And I guess if you spend a lifetime trying to hide or deny a big part of your personality,

I guess you live in fear of being found out.

That's the only way I can describe it.

And being rid of that and being able to just, you know, lay yourself there and not hide such a huge part of yourself

is bound to make you just a happier person despite the challenges ahead.

From Seamwork Magazine, I'm Sari Mitnick, and this is Seamwork Radio, where we tell stories from people who make clothing.

You might know Marie is the woman behind the blog A Stitching Odyssey.

If you follow her, you'll undoubtedly remember a post she made last September entitled,

Loving a Person, Not Their Gender.

In that post, Marie wrote the following words. About 19 months ago, my beautiful girlfriend,

my then-boyfriend, told me she is transgender, meaning the gender she was assigned at birth didn't

match how she felt inside. The first couple of months were tough on us both, for her finally

admitting and accepting her truth, and for me getting to grips with what it meant for our future.

Marie's girlfriend, formerly boyfriend, as she put it, is Charlotte. Today we're telling the story

of their relationship and what happened after that revealing blog post.

Just a note, for this story, I talked to both Marie and Charlotte.

You'll be hearing audio directly from Marie in this story.

Charlotte was recovering from vocal surgery at the time, and she also just didn't feel ready to be recorded, so you'll be hearing from her through quotes that I'll include

throughout.

And I want to clarify before we begin, Charlotte is a transgender woman.

For the first half of the story we're about to tell, she hadn't come out as transgender, and to some extent hadn't come to terms with her herself.

So to all outside parties, including Marie, she presented as male.

...