Erin Anderson is a 22-year-old knockout blonde bombshell from Kentucky. But she was actually born as Aaron, and grew up living as a boy.
Even when she was three, Erin felt like she was born in the wrong body. As a child, she wore her grandma's high heels, put on her mom's makeup and even wore T-shirts around her head to simulate having long hair. But despite being born the wrong gender, she was "dumbfounded about how to change." So, she continued living as a boy. At school, the boys bullied her for being effeminate. The girls didn't want to hang out, either, since she wasn't a 'real' female.
At age of 18, Erin saw Jared Norris' profile online, and thought he was cute, so she added him as a friend. "While still living a boy, I messaged Jared on Facebook saying 'Hey what’s up,'" reflects Erin in an interview. "But he was having no part of it and didn’t seem interested at all, so I decided not to try anymore with him."
Shortly afterward, she began questioning her gender, and realized she could live as her true self. "I thought I was too old to start transitioning," said Erin, "until my friend reminded me that life is too short and that I couldn’t keep living my life so unhappy."
Erin began living life as a woman, like she had always wanted, and began hormone replacement therapy. For transgender women, that means they take regular doses of estrogen, which, similar to puberty, cause the development of secondary sex characteristics - the growth of breasts, fat and muscle redistribution, a feminine hair pattern, a stronger sensitivity to emotions, etc. After seven months on HRT, Jared reached out to Erin on social media:
"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."
Jared, a 28-year old-computer science student, says that he immediately fell in love. Although he knew there would be 'haters,' he wanted to make their relationship public:
"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."
This was Erin's first serious relationship. All of her previous romantic partners were scared to tell their families and friends about her, because she was transgender. "But Jared didn’t fear that," says Erin. "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."
"When everyone found out, it was a big shocker," reflects Jared. "I received a lot of death threats online with one guy saying 'I will beat you up f----t,' which kind of sucked and was depressing. It's always the same rigmarole things like, "I hate you", "you're disgusting", "you're dating a dude."...Thankfully I had some messages encouraging us and telling us to ignore the haters, it reminds us that people like that are not worth our time."
Now Erin has gotten breast augmentation, and undergone two years of hormone replacement therapy. She says happy being a "passable woman," and hopes one day to get gender reassignment surgery. For transgender women, that means when a vagina is constructed through penile inversion. Some transgender women get GRS, while others choose not to, due to the exorbitant price and lengthy recovery time. Jared says he's not pushing for the procedure. "She wants to look more feminine, but to me she already looks beautiful," he explains. "I will still love her exactly the same. I love the fact that she is willing to be herself even with the ramifications of that, I'm glad she can put herself out there."
In a related story, this woman showed what dating is really like for transgender people...
