Hi all! You may have seen me around as "Sean 🎩" or @nektro if you happen to stumble upon my profile here on DEV.to or Twitter, but I recently came out as transgender to my friends and family so now I'm Meghan!

For some background, I'm 21, and have been coding since I was about 16. I've always been interested in puzzle type games, but didn't officially start programming until about 10th grade in high school when I got really interested in the idea of making a mod for Minecraft. Right around the same time a robotics club started in my high school, and I jumped on board to make the team web site and robot code. And I've been programming ever since! Nowadays, I'm in college for a Computer Science degree, but still do the vast amount of programming on my own. I personally would still say college is helpful because it helped me in a lot of ways unrelated to the classroom that I don't think I would have got staying at home looking for a job. In my free time I'm still a big advocate for the web, making some games and other utilities, but I've run a course through many a language such as Java, C, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, and others.

In regards to me being transgender, I normally wouldn't have made a post like this and didn't even plan to have what happened during Pride Month. I was a bit at odds on whether I should write this, or if I should just change my display name and hope no one notices. Ever since I was a little boy, I've felt that if I had been born a little girl instead everything would have made a lot more sense. However, due to a lot of factors, some known and some unknown, I only recently within the past 4 or 5 months came to terms with the term transgender for myself.

I mentioned earlier that I wouldn't normally make a post about this. This is because my "goal" I guess with transitioning, is to get to a point where if you saw me on the street, you would have no idea I had been born male. This goal of sorts requires that as few people as possible find out I'm transgender. And making a post coming out to the world tells everyone. However, in my early stages when I was finally coming to terms with the idea of giving myself the label of transgender, I found a lot of solace in reading others' stories on a variety of communities on Reddit. It was a very freeing yet, bitter sweet moment to read about all the other people that had grown up and had experiences, that while they were physically so far away, felt like I was reading my own biography at times.

Shortly after, I started talking to a faculty member at my university and slowly but surely started telling my friends that I just love soo much. They've been beyond accepting of me and words can't describe how much I cherish them. More recently, I went to the Boston Pride festival and it was one of the greatest weekends of my life. Just this past Wednesday, I told my older brother and my mom and they were great too. Coincidentally, I'm seeing my doctor for a physical very early next month so I'll be talking with them about my options going forward!

Some of the awesome Reddit communities that I mentioned above are below. Some of them are more memey and some are more discussion based, but they all helped. And there are tons more.
https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/
https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ftm/
https://www.reddit.com/r/lgbt/
https://www.reddit.com/r/me_irlgbt/
https://www.reddit.com/r/egg_irl/
https://www.reddit.com/r/GaySoundsShitposts/

So here's to sharing my story, in the hope it may help one of you 💜

I'm Meghan,

AMA!