Teen Boy's Reddit Post on How to Ask Out Trans Classmate Goes Viral

Teenage romance can be complicated.

A 17-year-old boy who is crushing on a classmate who is transgender turned to Reddit for advice on how to ask her out and his post is going viral this week.

Taking to the website's relationship subform, the teen's lengthy post details "how absolutely and painfully beautiful this girl is."

"She totally makes me feel lovesick," the anonymous teen writes. "...I could write poetry about this woman."

He goes on to explain his crush is trans and that "the majority of people don't see her like I do," noting she started transition a year-and-a-half ago. He writes he lives in "a smaller community" and "a lot of people refer to her as 'he.' I've even heard a teacher or two mistakenly (or perhaps on purpose) call her by her prior name."

"...A lot of guys, my friends included, make a lot of rude and derogatory remarks about her," he continues. "They talk about how she'll never be a real woman and how they'd never touch someone like her."

She is real to me though. No doubt about it. I've never felt this crazy about a girl before," he adds.

The teen explains they both attend the same after school art program and were recently paired up to draw each other's portraits.

"It was MAGICAL. It was like a Jack and Rose moment, except nobody was naked and neither of us died," he writes, referencing the 1997 film "Titanic."

The teen explains he exchanged number with his crush and that she asked him to hang out after school. Though he's currently sick with the flu, he write he wants to "do something extremely special" for her and "ask if she wants a date."

"However, I know the second word spreads we are hanging out or people see us together, or if we become a 'thing' guys will be awful to me and I know my friends won't get it," he adds. "I don't know if they'd disown me but obviously I couldn't be friends with people who make fun of my girlfriends.

"I haven't told my parents," the teen continues in his post. "I don't know how they'd feel about her. My older sister who just graduated high school last year says I should stay away from her because of all the drama she could cause. Plus my sister thinks I could become a target of bullies and people might even think I'm gay. This is defiantly something I worry about."

The boy writes his little brother, who is still in middle school, offered the best advice so far, saying he should bring his crush flowers on Valentine's Day "because he bets no other guy has given her flowers before."

"I'd definitely like being the first guy to ever give her flowers but it's also a very public and romantic gesture," he writes. "...I want to make her smile."

He goes on to ask Reddit what he should do, saying "I want to make her feel special. I want to be her boyfriend. I'm just terrified of the social repressions and I'm a little terrified of what my parents might think too.

"Maybe thy won't care. Maybe nobody would care. That's highly unrealistic."

There is a trans girl [17 F] in my [17 M] school that I can't get out of my mind. I have a massive crush on her but I'm also afraid of social suicide if I ask her out. from r/relationships

With nearly 500 comments, most Reddit users seemed to agree with the poster's little brother's advice:

"Be the kind of person your little brother thinks you should be," the top comment reads.

"I think it's so innocent and profound what your little brother said," another Reddit user wrote of giving the crush flowers. "And honestly, what your fears are and what you're describing, those are only probably 1/20th of the fears and worries this girl had to confront this society and declare who she was. So now that you've seen a peak into that, you also get to decide the kind of person you want to let the world know you are."

The teen's post was shared on Twitter by Eric Francisco and went viral, earning over 11,000 retweets and more than 29,000 likes.

It also got the attention of trans actor and activist Laverne Cox, who offered her own advice:

"I would say that life is so much bigger than high school and if this young woman makes you happy as it seems you must go towards happiness," she tweeted.