These are very emotional to me. I’m struggling to explain what it means to be trans, and then to be welcomed home. It’s just a welcoming. I feel warm, I feel welcomed by the women in my family. I transitioned after my mother passed. Neither one of my grandmothers, they had a different idea of maybe what I was or something, but they knew me, they knew Harper Steele, and I got to spend a lot of time around with ‘em. And I’m just happy to connect with my sister, especially. I love my father, of course, and I love my brothers. What a great change of life to be able to now be a part of this other side.
I have two girls, and my sister and I probably will be the ones who pass a lot of the granny and grandmother stuff down to those two girls. I have a nonbinary kid who is more trans-masc leaning, and I have a great collection of things that come from my own world when I was presenting as a guy and things from my father. I mean, our family was not a big collector of precious things that we passed along. I got my whole mother’s jewelry case, which I can tell you came out of a drugstore.
Looking down at my hands now, I see something that I didn’t allow myself to have for 59 years. My hands are different. They’re now attached to the right body. Everything is in its place. And so the jewelry is a reminder of, I like to say “home,” or I’m where I’m supposed to be.
I don’t necessarily think that all women accept me into sort of that matriarchy as a trans woman. And that doesn’t really bother me. I’m trans first and a woman second, in my mind. This is just my opinion. However, opening myself up and being vulnerable as a woman has opened me up to the female side of “S.N.L.,” of all my writing friends – love is a strong word, but love for Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, all these people who are my friends. But it opened up a more expansive sort of love for just the female side of my entire work life, and looking back at how much women helped me to get to where I am.
So all of it ties into the superpower of being a woman, and being vulnerable, or not afraid to be vulnerable. But there’s something very special about that to me because I didn’t allow myself to have that. And so these two things are reminding me that this is the world I live in now, and it’s a better world.
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