Erin Anderson, 22 years old, from Owensboro in Kentucky, first approached Jared Norris, 28 years old, on Facebook, when she used to be a man called Aaron.
Several boys used to bully Aaron (now Erin) Erin because they found her overly effeminate. Aaron started to question his gender when he turned 18.
"I was not happy in my born gender as a boy anymore, but I was dumbfounded about how to change, I had no knowledge on the subject or where to begin. I thought I was too old to start transitioning until my friend reminded me that life is too short and that I couldn’t keep living my life so unhappy."
Erin has now undergone two years of hormone replacement therapy, and breast augmentation, and she's hoping for gender reassignment surgery. After she had been on hormone replacement therapy for seven months, Erin noticed that Jared had liked an Instagram picture of hers, after he had previously rejected her as a man. So she decided to approach him again as a woman.
The couple met up and quickly formed a relationship. Since doing so, they have received several hateful messages and even death threats.
Erin, who is at present is a student of graphics design said:
"While still living a boy, I messaged Jared on Facebook saying “Hey what’s up”, I knew of him and added him on Facebook because he was cute, but he was having no part of it and didn’t seem interested at all, so I decided not to try anymore with him. ‘It was two years later when he liked one of my pictures on Instagram, by that time I had come out as trans and a woman. ‘I decided I was going to be up front, so I sent him a message with my number, and within five minutes, I got a message from him, and we started talking. ‘The next day was my birthday, I hung out with him, and a week later we were dating officially on Facebook and have been together ever since."
"Prior to dating Jared, I had been seeing people, but nothing serious came about because they were afraid to tell their family or friends. ‘They would tell me they really liked me but couldn’t risk their family knowing I was trans and that was what hurt the most. But Jared didn’t fear that he told his family that I was trans and everything, he doesn’t care what other people think."
"We talk about our love story and us getting together often actually, I admitted that two years prior I wanted him, and now I finally have him, which we laugh a lot about."
Jared, a computer science student, said:
"I hung out with her a lot and really enjoyed it, we had a lot of things in common even after talking for just a couple of days. ‘I was thinking, I could fall in love with this person, at first I didn’t know where it was going to go, but one day while lying in bed with her watching TV I told her how I felt. ‘I was like, “I love you and think we could make this work easily” and despite all the haters I wanted to go public and proudly show everyone we are dating."
That must be a delight for the "Whole Family" or at least they can feel a whole new new sense of being to connect and get plugged in...
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