I somehow managed to come out to a friend of mine this afternoon. I was originally planning on waiting until after I started therapy for my dysphoria (I'm pre-transition right now), but it came up in conversation today (over chat). I tried testing the waters a bit when he and a few other friends of mine all got together on the 4th. I started up a discussion about the DOMA ruling, which led to some follow up questions on my part about transgender related issues. My friends are all pretty religious, so it was an interesting discussion. Anyways, I had mentioned a few times over the last week or so that I've had a lot on my mind lately, and he enquired about that today after I had mentioned that I was dealing with some personal issues. He wasn't overly prying about it, but he said that he thought that he had struggled with the same issue I was struggling with, but didn't struggle with it anymore, and that he wanted to be supportive. I was pretty sure his issue was not my issue, since you don't really get over gender dysphoria. I took a leap of faith so to speak, and I went ahead and opened up to him, and told him that I was pretty sure that I had Gender Identity Dysphoria. I think he was a little bit surprised to say the least, he had never heard of that term before. He did seem rather supportive though. I gave him a link to this
article, which I felt gave a fairly good overview of what it means to be transgender. I tried not to overload him with too much info at this point, and I could tell he was going to need a little bit of time to process this. Hopefully he will remain supportive through all of this.
I will add that it is extremely difficult to type when your entire body is shaking from anxiety while I was discussing this all with him. Glad that has finally passed.
