Transgender actress Hailie Sahar has credited her mother with helping her find the courage to come out.

Sahar plays Lulu Abundance in the FX drama Pose. She also portrays Jazmin on Freeform's Good Trouble.

Sahar transitioned when she was a teenager. The daughter of a Baptist preacher in Los Angles, Sahar said that she did not want to “bring shame” to her family with her gender identity.

She spoke with Justin Sylvester, the openly gay host of E!'s Just the Sip, about her “extremely hard” decision.

“The beautiful thing is that I have my mother to thank," Sahar said. "My parents were divorced when I was about 1 years old, and my mother is the example of what I would call perfection, if there was such a thing as perfection in a human. My mother lives by love and just embracing who you are, as long as you're not hurting anyone, so I had that as an example. As I got a little older, I started to pay attention more to that, rather than the structure of the church."

"Rather than, this is what you should do or you shouldn't do or you're going to Hell, I started to pay attention to who God really is, and God is love, and my mother demonstrates love. And so I was like, huh, I want to be like her. I want to live like that. And so, with that, I had more of a freedom to express myself and to be my authentic self and it's thanks to my mom, my mommy."

"You have to take into accountability [you're a] teenager and I come from a very strict Baptist family. I didn't want to bring shame upon my family and I didn't want to be condemned. I knew that I was a good person and so that was very challenging for me."

"I actually ran away when I was a teenager and put my mom through so much," she continued. "But I was trying to find myself and I was trying to get away from that strict teaching that my father's side of my family was instilled in me, and not to say anything bad about them, because I love my family, but it was a lot of pressure on me, and my mother's voice was in my head, and my personal love for God was in my heart, and I understood who God is on a personal level, and I knew that God made me who I am. I realized one day that God loves me and God is love, and love does not judge, love is pure, and love is kind."

"So it was those things that I had to recondition with my thinking to accept, and once I did that, I had the courage to be myself and in that process – and I'm still in that process – I started to own that and what that looks like and what that means for me, and telling myself, this is my life, and I'm gonna live my life the way I want to live it and I'm in control of it,” she said.

Sahar added that as a child she dreamed of being a mom.