Mom,

You are wrong. You are wrong about who I am, you are wrong about what happened, and you are wrong about the story you keep telling yourself to avoid facing it.

There was no “sex change.” There was no “transition.” There was only a girl—me—born as your daughter, living as your daughter, needing routine medical treatment as a woman when her body required it, just like millions of other women do for reasons you neither understand nor seem willing to learn.

What I needed was hormone replacement therapy—not because I was “becoming” anything, but because my body, as it was born, demanded it for survival. You can lie to yourself all you want. You can script a version of my life that feels more digestible, more convenient, more removed from your own sense of guilt and confusion. But make no mistake: your lies change nothing.

I was born female according to my birth certificate. I lived my entire life female. I am female. Everyone knows this, including you.

You have a daughter. You raised me as your daughter. My name is Emily. Everyone has known me as Emily since preschool. And if you cannot say it, if you cannot even think it without retreating into a fiction where I am something else, that is your failure — not mine.

I owe you no explanation. I owe you no performance of pain to satisfy your discomfort. I owe you nothing — except the bare, immovable truth.

I will not stand silently while you mutilate my history to protect your pride, and the unattainable expectations of my late father who has been dead for over a decade.

I will not play along. I will not forget who I am. And if you insist on speaking about me, think very carefully: You are either speaking the truth—or you are lying.

Those are the only two options left to you. Choose wisely.

— Emily