Having met on a Craig McDean shoot for Mission’s Youth Issue, Harper was keen to share her story with others on how she was forced to come out to her mother.
At the age of 16, I approached my mother’s room. I pushed the handle of the double doors down slowly and silently so as to give myself the opportunity to retreat from the battle that was about to ensue. I was about to ask my mother if she would let me get my hair cut short. And standing there, about to open those doors, I was reminded of the pain that began this way a little more than a year before: I’d walked into my mother’s room at three in the morning to tell her I was bisexual and dating my friend (who she despised). I expected to see her face change, to show some emotion, but it remained the same. She asked, “You woke me up in the middle of the night for this?”
The next morning, she said she was furious at me for hiding things from her, that my grades had been plummeting already and that I was being distracted by girls and sex, and that I was out of control. She took my phone and laptop and told me I wasn’t allowed to see friends. She told me I had to gain her trust back and get my grades back up before I was allowed these privileges again. However, my mother already believed that, above all else, I was selfish, distracted, spiteful, cold, and a liar. As a result, I was uncertain it was possible to gain her trust back. I was isolated and sunk into a deep depression. Only when I started to sneak around and find support from counselors at school was I able to begin a process of self- recovery. While my mother believed it was a result of her tough parenting, in a strange way I was proving her hypothesis correct: Lying and hiding was the path I used to recover.
“Only when I started to sneak around and find support from counselors at school was I able to begin a process of self- recovery.”
I had been playing around with the idea of cutting my hair short for a while. For as long as I could remember, my hair was boring. It went about 4in past my shoulders. I parted it down the middle. It was soft and thin, but un-styled. My friends and counselors at school helped me build up the confidence to ask, telling me that it was my hair, so reasonably she had to let me. I told them they didn’t really know my mother.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and waited until I felt the latch bolt recede and could push the door open to see where she was. She was drying her hair. I knocked on her bathroom door and quietly forced out, “Mom?” No response. Possessed by a strange courage, I knocked on her door again, this time louder. Once more. I heard an irritated, “Yes?” I told her I was wondering what she thought of letting me get my hair cut short. She asked for pictures of what I was talking about, annoyed that I had come unprepared. I went and printed some out. She looked them over for five seconds before raising her voice and commanding, “I will not have a dyke for a daughter.” It was not the first time I had been called a dyke in a derogatory way, but it was the first time it had been used to describe me in a negative way—or rather, to tell me that it would not describe me—by someone who mattered. I was unable to move or speak for a moment, then I told her it was fine, that it was just a passing thought.
“I will not have a dyke for a daughter.” It was not the first time I had been called a dyke in a derogatory way, but it was the first time it had been used to describe me in a negative way—or rather, to tell me that it would not describe me—by someone who mattered. “
I sprinted to my room and started sobbing. Past experience told me what I should have expected, and so, as I sat in my room on the verge of a panic attack, I was forced to ask myself: Why the hell does this matter so much to me? I had made a part of myself vulnerable that had never quite been exposed in that way before. Two hours later, it hit me: It had something to do with my gender. I had a crisis for a week, during which I could feel myself slipping back into depression. The more I thought about it the more I realized I wasn’t comfortable with the categories of male and female. By the end of that week, I decided I was never going to tell my mother I was trans.
To shield myself from her, I would let myself be called by a name and pronouns I didn’t like. Lily would function as a protective shell for whoever I actually was. In my current emotional state, I could not handle scrutiny from my mother directed at my gender identity. By refusing to tell her I was trans, I refused to let my gender identity take root in my home, where I would have had to justify it and defend it. While I had the language to explain being genderqueer to my close friends who wanted to understand, I did not yet have it to explain it to my mother, for whom everything needed to undergo close examination.
Once I left for college, things became paradoxically more and less complicated. I was away from home and could effectively live completely out. People were comfortable using the name and pronouns I wanted them to. I was so taken aback by this sense of independence and freedom that I forgot that my mother would eventually return. As a family weekend approached, I spread the word that should someone see me with my family that weekend, they should call me Lily or avoid talking to me altogether. But since I had established my identity on that campus so strongly as Harper, the presence of someone who I was hiding that identity from made me profoundly uncomfortable. I suffocated under the weight of balancing two identities for even a weekend and my mother sensed something was off. As soon as she left, I felt like I had escaped a near-death experience.
A week later, after I was starting to regain my footing, I received an email from my mother with the subject line “between us … ” It read:
Lily,
It was great to see you on Parents’ Weekend in New York. Bard is a beautiful college and I am proud you are doing so exceptionally well there. [What was up with this painfully awkward introduction? What performance was she giving and to whom? Was this a denial of the past or simply an act of forgetting?]
Last Tuesday, I read an essay that you wrote that was online. Honestly I did not understand until now that you identify as transgender. It must be very freeing in many ways for you to be able to identify yourself and yet challenging to express yourself to some family and friends.
