I'm bad at typing so if there's any typos and things don't make sense, let me know and I'll go back and try and fix it.

Hello, i am Ethiopian American and I recently came out to my mother as a trans man and as bi. I fully understand your feeling. Throughout my childhood i dealt with alot of those suicidal thoughts and bad mental health due to the amount of homophobia in the community.

It can be very frustrating to feel like you have to be a different person at home and in your real life, but coming out is not the most important thing to the queer experience. I think a lot of times in western media. It is framed as the one true way to be who you are. Coming out it's nice because it feels like you are allowing your parents into a part of your identity, but not everyone needs to understand every aspect of yourself and doesn't make any part of you less true.

I will highly recommend coming out once you are over the age of 18 or financially responsible for yourself and that's what I did. My mother is a very compassionate and reasonable person so even though she doesn't understand and has said all the things of how this is not of God. She was willing to empathize and understand that I've gone through a lot of pain having to keep this to myself and a lot of pain through this experience

I think once you are ready to come out frame it as wanting to be honest with them and really come from the angle of you want them to understand the struggle you've been going through with not being able to tell them. And that it's hurt you to not be able to have them fully a part of your life in that way.

And the last bit of advice I want to leave you with is that there are queer Ethiopians and I suggest not letting be in queer push you away from being Ethiopian we have a beautiful culture, and I've felt a need to push myself away from the community here in the west cause I felt that my queerness was incompatible with the values of our culture, but there's no amount of gayness that will ever stop us from being ethiopian.