Harper Steele of the documentary “Will and Harper” and Her Matriarchal Jewelry

What do these pieces mean to you?

These are very emotional to me. I’m struggling to explain what it means to be trans, and then to be welcomed home. It’s just a welcoming. I feel warm, I feel welcomed by the women in my family. I transitioned after my mother passed. Neither one of my grandmothers, they had a different idea of maybe what I was or something, but they knew me, they knew Harper Steele, and I got to spend a lot of time around with ‘em. And I’m just happy to connect with my sister, especially. I love my father, of course, and I love my brothers. What a great change of life to be able to now be a part of this other side.

Have you thought about passing down the cameo ring and the watch to your children?

I have two girls, and my sister and I probably will be the ones who pass a lot of the granny and grandmother stuff down to those two girls. I have a nonbinary kid who is more trans-masc leaning, and I have a great collection of things that come from my own world when I was presenting as a guy and things from my father. I mean, our family was not a big collector of precious things that we passed along. I got my whole mother’s jewelry case, which I can tell you came out of a drugstore.

Does the jewelry connect to something bigger for you?

Looking down at my hands now, I see something that I didn’t allow myself to have for 59 years. My hands are different. They’re now attached to the right body. Everything is in its place. And so the jewelry is a reminder of, I like to say “home,” or I’m where I’m supposed to be.

One more thing I want to just say in general about, I guess, femininity: I don’t necessarily think that all women accept me into sort of that matriarchy as a trans woman. And that 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 the female side of “S.N.L.,” of all my writing friends — love is a strong word, but love for Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, all these people who are my friends. But it opened up a more expansive sort of love for just the female side of my entire work life, and looking back at how much women helped me to get to where I am.

So all of it ties into the superpower of being a woman, and being vulnerable, or not afraid to be vulnerable. But there’s something very special about that to me because I didn’t allow myself to have that. And so these two things are reminding me that this is the world I live in now, and it’s a better world.