If you know Gwendolyn Herzig’s name, it’s probably for a really awful reason. A reason she’d rather forget. But before we get into one of the worst moments of Herzig’s life, let me back up and explain who she is.

Herzig is a trans woman, also a pharmacist. She lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. And like a lot of queer people, she got in her car and drove to her state capitol this year to offer testimony. She was testifying against a bill known as S.B. 199. This bill extends malpractice rules, allowing trans kids who regret their transition to sue their medical providers decades after receiving treatment. Practically, it’s a way to narrow the pathway to gender-affirming care. She was the first member of the public to speak at this hearing.

Herzig tries to be funny and human. She talks about how she’s still married to her high school sweetheart and has two daughters. She says they’re both “rotten”—a joke to lighten the mood, but it doesn’t work. Then she gets to the point. “In my practice, I have not experienced a single instance of a patient regretting their transition or starting puberty-blocking medication,” Herzig said in her testimony.

Her main argument is: I’m a medical professional, I treat trans people all the time. Let me tell you what that’s really like. And then, she takes questions, which is when a state rep gets very personal with her. “You said that you’re a trans woman. Do you have a penis?” he asked

This is why you might know Gwen Herzig’s name, or at least her story. Because she’s the trans person who got asked about her genitalia in the middle of the Arkansas General Assembly. Immediately, this exchange started pinging around the internet. At the time, all Herzig knew was how horrified she was.

“What went through my head was two things: either answer the question or don’t answer the question,” she said. “I’m generally pretty open about my health care history because I use it for educational purposes to talk about what resources and what surgical procedures are out there. I’ve had a vaginoplasty. I don’t generally mind talking about that. I’ve had great surgical results. I love my surgeon. But that being said, he was trying to force me to answer that question because he wanted me to relate to trans youth. And that’s just not appropriate because trans youth don’t just readily go out and get bottom surgery or any gender-affirming surgery.”

I wanted to talk to Herzig now because this month—Pride Month—I’ve been thinking about all the people just like her, all over the country, who have been trying to make themselves heard. All year long, I’ve seen these snippets from their lives float across my timeline. There are parents of queer kids, kids themselves, a drag queen who quoted the Bible, even a game show champ. All of these people were given just a few moments to convince lawmakers to see them. Hear them. I wanted to ask: Was it all worth it?

“For me to go in there and only have two minutes to talk about my life story, my feelings, it’s just not enough,” Herzig told me. On Thursday’s episode of What Next, I gave Gwen Herzig the time she deserves. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: Can we tell your personal story a little bit? You transitioned only in the last few years, right? How did you come to that decision?

Gwendolyn Herzig: I had an idea something was wrong at 12. It’s not right when a kid’s going to bed wishing they would wake up as a girl every night. I’m not joking. Every birthday wish, every shooting star, there’s always been that one singular wish. There’s destructive and constructive coping mechanisms. For me, it was constructive. A lot of it was goal setting. So to keep my mind off of it, I just set a goal, went after it, and it worked. It worked for a long time. It was graduating high school and doing all the things I did there. It was then going to college and graduating university with honors, going to pharmacy school, having a family with my wife, with our first daughter, Autumn, and then after that, buying a pharmacy, having a second kiddo, Evie.

You like projects.

Right. And it was always a bigger, more loftier project. But eventually that hole just got so big where there was nothing I could do to fill it adequately.

And so at 30, I hit a wall, and I’m like, “I have to do something.” I actually even made a therapist appointment to try to talk about it and see if I could put it off as a midlife crisis. But they were like, “People don’t want to change their gender with a midlife crisis. They want to buy a car.” So, it took some self-reflection. I knew what needed to be done, but it’s really hard because you feel like you’re going to lose everything.

What did you worry you might lose? What was your biggest fear?

My family, my career, my life.

That’s a lot.

Right! It’s everything to me. My kids and my wife are everything. And the fact that I could potentially lose them was horrifying.

You started taking hormones kind of on the sly for a couple of weeks before you even talked to your wife. You describe telling your wife about it a couple of weeks later. Can you take me back to that moment? What was that like?

