NEW YORK >> After years of focused preparation, Aiden Budd was well on his way to fulfilling his lifelong dream of becoming an officer in the New York Police Department. He had served in the U.S. Army and had worked for years as an agent in the department’s School Safety division. He studied for the exam to be promoted and he passed.

He was set to start at the Police Academy on July 7, 2015.

But first, there was something else he felt he had to accomplish. When he became a recruit, he wanted to be recognized officially as Aiden Budd, male police officer — settling, at least legally, a question of identity he had struggled with since he was a child.

He had grown up as a girl in the Wakefield neighborhood in the Bronx, the oldest of three children in a West Indian family. He could tell early on that something did not feel right. It went beyond being a tomboy, the one student in his all-girls Catholic high school who refused to wear a skirt, even though it meant detention almost every day. Even after he came out to his family as a lesbian in high school, he felt an overwhelming discontent that continued into adulthood, poisoning his personal relationships.

“I couldn’t find happiness with myself,” Budd, now 33, said. “There was something missing.”

He had to come out again. He was transgender, and about a year before he started at the academy, a time of exams and interviews and extensive digging into his background, he began his transition to physically becoming a man. “I’ll put it like this,” he said. “It was a rebirth.”

He knew his decision had the potential to jeopardize his relationship with his family, one that had been strained since he came out the first time. And as he followed his uncle, a father figure, into law enforcement, Budd feared that his identity would keep him from being accepted into the fraternity of police officers.

“I didn’t want to be judged before they got to know me as a person,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a science project.”

Still, he pushed ahead.

These days, the New York Police Department embraces “Out and Proud” as a motto. Officials boast of the hundreds of gay officers who help make up the department’s ranks. And inside Police Headquarters, on the monitors that serve as electronic bulletin boards with fliers for retirement parties and charity golf tournaments, among the rotating messages is one reminding officers of their rights to use the bathroom or locker room aligning with their gender identity.

The public support by police officials in New York has come at a time when the nation is grappling with transgender issues — when lawmakers in some states have pursued “bathroom bills” limiting restroom access for transgender people, but also when such legislation has met with fierce resistance. In June, the U.S. military lifted its ban on enlisting transgender people; Defense Secretary Ash Carter called the move the “right thing to do.”

In New York, activists said the progress had not erased the Police Department’s turbulent history with gay people, where tensions remain today. But police leaders described their institution as one that, with each new class of recruits, has increasingly reflected the city’s diversity. And it has made strides, they added, not only in hiring a more diverse group of officers but also in welcoming them into the fold.

“We look at the individual for who they are,” said Deputy Inspector Joseph Simonetti, commanding officer of the 6th Precinct, which covers Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan. “We’re all cops,” he said. “We’re all police officers.”

But officers coming to terms with their gender identity said they faced a dilemma. Those who delay making the transition while on the force face the corrosive toll of living what feels like a fraudulent life; those who do make it risk being rejected from the tight-knit fellowship of law enforcement that was also central to their identity.

Denise Dragos, who had been a detective in the Police Department investigating computer crimes, put off transitioning to female from male until after she retired two years ago. She worried how colleagues would react. “It was going to be difficult,” Dragos, 43, said. “Things are changing in leaps and bounds over the last several years, but even four or five years ago, it didn’t seem in the scope of possibility.”

Tcops International, or the Transgender Community of Police and Sheriffs, started in the late 1990s as a support group for a small network of officers to share their experiences online. For many of them, fears about coming out or transitioning were rooted in a harsh reality.

Among its members from around the United States, there are stories of co-workers responding awkwardly or with outright hostility. Transgender officers have said they have been referred to by the wrong gender or the wrong pronouns. They have lost their jobs or have seen careers that once seemed to be on an upward trajectory suddenly change course, their reputations appearing to vanish along with their old identities. And access to bathrooms and locker rooms has been a recurring issue.

But some have expressed optimism, believing that a broader cultural shift in the acceptance of transgender people was finding its way into policing. “Officers hired in the past five to 10 years have a better understanding of who we are,” said Julie Callahan, co-founder of Tcops International, who retired after 30 years as a police officer in San Jose, California.

“More and more people will understand that we’re not villains,” she said, noting that the exposure many veteran officers had to transgender people was limited to interactions on the job, negatively shading their impressions. “They see sex workers, they see drug abusers, they see people stealing to support their habit or to survive,” she added. “They translate their experiences with those people to all transgender people.”

As the academy approached, Budd said he was in a mad dash — changing his name and gender on official records and almost everywhere else that had his former identity on file.

He pulled it off: On July 7, he was Aiden Budd, male recruit. He fit in well and became the company sergeant, a position of leadership among fellow recruits. “They took to him pretty quick,” said Officer Ayesha Marty, an instructor in the academy. “They respected him.”

But in his push to transition, he made an ambitious move: Two weeks in, he scheduled his “top surgery,” a procedure in which breasts are removed and the chest is recontoured. He told fellow recruits he needed to have a growth removed.

After he returned, he pulled his company aside and told them he was transgender. “I thought it was important for them to know that part of myself,” he said. They responded positively and without much of a fuss, he said.

Budd has an easygoing manner with a broad smile. He looks young for 33, so much so that fellow officers have given him the nickname “Benjamin Button,” after the character who ages in reverse. His fiancee, Idalia Sumpter, said he was genuine and had a self-assurance that made people feel comfortable around him. But Budd’s transition has been transformative in more ways than physical, Sumpter said. He wasn’t always so confident. “He has come a long, long way,” she said, laughing.

His struggles with identity had been a source of pain and confusion. As a teenager, he was outed as a lesbian when his mother found notes from a high school crush. After high school, he enlisted in the Army as a woman, but that was in the era of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a policy that allowed gay and lesbian soldiers to serve, but not openly, and he said he was discharged after almost a year because of his sexual orientation. (After the policy was rescinded, he re-enlisted as a reservist, still as a woman.)

“I remember asking God a couple of times as a child why I wasn’t born a boy,” Budd said. “If he knew how I felt, why didn’t he just make it happen that way, to avoid all these issues with me liking women and me wanting to be in men’s apparel and doing boy things?”

“I never really got that answer as a kid,” he continued. “I kept those feelings to myself.”

His transition has not been without hurdles. Some family members had a hard time. His sister, with whom he is very close, looked at it at first as if she were losing a sister. His uncle, whom Budd considers his role model, did not attend his graduation.

But that unsettled feeling that had rankled for most of his life has faded. He has been surprised by the people who stuck by him, including his great-grandmother. He and Sumpter, who met while working as school safety agents, plan to marry next year. On Dec. 29, 2015, he graduated from the academy, accomplishing that lifelong goal. He aspires to someday make detective.

And in July, he said, he went on his first training exercise as an Army reservist since his transition, staying in the male barracks without issue.

Even as more women have joined the police force, many officers still talk of their profession as a brotherhood, and it is one that Budd wants to be part of. Anxieties over acceptance still linger as more of his colleagues learn of his background. “I think I’m only worried about not being man enough,” he said. “Once somebody finds out the truth, they may think, like, ‘Oh, this guy’s not really man enough — what does he know about being a man?’”

He added that he was learning that “a lot of it is my own fear.”

Since his graduation from the academy, Budd has been assigned to the 20th Precinct in Manhattan, spending most of his time on the streets of the Upper West Side. One officer heard a rumor that he was transgender and gently asked about it. Budd was certain others knew as well. But as he starts his career, his focus has been on building a good reputation, earning the trust of other officers.

“Like any other rookie, you want the guys to know you as a good cop,” he said. “Nothing else.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company