From a very young age, Erin Anderson from Owensboro, Kentucky who was born as a boy named Aaron knew that she wanted to transition to become a woman. She knew she was born in the wrong body as a three-year-old when she would put on her mom’s makeup and draw herself as a girl.
Now 22, she has had breast augmentation, two years of hormone replacement therapy, and is hoping to undergo gender reassignment surgery in the future.
Erin has revealed how her now boyfriend, Jared Norris, 28, kindly turned her down when she approached him while still living as a man, then fell in love with her after she embraced her true identity.
She was 18 when she first got in touch with him on Facebook believing he was “cute”, but said Jared “didn’t seem interested at all”. Two years later, after Erin had come out and seven months into her course of hormone replacement therapy, Jared liked one of her Instagram pictures and the couple struck up a romance.
“I decided I was going to be upfront, 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.”
Today, they are a couple – with Jared saying he loves the fact that his “beautiful” Marilyn Monroe-lookalike girlfriend is “willing to be herself”. Erin and Jared went public with their relationship within the first couple of months. But since then, they say they have received hateful messages and even death threats online. Even though it has been difficult, they ignore the haters and focus on their own relationship.
Erin continued, “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.”