Back in the days before Yale’s freshmen became “first-years,” one of my freshman advisees was a gay man who translated Tang Dynasty poetry; planned to learn Portuguese in order to read Clarice Lispector, his favorite author, in the original; and often got so caught up in books, assigned or unassigned, that he missed meals.

As a junior, while taking my advanced non-fiction writing class, my advisee began using they/them pronouns and announced a new name—or, rather, a new initial—on Facebook: “So I’ll be going by M, because inside the letter M is a boy & a woman, the two…