My Mother’s Daughter

No single word fully captures the complexity of how I experience gender.

It’s a cold day at the end of January, and I’m sitting with my husband in an examination room as a group of doctors explain to me how the surgery will work, how they will dissect the parts of my body I no longer wish to have and repurpose them into the parts I want. This procedure, according to the letters I had to procure to get insurance approval, will produce the body I’m meant to have, the body I dreamed about, literally, as a young child, before repressing that desire. In my letters and in my after-visit summary, I am described variously as nonbinary and as a transgender woman. These are labels I use as a shorthand to describe how I feel about myself and how I move through the world, because no single word fully captures the complexity of how I experience gender.

On International Women’s Day, I often think about what womanhood means and who gets to claim it, just as much as I think about the women in my life who have informed the kind of person I’ve become. I think about my friends, the women and nonbinary femmes who have watched me come into my own as an adult. I think about my mother, who raised me largely by herself, whose labor and sacrifices allowed me to live a comfortable life, but from whom I hide my femininity, the aspects of myself that she refuses to see.

I was supposed to be born a girl, so the story goes. I grew up hearing about how my mother’s doctor told her so while she was still pregnant, how my parents bought months’ worth of baby girl clothes to prepare, how they had to clarify to strangers, no, he’s a boy. I listen to my mother retelling this story to my husband at Thanksgiving dinner, hoping she doesn’t catch the sidelong glances he and I give each other. If only she knew, we say to each other silently. What would she think?

I was supposed to be born a girl, so the story goes.

Here’s the fuller version: my parents immigrated to the United States from China in 1985 so that my mother could pursue her PhD. My father worked in the restaurant business to help make ends meet since her graduate student stipend didn’t go far. A few years later, my mother got pregnant with twins; the doctor identified one girl but couldn’t sex the other. My sibling, born first, turned out to be a boy—and then, so did I. My parents were blessed with two twin boys, so they thought.

In my memory, my parents indulged my feminine proclivities during my childhood. When I asked for a Barbie doll for Christmas, they bought me one and costumes for her to wear. They didn’t seem to mind that I played with the girls at school or that I watched Sailor Moon when I came home; meanwhile my sibling played with action figures and watched Dragonball Z. Perhaps they were too busy worrying about making ends meet, or perhaps they thought it was a childish phase I would grow out of once I got older. Maybe they simply turned a blind eye.

Perhaps they were too busy worrying about making ends meet, or perhaps they thought it was a childish phase I would grow out of once I got older.

In reality, of course, my childhood was not particularly idyllic: my father left the family one day while I was at school; my parents later divorced. My mother then raised my sibling and me to internalize heteronormative values of filial piety, telling us that one day we would marry women and have grandchildren for her to take care of in her retirement. She maintained that immigrant Chinese mindset: her survival in old age, she believed, depended on my sibling and I conforming to these social scripts. It didn’t matter what we were or were not allowed to do as children.

In high school, I began to come into my queerness. I crushed on the bi-curious Jewish boy who kissed me at a party once—my first kiss, in fact. Then I fell for the lanky, bisexual white boy who called me cute when I put on a women’s hat from the theatre club’s costume room. I thought of myself at the time as a gay boy, even though I felt some unspoken kind of satisfaction that both of these boys later told me they were straight after all.

I thought of myself as a gay boy even despite my growing interest in cosmetics and fashion. My girlfriends taught me how to shoplift eyeliner and frosty, vanilla-scented lip gloss from CVS after school. I pored over the copies of Harper’s Bazaar my school’s library stocked. I bought bold blue and red Manic Panic hair dye from the Hot Topic at the mall, learned to cut my clothes apart and sew them back together, made plastic beaded bracelets to trade with my friends.

My mother found that lip gloss, by the way. She ordered me to stop wearing it to school: I don’t want people to get the wrong idea about you, she screamed at me. No one’s getting the wrong idea, I retorted, but I refused to clarify what I meant when she pried. I felt shamed by this discovery, like I was being interrogated for committing the crime of defying gender norms. I learned how to hide my things from her, how to craft believable lies about what I was doing after school and with whom.

My queerness was a dirty secret to keep hidden from her.

