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location:  Transition  >  Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)  >  Coming Out 1. How old where you when you knew/came out? 2. How/when did you tell your parents? 3. At what point, in which scenarios and/or contexts (like work, school, friends), would you tell someone that you are FTM? 1. How old where you when you knew/came out? I was 13 when I realized I was attracted to women, and I came out as liking women (so people saw me as a lesbian, but I did not identify as one) when I was 14. When I was 18, I began exploring transgenderism and was 20 when I came out as transgender. It is important for me to point out when answering this question that I do not have the narrative that most people hear about in the media (a small child going up to someone and insisting they are of another gender). I was not a child who insisted I was a boy – I was very much my mother’s little girl. I like to point this out, because so often people who have narratives like me (ie. ones that differ from what we hear from the media) feel like their story is not validated so they must not be a “real” transsexual that is “allowed” to transition. So just because someone didn’t know when they were two years old, doesn’t mean their current feelings aren’t real. 2. How/when did you tell your parents? I told my parents I was having trans feelings in the summer of 2001, about a year after seriously considering my options of medically transitioning. I told them to go to my website (a slightly different version than what is here now), which at the time I was using more as a blog to write about my feelings of being trans and possibly wanting to transition. In retrospect, telling them to go to my website probably wasn’t the best way to come out to them. I wish I had written a letter explaining myself instead. However, after they visited my website, an email exchange began in which many hurtful things were said, many of which I will never forget. Perhaps if I had written a personal “coming out” letter to my parents, things would have been different. Perhaps not. Still, I knew that I could not tell them in person, mostly because of my own insecurities and my family’s personal parent/child dynamics. I’m sure some trans people choose to tell their parents in person, but that was not an option for me. 3. At what point, in which scenarios and/or contexts (like work, school, friends), would you tell someone that you are FTM? I image this will change over time, as different contexts will become more important to me and other contexts will become less important. I chose to write about being a transsexual in my graduate school application essay so the school administrators obviously knows. The vast majority (if not all) of my current classmates know, because (although I have did not make an effort to tell people outright), they all had access to my website information and apparently the juicy gossip “spread like wildfire” without me even knowing. In a work environment, I probably wouldn’t tell people, unless it was important for them to know in terms of access to resources or if it were a close-knit group of employees and I felt comfortable sharing aspects of my past and wanted to be able to talk openly about it.