Erin Anderson is not your average everyday 22-year-old girl. Yes, she’s pretty. She’s blonde and she has beautiful eyes with a pleasing personality. But she wasn’t always this way. She wasn’t always Erin Anderson. In fact, not too long ago, she was known to be a boy named Aaron Anderson.
When she was only three, Erin had already felt like she was born into the wrong body. Even as a young child, Erin was fond of rummaging through her grandma’s closet to wear some of her clothes and shoes. She would even borrow some of mom’s makeup every now and then. She truly believed that she was born with the wrong gender but she didn’t really know how to go about fixing the problem.
And that’s why she just decided to continue living as a boy. OF course, she was subject to the vile nature of some high school kids. She was bullied for being different and effeminate by all the other boys. And the girls didn’t want to hang out with her either because they still saw her as a man.
When Erin turned 18, she encountered the online social media profile of a guy named Jared Norris. She thought he was cute and so she tried to engage in friendly relations with him. Erin narrates the entire experience by saying, “While still living a boy, I messaged Jared on Facebook saying ‘Hey what’s up,’ But he was having no part of it and didn’t seem interested at all, so I decided not to try anymore with him.”
A short time after that, she started to really question her gender and whether she could go on in life being this version of herself. “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.”
And that’s when Erin decided that it was time to own up to who she really was on the inside. She began to live life as a woman. She went out and grabbed what she had been wanting for so long. She got hormone replacement therapy to initiate the process. For a lot of transgender women, they can mean increased intake of estrogen which can induce the growth of breasts and feminine hair patterns.
The estrogen also manipulates the fat and muscle structure of her body to make her more feminine. And after only seven months of undergoing hormone replacement therapy, Jared messaged 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 is a computer science student in his late 20s. And he claims that after witnessing Erin’s transformation, he fell in love right away. He knew that there would be a lot of chatter surrounding the relationship but he didn’t let that stop him from making the relationship public for all to see.
“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 the first time Erin ever found love with another person in a very open and public manner. All of her previous romantic entanglements always involved some form of secrecy and discretion. And she was tired of that. She was tired of being in relationships with people who were ashamed of her. That’s why Jared is something different for her.
“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.”
This is truly a testament to the wonders of love – about how it knows no limits and boundaries. It can strike any person at any moment in any place.
