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Monahan and her wife, Shannon Lastowski Monahan, had just finished dinner. Their guests had all departed, leaving the couple alone at their log home well off the main road in the rural community of Wapiti, a village of a few hundred in northwest Wyoming. Colin had just finished installing a new, prefabricated garage on their property, painted in a shade of brown to complement the waving grasses of the surrounding valley.

Donning their masks and opening the door, the couple were greeted by five people standing on their porch, there to discuss a “neighborhood issue” — presumably, Colin thought, the garage.

It would have been a strange complaint. The couple had received permission to install it from the subdivision’s management, and the area’s lack of a homeowners’ association made concerns over aesthetics questionable at best. The iconic Smith Mansion — a twisting structure looming on a bluff overlooking Highway 14 — is visible from the couple’s porch, while the subdivisions surrounding them feature a broad mix of architectural styles that had sprouted amid a flood of new residents discovering the Wyoming countryside.

The garage, as it turned out, wasn’t the problem, the Casper Star-Tribune reported.

Looking over the group, the Monahans — a same-sex couple originally from the Chicago area — recognized a familiar face, a man who the couple said had previously harassed them on social media. Both Colin and Shannon, residents of the subdivision four years now, quickly came to realize that the conversation was never about a garage, and was never intended to be.

It was about Colin, who dresses masculine but, in her own words, could be seen as either male or female. She goes by “Colleen” as often as she does “Colin.”

“One of the women said to us, ‘Your kind is not welcome here. You are not welcome in Cody Country and you need to leave,’” Shannon recalled in an interview shortly after the October incident. “She told Colin, ‘You pretend to be a man, and you need to leave.’”

The incident sparked a conversation that reverberated through Wapiti and into the greater Park County community, including Cody, a popular tourist town of 10,000.