked being a bit of a misfit.”

After high school, Luke went to Georgia Tech, where he studied computer science for a year and hated it, before transferring to Columbus State University and graduating with a degree in English.

Along the way he learned to juggle, growing fascinated by the technical, physical artistry of it.

Luke aspired to be a great memoir writer but realized he hadn’t lived a life worth writing about yet. Feeling confused and lost, he covered high school sports for Jesup’s newspaper for a while, but then quit and headed to Athens where he got a job at a restaurant and found a girlfriend.

He started taking a series of clowning workshops and performed a few times with a troupe called Sacred Pudding Society. In one show, the whole cast dressed up as princesses. In high heels and a dress, in front of an audience, Luke felt ebullient — ironic, considering he’d spent his life ducking attention. But beneath clown get-ups and dresses he realized how capricious human identities are, how clothes and face paint have the power to instantly transform.

Something about being a clown afforded Luke a sense of security. Suddenly gender was irrelevant. No one typically sees a clown and thinks “man” or “woman”; they see only “clown.”

A breakup with his girlfriend left Luke devastated, and he found solace in his newfound skill. Juggling requires absolute focus, and it helped him escape his own head. He became obsessed. Within a year, he could juggle five balls — a technical feat.

4. Risking everything

I need to get out of Atlanta, Luke thought.

Luke moved to Asheville in late 2015. He worried his career would suffer, but he shouldn’t have. Clients in Atlanta were so fond of him, they happily paid travel expenses to bring him back for performances. Luke suspected the stress of living in a big city was fueling his depression, but among the slower paced life and sweeping mountain vistas of Asheville, his issues only worsened.

Luke began slipping into sad, dissociative states during the day. Each mirror was a reminder he didn’t like himself — that there were incongruities between the life he had and the one he wanted. Increasingly, the only option for escaping the dissatisfaction and cognitive dissonance seemed like suicide.

It took a loving push from a close friend to get Luke to admit his true dilemma.

That turning point came when Lexi Galbreath — a transgender woman and former roommate whom Luke idolized — sat him down for what they now refer to as “the intervention.”

Are you trans? she asked point-blank.

Something inside Luke crumbled. He began to weep.

Someone finally saw his true self. And for the first time he voiced what he’d felt all his life: Living as a man was a farce. He was a woman.

They talked for a long time, then Lexi said: I don’t think I can call you Luke anymore. Can I call you Lucy?

Luke agreed.

Later he would recall that had been his grandmother’s middle name.

* * *

It’s one thing to declare oneself female and another to present it in public.

By the spring of 2016, Luke had come out to a couple of Asheville friends. Then he paid a visit to Jesup to tell his parents. He fought back nerves before telling his folks the news. They were surprised but supportive.

Oh! I knew I got this for a reason, his mother said before handing him a rainbow-colored, inflatable ball and wrapping her child in a hug.

Luke made “Lucy” official on Facebook and received a cascade of “likes.” He gave away his male clothes and started a fresh thrift-store wardrobe of skirts, dresses and frilly tops.

His first public outing dressed as a woman came one evening when he ventured down the streets of Asheville in a purple lace dress with a group of friends to a gay-friendly bar called The Crow & Quill. To his surprise, the first few steps in public felt like a sigh of relief; he wasn’t trying to be female so much as not straining to be convincingly male anymore. Inside the bar, that relief became euphoria. There were no guffaws. No whispers. No sneers. Everyone just treated him normally, and for a moment he was happy.

But Luke’s depression didn’t really begin to dissipate until he started taking hormones that summer — first via arm patch and then pills that dissolve under the tongue. Allergic to alcohol and paranoid of needles, he was nervous about introducing chemicals, including anti-androgens to block testosterone, into his system and undergoing the consistent, requisite bloodwork. But the emotional lift was worth it.

After Donald Trump was elected president in November, Luke grew worried that LGBTQ rights would be rolled back, so he made a rash decision that he knew could impact his burgeoning career. He would move back to his birthplace, Oregon. Legally changing his gender would be faster, cheaper and simpler there than in North Carolina or Georgia, where lengthy background checks and fees are required. He feared being “stuck” in the South, unable to fully become Lucy.

In Portland Luke was issued documents legally changing his name to Lucy and his gender to female, which she then used to obtain a new passport and Social Security card.

Unfortunately, Portland’s job prospects for circus performers were slim. She felt pulled back to Atlanta, although she wasn’t sure a transgender act would fly in the conservative South.

6. Into the light

Like the scent of patchouli, there was an early nip in the air as Lucy lined up for the LEAF parade in Asheville one Saturday afternoon in August.

Surrounded by Art Deco high-rises and hazy mountains in the distance, Lucy — dressed in a black romper, her face painted in a white heart with sparkling red lips — joined Melissa and a motley cast of misfits. There was a bearded unicyclist, a pink-haired stilt-walker, a giant owl made of bamboo sticks, a rhinoceros of paper-mache, and Toybox the Clown. The Asheville Second Line band began its thumping, Mardi Gras march, and the parade officially launched.

A few steps behind the grand marshal, Melissa acted the classic jester brandishing a black-and-white parasol while Lucy juggled three purple pins, hardly missing a marching beat. The day would yield for them little more than stipends for food and maybe gas money, but it was clear they got a lot of joy from the experience. Talk of dysphoria and nightmares couldn’t have seemed more like an afterthought for Lucy, who looked giddy and electrified among the cheering, whooping crowd.

When she speaks about her transition, Lucy describes it as a process of ushering dreams into the sunshine, of being free and unafraid, so it was fitting that only faint swabs of clouds dabbed the sky.

As the parade snaked into a park, down into the shadow of Asheville City Hall, Lucy launched a pin above her head then extended her leg and caught it behind her kneecap. A father leaned down to his son and said, “That’s unbelievable!”

“Yep,” said the boy.