[I stopped in my tracks—she never took an interest in my work beyond telling me to get better grades. Not once did she inquire about reading something I had written, let alone seek it out online. The implications of this came crashing down on me. She was going to make me explain being trans to her. She was going to make me try to pin down something I couldn’t, and scrutinize my explanation of myself when I was still figuring it out.]
“Honestly I did not understand until now that you identify as transgender. It must be very freeing in many ways for you to be able to identify yourself.”
I want you to know that I support you 150%. I now understand why it was difficult during our visit. However I am now aware and hope that you will be able to be open with me in the future, even in spite of any previous missteps I have made in the past. Please know that, as your mother, you can always expect my total unconditional love and support.
[There was no indication of what “support” looked like. Acknowledgments of missteps came after “hope that you will be able to be open with me in the future.” There was no explicit accusation of deception or lying. There was no apology, but there also wasn’t a demand that I apologize. “Please know,” a command poorly veiled in politeness, “that as your mother,” a reminder of the familial structure I was trying to escape and of her position of power over me, “you can always expect,” but not should, which would have communicated a need for her accountability, “my total unconditional love and support.” This should have been comforting. This would have been comforting to any other trans person I knew.]
If you ever want to talk with me about this, I promise I’m open-minded, I’ll listen and I will always be there for you.
I love you, Mom.
“If you ever want to talk with me about this … ” What was I to make of the “if”? Should I have been comforted by the gesture of giving me an escape from this situation or critical of her motives? “As your mother, you can always expect my total unconditional love.” The love itself was conditional on the parent-child relationship, and my position as her child still seemed precarious.
And yet, none of this felt intentional. The email was too awkward to have been carefully crafted to intentionally communicate what was communicated. Was my overthinking rational and justified? Had I been found or found out? Was I lost or in hiding? Silence was a rejection of what was framed as a good-faith action. It was an admission that I lacked confidence in my identity. Regardless, I chose silence.
My stubbornness came toe to toe with my mother’s by late December. We were in the car on the way to a doctor in the city, one of the few times of the year when we spent several hours alone together. She mentioned the email. I immediately assumed that same defeated, tense posture that overcame me whenever I was in front of my mother’s bedroom door. She asked when I had been planning on telling her. She told me this meant I was hiding a major part of my life from her. I avoided the question and told her that my gender identity didn’t change anything about me or who I was—the first of many simple reductions of my identity that I would make in the years to come. She again asked me when I had planned on telling her. I was silent. She asked again. This time the question felt more like an accusation. I knew she couldn’t feign patience for long. Now, over and over, she asked slightly different variations of the question, without breath or pause, stealing away any silence I might have used to think. I needed to make it stop, so I blurted out, “I wasn’t.”
“She was still talking. No pause, no room for reflection or possibility for exchange. Two words broke through the noise: “Explain yourself.”
In this moment, I became certain that I hadn’t been found, I had been found out. She demanded to know why. I pointed to when I asked to cut my hair, and she blamed her reaction on the way I did it. I pointed to when I was elected the president of my high school’s GSA and she told me I couldn’t do it. My mom told me that I was making that up, that she had always supported my activism. I closed my eyes in an attempt to escape. Did she genuinely not remember? Or did she truly believe so strongly that people do not change that she revised her entire memory? I was filled with a profound emptiness. Certainty was escaping me, but at the same time my mother was demanding an explanation of the very thing I had sought to avoid explaining for three years. She told me I was lying and hiding because I was selfish. She asserted that I did not share my accomplishments with her despite the fact that, as my mother, they were rightfully hers to enjoy as well.
There was that language again: “as your mother.” It was only ever used to subjugate me. She was still talking. No pause, no room for reflection or possibility for exchange. Two words broke through the noise: “Explain yourself.” This was the moment I was most afraid of. The longer I was silent the angrier she got. I said, “Well, I guess I’m not really either and I guess I’m kind of both.”
This, like everything else in life, ebbed and flowed, though each wave was different, both in force and character. Change is never linear, and slippage always occurs. Over time the norm seemed to shift into one of acceptance. She asked to buy me new clothing and tried to convince me to get my name changed legally despite my reservations. She asked me if she could call me Harper, and I told her no. She seemed offended, genuinely, that she couldn’t take part in my life the same way some of my friends had.
As the tides shifted and felt more gentle than resentful, I felt myself again leaning toward giving her the benefit of the doubt and feeling I had been found rather than found out. At the same time, it was clear that, to some degree, she held onto her beliefs that I was selfish and deceptive. However, this had become the break in character rather than the default. The baseline is always shifting, forcing me to let go of the resentment I once held, forgive something that had never been apologized for, and accept that I will never have full agency over my identity: Unable to come out, I am perpetually in a flux between being found and being found out.
This article first appeared in our LGBTQIA+ issue.
