When Samantha Nystrom first began questioning her gender identity, she didn’t turn to her parents for support. The thought of losing them, wrote Nystrom, was too emotionally traumatic to imagine. So she turned, instead, to her friends. And when she did come out to her family, and faced the rejection she had so feared, her friends were there to pick up the pieces. In them, Nystrom found a new family. Click here to read more…