It was horrifying. I tried to get it out all day—that morning, at lunchtime, at dinnertime. My wife knew something was wrong, and so we got in a hot tub. And I’m like, “I’m not getting out of this hot tub until I tell her.” It took some liquid courage, probably not the best, but I finally got it out. But the issue was there’s really no putting that back.

And did you guys have a little baby at the time?

We had, Evie, our youngest, who was probably 1 at the time, or about to turn 1.

Wow. So there’s just a lot happening in your lives.

There was. It was a lot to go through. Over the next couple of weeks, it was a lot of taking it slow, explaining. I had a therapist. She got a therapist. That way she could really talk through her feelings. But, after about three to six months, we were on the same page about everything. And like, here we are. Our story is happier than most. We are happily married for over 10 years. We have two beautiful kids. A lot of people try to define our sexuality and stuff like that. But I feel like love goes beyond that.

In the ideal world, yeah.

Yeah. I know how my wife wants her coffee. I know what little things make her happy and take care of her. I know the things to do to make sure she’s taken care of before she even does it.

How did you come out at work? Because you’re the boss at work. You own your pharmacy, right?

Yes, for sure. I went stealth for three to four months, just to make sure of everything that was going on. I wanted to make sure my support system pillars were in place. And that is my family, my brother, my wife. All that was steady.

Did that mean you were going to work with your old identity?

Yeah, I did some things, though. I had glow-in-the-dark nail polish. That was pretty incognito. And then also my hair was starting to grow out longer and stuff like that. There were some signs.

She played it coy for a few weeks. All that time, she was trying to figure out how her employees—and her customers—might respond once she came out. She’d seed little conversations about the culture war, probing for people’s true beliefs.

Oh, I’m very sneaky. I like to play devil’s advocate, so I would bring it up like, “Oh, do you hear about these people that are transitioning, like these ‘transgenderers’ people? I don’t know how I feel about that.” It’s just sparking the conversation, seeing people’s thoughts on it. And someone corrected me, which I’m like, “Thank you, thank you for correcting me.”

That’s so interesting. You were baiting them.

I was.

So, when did you feel safe expressing your true self at work?

When I bought my pharmacy, my pharmacy was very much a country club mentality, a majority conservative based population. That’s what’s in Arkansas and that’s what the pharmacy was servicing at the time. So, it would have been really unrealistic of me to be like, “OK, well, we’re going to do all this and we’re just going to hope for the best.” I would have lost my whole patient population before I gained enough trust with the LGBTQ community to have them start using my pharmacy. My pharmacy would just have went under, plain and simple.

So, I started implementing small programs throughout my first two years. Like, we’ll start doing HRT. We’ll start showing up for Pride. We’ll start putting up small Pride flags everywhere. So, it was more of a slow transition of patients. And now we’re to the point where I can be out, proud, and make sure my community is taken care of.

Were you able to carry that conservative base of customers along with you by going slow, being honest about who you are?

I think I changed a lot of minds, honestly. It was refreshing to see. Don’t get me wrong, I lost plenty of patients, but there was a lot of people where I was really surprised.

Who surprised you the most? Is there one patient who you thought you might lose, but then you didn’t?

Oh, he’s a preacher man. I thought once he found out, “Oh, I’m definitely losing that man.” And no, he came up to me, and he was like, “Hey, I didn’t know.” I thought I was really going to lose him, but no, he was actually very open and like, “I’m just so happy that you can live your life,” and he still uses the pharmacy to this day.

Your pharmacy’s unique in the work it does. Can you explain your approach to caring for trans patients, but also people looking for reproductive health care? Like, what are some of the changes you’ve implemented?

Yeah. So, reproductive health care, especially after Roe v. Wade, Plan B’s at cost. We sell Plan B for what we buy it for.

The morning-after pill.

Yeah, it shouldn’t be $30 to $40 to go buy it A lot of pharmacies will mark it up because they’re like, “Well, if you need it, you need it.” I’m like, “No, if you need it, you need it.” We also still carry misoprostol because there are missed abortions out there, miscarriages. A lot of pharmacies just want to keep it off their shelf. And I’m like, “That’s not appropriate.”

