Janet Mock, Huffington Post: "I Told My Boyfriend I Was Born a Boy"
It Happened to Me: I Told My Boyfriend I Was Born a Boy
Janet Mock
Writer, speaker, and trans advocate; Staff Editor, People.com
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janet-mock/transgender-coming-out_b_1146414.html?ref=mostpopular
I was born a girl but in a boy's body, as media headlines tend to scream when telling stories like mine.
Being trans, I've grown up with the understanding that most women are born girls, yet some are born boys. And most men are born boys, yet some are born girls. And if you're ready for this, some people are born girls or boys and choose to identify outside our society's binary system, making them genderqueer.
Regardless, I was born me, and in order to be me, I had to take many steps to affirm my me to myself, my family, and the world around me, and then, once I dealt with my gender change as a teenager, to the men I dated.
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We're real together, and Aaron and the friendship and love affair that we've built is my foundation, a platform that has fortified my own sense of self and has, in the nearly three years since we met on that Lower East Side dance floor, given me the strength to step out of my shadow and come forward as a trans woman, lending my story as one of many narratives on what it means to be a young woman who happened to be born a boy.