Transgender Woman Finds Acceptance In South Korea
December 10, 201212:00 PM
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http://www.npr.org/2012/12/10/166878499/transgender-woman-finds-acceptance-in-south-korea (http://www.npr.org/2012/12/10/166878499/transgender-woman-finds-acceptance-in-south-korea)
When Andy Marra came out as a transgendered woman, she got lots of support from her adoptive American parents. She wanted to move forward with hormones or surgery, but not until she found her birth family in South Korea. She shared that journey in an essay titled 'The Beautiful Daughter: How My Korean Mother Gave Me the Courage to Transition.'
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And today, we want to talk about something that is coming into the open more and more these days, but is still a source of pain and shame and trauma for many people. Actually, we're going to talk about two things like that. One is the experience of being adopted, especially from another country. For some people, contemplating the circumstances that caused the birth parent to give him or her up is painful. The other is the experience of being transgender. That refers to a person who identifies with or expresses a gender identity that's different from the one that corresponds to the person's sex at birth.
In a powerful essay that we found in The Huffington Post, Andy Marra talks about searching for and finding her birth mother in Korea and her decision to come out to her family as transgender. The essay is titled "The Beautiful Daughter: How My Korean Mother Gave Me the Courage to Transition." And Andy Marra is with us now.
Thanks. This is a happy, heartwarming story.