Zoe Dolan is no stranger to controversial topics. She’s a trial lawyer who has made her living defending, among others, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. But at the 2014 Chicago Ideas Week Edison Talks, she addressed a topic she had previously shied away from.

“I had sex reassignment surgery in Thailand,” she said on stage. “If you’re thinking about it, I can recommend a doctor. See me afterward.”

Zoe Dolan discussed “edges,” both personal and professional, at the 2014 Edison Talks.

To many, if not most, in the audience, this was a simple, direct statement, followed by an equally forthright offer to help. But the statement comes in the context of journalistic and societal standards that de-emphasize the role that surgery may play in gender transition. GLAAD instructs reporters to “avoid overemphasizing surgery when discussing transgender people or the process of transition.” A recent Washington Post blog post on “transgender etiquette 101” advises against inquiring into a person’s “pre-op or post-op” status: “If a transgender person wants to talk to you about such matters, let them bring it up.”

Dolan does want to talk about such matters. Emboldened by her experience at CIW, she started writing more about the topic on The Huffington Post. She titled her first post “Let’s Talk about Sex (Change),” leaning once again on a phrase that GLAAD counsels against. She calls her operation “life-saving,” and while her writing by no means evangelizes the surgery, she wants everyone—perhaps especially those considering the surgery themselves—to understand the “actual logistics and reality of the gender transition and what happens afterward.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to be myself without that surgery,” she stressed in a recent phone interview.

In her hands, her initial Huffington Post piece has developed into a multi-post, thoughtful study on identity politics that she’s titled “Being Transgender—Naked”. Where guidelines caution against asking questions, Dolan invites them. Recently she wrote, in a post that was itself a question (“Am I Transgender Anymore?”), “Considering the mercuriality of transgender terminology these days, who can blame anyone for asking what they want to know, beginning with what the terms mean?”

That type of openness has started a dialogue that, Dolan is pleased to report, has included both praise and criticism, with an ever “greater diversity of perspective.” Even more touching are the stories she’s received—an “e-mail from a mother of a four-year-old transgender girl who wrote to me at length about her daughter’s transition,” a heartfelt “response from a 74-year-old” and many more.

Since the Huffington Post, she’s participated in StyleLikeU’s “What’s Underneath,” a video series that asks participants to strip, both emotionally and physically. And she plans to open up the conversation to encompass ever more universal themes of identity. As hinted at in her online tagline—the clever and characteristically honest “Transgender Defender”—Dolan is interested in the interplay between personal identity and an individual’s day-to-day professional life.

“I believe that our personal experiences inform, and sometimes even control, our decisions and our actions as professional people,” she said. “At the end of the day, that’s the question that really interests me, more than just how my identity as a transgender person impacts me within society.”

Throughout this process of inquiry, she returns, again and again, to the responses she’s received as her project has unfolded. That e-mail from the 74-year-old carries a particular impact. It ends, simply: “Stay true to yourself, Zoe. I wish I had.”