The bottom line of it all? “You are NOT who people think you are, you are who you know you are,” in Jaimie’s own words. Though his transgender female to male progress is astonishing, the people from his previous life who chastised him for being ‘too feminine’ to become a trans man have now been replaced by his fellow members of the transgender community, many of whom, ironically, criticize him for being ‘too masculine.’ “People say that I’m trying too hard to be like a cisgender male,” he told Cosmopolitan in a March 2017 interview.

After 2 years of testosterone treatment, surgery, and hard work at the gym, 21-year-old Jaimie has sculpted himself into the man he’s always been at heart. “At first I was scared to come out with my gender transformation because I didn’t give any ‘signs,’ as people say,” he writes on Instagram, where he now enjoys over 300 thousand followers.

In 2015, Jaimie made the brave decision to start transitioning from female to male (or simply FTM for shorter), shocking and alienating most of his friends and family.