“Coming from a strict Persian background, you can imagine that it wasn’t easy,” singer-songwriter Gia Woods told R29. “Both of my parents are from Iran, where you can still be beheaded for being gay. So growing up, I was very closeted and felt estranged from my own family a lot of my childhood. I thought that there was something wrong with me, so I just kept to myself a lot of the time.” According to her, music became her way out, a method of expression that eventually led her to embrace who she was. “I dropped my first ever single called ‘Only a Girl,’ which was how I came out to the whole world. It was terrifying, but I finally felt like I could breathe,” Woods said.