Mom Embraces Her Daughter’s Transgender Identity by Gifting Her A Favourite Sari

If you’re a trans person living in India (or in any other part of the world), chances are you had a pretty difficult time coming out to your parents.

But a touching Facebook post shared by Canada-based Kama La Mackerel has gone viral because it talks about her mother gifting Kama La her favourite sari, as acknowledgement and acceptance of her transgender identity.

The 34-year-old performer, poet and activist was born in Mauritius and migrated to India as a young adult before settling in Montreal, Canada.

Source: Facebook

In the post she says,”But wrapped around my body is also the gift of peace & acceptance: an offering of love, a request for forgiveness, the recognition of souls beaming truth in the sunlight, and the possibility of re-imagining, re-creating and re-enchanting ourselves, each other and our relationships.”

Read the complete post here:

Thank you mom, for gifting me your own favourite sari, and for insisting that I wear it to my best friend’s wedding. my relationship to my family, just like my relationship to femininity, has always been a fraught one, my family having been the first site of punishment that I experienced for transgressing gender norms. these two relationships are tied in a knot that I’ve had to unravel, one alongside each other, over the years:

Embroidered in these six yards of silk are the thirty years it took me to find who I am and slowly become who I was meant to be;
hidden in the deep blue of this sari are three decades of navigating rejection and acceptance, punishment and compassion, rage and forgiveness; threaded in this fabric is a lifetime of silence and dejection, the weaving of the unspoken over my skin, the (un)wrapping of shame around my body; embedded in this garment are the feet of a young child walking in pain, the hands of a suicidal teenager holding the pieces of a broken heart, the lungs of an insecure adult still learning how to breathe a steady rhythm…

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