Parents are the ultimate barometers of approval. Every time I am asked if I have told my parents something — in this case, my transness — all I hear is "Have you told your Gods of Acceptance that you’re trans? Do they still accept you? Do they still love you?" The question, merely by subtext, is transformed into something even more personal and challenging.

In spite of my misgivings about the question, I know I have asked this of others. While grappling with this question myself, I’ve started to examine my own motivations for posing it to others. So perhaps the motivation is purely selfish. For those of us who have parents, the desire for their approval can be profound, at times obsessive, and is possibly even universal. Maybe when we ask someone, "Have you told your parents?" we are actually grappling with whether or not we could tell something (maybe the same thing) to our own parents, and wondering whether our own parents would still approve of us.

On one of my first and only dates, 20-year-old me and a messy-haired, stocky guy I had met at the gay bar the night before were huddled at the back of a Second Cup. The café was on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton, where it wasn’t unusual to see the occasional gay man or a gay couple even, but we still spoke quietly to each other, partly from shyness and partly to avoid drawing attention to ourselves. I was also convinced that this boy’s interest in me (and any boy’s interest) was actually a prank, and I was waiting for it to unfold, waiting to be right. He told me how he loved to travel with friends and the countries he wanted to visit.

“We should go to Egypt together!” he said.

“Ha ha, should we?”

“No, seriously. My dad will pay for it.”

“He will?”

Prank confirmed, I thought to myself. But talking about his dad opened the door to the inevitable question, the question that almost felt like the destination of every conversation with another gay person at that time.

“So does your dad know?”

“Oh yeah, totally,” he said. “He’s so great about it.”

I nodded. I wasn’t yet out as queer to my parents, and I was unconsciously collecting stories like this to bolster myself, and to give me hope that maybe my parents would be so great about my queerness too. This is maybe what all young queer teenagers are doing by circling around this question with each other — building solidarity and courage. I collected the stories from friends who came out to their parents and their parents reacted negatively. These stories were certainly demotivating, but I was more fixed on the fact that many of these friends seemed to be okay nonetheless. They were in pain, of course, and some friends were even kicked out of their homes, but their parents' rejection of their queerness seemed to instill a resoluteness in their identities. This suggested to me that parental acceptance wasn’t crucial to survival. I needed to know this then.

When queer youth ask me if I have told my parents about my queerness, I am happy to answer, because it is often accompanied by "How should I tell my own parents?" Despite being out as queer to my parents, I often push against the pressure for queers to come out. Not telling our parents absolutely everything is framed as a kind of dishonesty, not only with your family, but also with yourself. But the ability to come out to one's parents is a privilege that many, particularly people of colour, don't always have because of cultural, religious, and familial barriers.

When a straight or cis white person asks me about my parents in relation to my gender or sexual identity, the underlying motivation feels different. Last year, I had the opportunity to attend a film festival in Glasgow for the screenings of my short films. During the Q&A, a white woman asked: “Can you please speak to what it’s like being queer with South Asian parents?”

This question is rooted in two racist assumptions: One, that I embody a universal and monolithic South Asian queer experience. I have to answer with caution and care, because whatever I say will shape the white questioner’s idea of The South Asian Queer. Two, that my parents must disapprove of me, because all Indian parents are conservative and backwards. In this context, I feel a subtle pressure to provide a positive and uncomplicated narrative: As soon as I told my parents I was queer, they hugged me and fed me ladoos!

I first came out to my mom as gay when I was 21. I had planned to take Dan Savage’s advice and wait until I was financially independent and living on my own, mostly out of fear of how she might react. Queer children tend to cling to clues in relation to potential acceptance or rejection from others, especially our parents, before coming out. One of my clues from my mother was when she came home from work, declaring that her hero Oprah had been “talking about lessssssbians.” The insertion of a hissing sound into the word “lesbian” didn’t bode well for me. And despite the fact that my mom had a strange affinity for movies with gay characters, such as The Wedding Banquet, I had observed that during the inevitable man-kissing-man scenes, she seemed slightly more repulsed than she was during man-kissing-woman scenes. Beyond clues, my best friend’s cool mom (she knew all the lyrics on Jagged Little Pill) had a breakdown when he came out to her. I was learning that you can never predict how a parent might react to learning their son likes to suck cock. Nonetheless, not telling my mom I was queer had created a dense cloud that hovered over me and our relationship, a silent barrier that bred more silence.

“Mom,” I told her, “I think love is for everyone.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Like, it doesn't matter if you are black or white, or are tall or short, or are a man or a woman…” My voice got more and more quiet.

“So, you're gay?” my mom asked, without skipping a beat.

“Yes?” I often wish I had said, "No, I am bisexual," instead, because it would have made my subsequent coming out about dating a woman a bit smoother.

“Well, some kids have cancer. Some people are paralyzed. You are our child. We love you no matter what.” Not quite the PFLAG-mom response or fanfare, but I was mostly happy to not be kicked out of our home and that she didn’t, to my knowledge, have a jagged little breakdown.

Oh, and my best friend’s cool mom? She was white.