I’m crying just reading about it too. Congratulations Amy!!! I’m so haaaappy for you!!! This is so warm and touching. I’m so glad it turned out amazingly well for you. :) I feel so proud and grateful to have someone like you in our community! You’re such an inspirational role model! I can’t say I know exactly how you felt before coming out, but I really love your deep thoughts that go beyond your own personal experience. When you share your experience, I see so much appreciation for what you already have and so much compassion for other people with similar experiences and difficulties. You are not only talking about yourself or other trans people, but you conveyed a strong message to the society about diversity in general. It all boils down to embrace the beautiful differences in all human beings (doesn’t matter whether it’s a difference in gender identity or not). You have such a big heart! :)

Your thoughtful article has a lot of takeaways and food for thought. I feel there’s a subjective “threshold” of accepting people’s “differences” where the higher the “threshold” is, the more judgemental a person is. For example, the threshold of accepting “hair color difference” is really low pretty much for everyone because we see people with different hair colors every day and we’re used to it. In other cases that we don’t see or hear about every day, such as different gender identities, some people would be judgemental and have a high “threshold” for accepting it. But if you think about it, different gender identities are just as natural as different hair colors, aren’t they? We know what we want and we choose what we feel comfortable. Why being less open-minded to different gender identities than to different hair colors?? Well, I don’t know what makes people judgemental and I have no solution for changing people’s “thresholds”, but I think more people sharing their stories (just like you Amy! :)) definitely would help with the social acceptance in general since people would be more and more used to it, just like being used to different hair colors. I hope one day, coming out wouldn’t be such a big deal for people but would be just as easy as changing your hair color. :)

Last but not least, I highly recommend Amy’s coming out story! Very well thought article with lots of resources as well. And most importantly, thank you, Amy, for sharing this important message. :)