Eventually, I came out to my mother when I asked to go to prom with a boy. She did not take it well. Claiming that she was afraid for my safety, afraid of what people would think of me and do to me, she refused to give me the money I needed to buy prom tickets. Although she told me that she did not personally have a problem with my being gay, I knew when I caught her crying to her then-boyfriend the following evening that that wasn’t entirely true. Hearing her confide in him that she didn’t know what to do with me told me that her pain was not only because she was worried about my personal safety, but also because she was ashamed of having a queer child. My queerness was a dirty secret to keep hidden from her.

I lived for much of my adult life thinking of myself as an effeminate gay man. While Orientalist images of emasculated Asian men undoubtedly cause harm to the Asian American community, portraying Asian men as undesirable to the Western gaze, I instead reveled in my femininity. I didn’t quite know why I felt pleasure in filling what many consider to be an offensive stereotype until I discovered RuPaul’s Drag Race. Watching contestants like Ongina, Jujubee, Manila Luzon, and Raja transform from ordinary men into glamorous goddesses was a revelation. I understood then that embracing my femininity could make me feel beautiful and powerful rather than ashamed.

In the privacy of my bedroom, I experimented with cheap E.L.F. makeup products that I ordered online because I was too afraid to buy makeup in person. I got dolled up in wigs I bought from street vendors on St. Mark’s in the East Village, practiced the makeup techniques I learned from YouTubers like Michelle Phan. I called myself a drag queen, even though I was too nervous to actually go out and perform onstage, and took what I now understand were gender-affirming selfies that I posted on Facebook.

In the summer of 2016, I came to the realization that I was not a man. I began slowly to incorporate more visible signifiers of femininity into my wardrobe: flamboyant earrings, colorful nail polish, bold makeup, long hair. In December that year, I began hormone replacement therapy to feminize my face and body. The realization of my transness put my childhood into perspective: I never truly felt like “a boy.” Rather, I lived a kind of girlhood as a child, being socialized more around girls and women than boys and men, before my mother’s stern disapproval caused me to hide my girliness. Establishing a life for myself outside of her physical reach has allowed me to embody the womanhood I wanted as a child.

The realization of my transness put my childhood into perspective: I never truly felt like “a boy.”

Even though I now live as an openly trans femme person, adopting new names and pronouns for myself, I am still closeted to my mother. The shadow of her disappointment in my failed masculinity continues to hang over our interactions, even into my thirties. I feel unequipped to express to her that I am not the son she thought I was—both because of the language barrier and because I’ve learned throughout my adolescence and early adulthood to hide from her and lie to her, rather than confide in her about my personal and emotional life. So I’ve chosen to remain silent, ignoring the obvious, for her comfort—and to shield myself from her wrath.

This is not to say that she’s completely clueless or that my silence is enough to put her at ease. When I came home with painted nails and long hair, she flew into a rage. When I carried a floral printed purse, she was incredulous, demanding that I take one of her plain brown satchels instead. One summer, seeing me in t-shirts, she asked me why my chest was so big before telling herself that I had simply “gained weight.” And yet, there are moments when I wonder if she does truly see me; my sibling told me once that over dinner with her, she kept “accidentally” referring to me as a girl before “correcting” herself.

There’s a photo of me as a child, which I’ve taken from an old family album and now keep framed on my desk. In the photo, I’m dressed in a long-sleeved, striped polo and denim pants, with a blue lacy dress over my “boy clothes.” According to my mother, I borrowed the dress from a girl I was playing dress-up with; my mother apparently thought I was adorable enough to ask me to pose for a photo. In moments when my mother is struggling to accept the way I look and dress, I think about the girl in the photo who didn’t know yet that she was a girl but knew that she wanted to wear dresses and play with the other girls. I think about how her mother gifted her with Barbie dolls until it was no longer cute to indulge her fantasies. I think about how she learned to hide herself for fear of bringing shame onto her parents, how she learned that it’s easier to lie than to be honest.

I think about the moments she could have shared with her mother, the relationship they could have built: a Chinese woman who sacrificed so much, who moved halfway across the world from her family so her children could be afforded better lives, and her American-born daughter who needed nothing more than a mother who could show her the ropes, teach her how to be a woman. 

My mother is fond of saying that I take after my father physically, but I look at photos of her in her youth—how beautiful she was!—and see my own face looking back at me.