As for what the pharmacy does for taking care of the transgender community and LGBTQ community: We provide all resources, whether you want to start HRT and you want to know your providers and their wait times, we know it. Whether you want to get your name changed and you want to talk about getting your gender changed on your birth certificate, let’s talk about it. You want to talk about gender-affirming surgery? Yeah, let’s get you pointed in the right direction. And so, we really try to make sure there are no roadblocks for our patient base.

That’s way beyond just, like, getting some pills from the back for you.

For sure. And also, HRT, or hormone replacement therapy, is always seen as a luxury drug. These are lifelong drugs that these patients are going to be on, and it’s not fair to be charging them a pretty penny for it.

So, how much does it cost to get hormones down the block at a different pharmacy versus yours?

I had someone yesterday where Walgreen’s was trying to charge $130 for a bottle of AndroGel 1.62%. We charge anywhere from $25 to $35 for that bottle, and that’s really only $6 of profit above our cost. It was actually at cost—we did at-cost HRT for almost two years. But the problem is when the majority of your patient base is the transgender community, I’m like, “OK, guys, I have to make a little to make sure we’re even still here.”

In your testimony, you invited lawmakers to come to your pharmacy. Did anyone take you up on that?

No. I wish they would have. LGBTQ individuals, these are just normal people coming in for prescriptions, trying to have normal lives with normal families. And you’re just trying to make it so much more difficult for them to live their lives in peace. I’m like, “What does it matter to you that someone’s on testosterone or estrogen?” I wish someone would have took me up because it would have been insightful.

I know that in the aftermath of your testimony, your business got a lot of attention and some of it was really negative. What did that look like?

We got three good responses for every one negative response, but my staff didn’t ask to be harassed. We’re still just taking care of kids’ antibiotics. We’re still taking care of people’s birth control and high blood pressure medication. Please don’t call my staff and harass them when they’re just trying to do their jobs, because they didn’t go up to the legislature and ask for that.

I’m wondering if there’s one story of positive feedback that sticks with you.

We got a ton of cards. We got a ton of gifts. We got a ton of flowers, and I’m a sucker for some flowers. One card that really stood out to me, it was like, “You saved my life. You being out there gave me the courage to transition.” It’s stuff like that.

Given the way laws have been changing in Arkansas, has it changed what you do as a health care provider? Have you had to change who you’re treating and how?

No, actually, it just makes me push harder. I do a lot more education. I’ve really switched gears, just trying to educate pre-professionals and professionals—and just the general public. I feel like maybe I can dispel a lot of the stigma that’s surrounding the transgender community if I can just educate. Let’s talk about HRT, what it really does and what it really doesn’t do. Let’s talk about the cost of puberty, the cost of not starting puberty suppression on those individuals.

Do you see your role as to push back on that and say, “Hey, there are costs to not providing the care, too”?

Yes. And that’s exactly what I talk about in a lot of my education. It costs financially, it costs physically, it costs mentally. It’s just very costly. And it’s not fair to put that cost on that individual later on in life and just say, “Hey, do your best to cope right now. It sucks to be you.”

Would you testify at the statehouse again?

I probably would.

How would you prepare next time?

I think I would be a little bit more defensive. I’d be ready, I guess. I don’t know. Or I’d want to go in with the same mentality as I did last time: just hoping for the best but this time probably expecting the worst.

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We haven’t really talked about your kids so much, but I’m wondering if we can. Because you’ve got two daughters. They’ve watched you go through everything you’ve gone through in the last year. And before. Do they have questions about any of it?

Uh, not really. They’re kind of cool. Kids adapt, especially my kids. They’re so much fun and a headache at the exact same time. If you have kids, you understand.

Oh, I understand.

But that being said, Autumn remembers a semblance of me pre-transition. And so, if anyone ever asks, she’s like, “Well, she was my daddy, but now she’s my deedee.” That was the name we went with. But it’s not even an issue now. She just says she has two mommies. And that’s great.