By middle school, I thought I was a boy born in the wrong body. I wanted to like dollhouses and frilly outfits but, no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t. When I was young, my mom’s anger toward my style of style was so marked that I knew I wasn’t the child she wanted. (At a young age, I already had “Xena Warrior Princess” collectable figurines.) I’m sure my mother thought if boys were more attracted to me I’d get straightened out, so to speak. It occurred to me that she sensed I was gay. “It’s like your Mom wants you to wear slutty clothes,” my friend Julia said, holding up a sequined tube top.

“Has she met you?” my friend Amanda asked, laughing as she stared at the rack of multicolored miniskirts and then back at me, a 16-year-old in cargo pants and a breast-obscuring hoodie.

Her tactics were notorious with my high school friends, who’d come over after Christmas to survey my loot. Weekends in December became forced marathon shopping excursions in which I tried on skirts and gowns that would later become my presents. And the holidays were the best opportunity for her to operate on me. But whenever my mother put me in a dress, I felt as if she were taking a scalpel to my identity, trying to slice out the parts she didn’t like. Maybe the use of “assault” sounds melodramatic, and I admit that being plied with finery was an extremely first-world problem. She was a middle-aged female Liberace, whose tastes veered toward the laughably eccentric and: a pink shorty robe spackled with butterflies, Lilly Pulitzer skirts, and various camisoles of varied levels of transparency. Every week in high school, mother assaulted me with a new article of clothing. Quite the opposite, my mom waged a war to get me into more feminine attire. I grew up in the ’90s, with a mother who wasn’t exactly the Angelina Jolie to my Shiloh, defending my boyish sartorial choices. And in a red dress with the words “Santa’s Helper” bedazzled on the rear, I felt like an idiot.

An inveterate tomboy and a closeted lesbian, I felt like an impostor in a dress. “Just try it on once for mummy.” She stared at my offending Giants baseball cap and T-shirt. “Try it on,” mother said, holding it up in front of me. I tore open the Santa paper to find a short red cocktail dress.

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