What do these pieces mean to you?
These are very emotional for me. I struggle to explain what it means to be trans, and then be welcomed home. It’s just a welcome. I feel warm, I feel welcome by the women in my family. I transitioned after my mother passed away. None of my grandmothers, they had a different idea of maybe what I was or anything, but they knew me, they knew Harper Steele, and I got to spend a lot of time with them. And I’m especially happy to bond with my sister. I love my father, of course, and I love my brothers. What a life changer to be able to be a part of that other side now.
Have you thought about giving your kids a cameo ring and watch?
I have two girls, and my sister and I will probably be the ones to pass on a lot of grandma’s stuff to those two girls. I have a non-binary child who leans more towards the trans mask, and I have a huge collection of things that come from my own world when I was presenting as a boy and my father’s. things I mean our family was not a big hoarder of valuables that we passed around with. I found my mother’s jewelry case, which I can tell you came from a drug store.
Does jewelry connect to something big for you?
Looking down at my hands now, I see something that I have not allowed myself to do for 59 years. My hands are different. They are now attached to the right body. Everything is in place. And so jewelry is a reminder, as I like to say, of “home,” or that I am where I am supposed to be.
Another thing I want to say about, I guess, feminism in general: I don’t necessarily think that all women accept me as a transwoman in this kind of marriage. And it 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 all of my writing friends, the women of “SNL” — love is a strong word, but Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, all of them. Love for Joe, my friend, but it opened up to a much wider variety of love from women than I’ve had in my entire working life, and looking back at how much women have helped me get to where I am.
So it all ties into the superpower of being a woman, and being vulnerable, or not being afraid of being vulnerable. But there’s something special about it for me because I didn’t allow myself to. And so these two things are reminding me that this is the world I live in now, and it’s a better world.