Graduation Season

 

Image from Logan Isbell
on UnSplash.

It is graduation season around me, and it brought up all sorts of memories of my own graduations. Many far from the usual school graduations everyone thinks about when we think about moving on with life. Plus, it goes much further than just thinking about the pretty new fashions women get to wear on their celebration days. If they choose to do it.

When I look all the way back to my high school graduation days, I always tie it with the prom season which was very close to it. My senior year was actually my second prom, but nothing really changed. I was still very envious of my date’s beautiful prom dress and corsage (which I had to buy her) to add insult to injury. No matter how hard I tried, I wanted the high heeled shoe to be on my foot and not hers and I would be taken out for the evening. Graduation was not as bad as prom because every graduate had to wear the same black gowns, hiding their new fashions until they went to an after-graduation party. But, even so, I still had misgivings about what I was facing following my graduation. As I faced hurdles such as surviving college and the military service which sometime made my gender issues pale in comparison.

Even though I realized a college graduation was in my future too, I did not think of all the other times I would have to graduate in life to survive. Examples included the times in the Army when I needed to graduate basic training all the way to making my way through the “Defense Information School” in Indianapolis. Time was flying by as I transitioned from the college world to the Army and back again three years later when I pursued my second college degree. Aside from brief moments of regression and purging, my desire to be a transfeminine person never went away and was in fact getting stronger. Little did I know I was facing more graduations confined only to how I viewed myself as a person.

Backtracking a bit and going back to my very first time I saw myself in girl’s clothes and makeup in front of a mirror. I realized I had graduated from being a so called “normal” boy forever. Plus, there would be several future gender graduations when I transitioned from being a cross-dresser to a transgender woman and when I began to take HRT or gender affirming hormones under a doctor’s care and took another major step towards my dream of being a fulltime trans woman.

By the time I had gone through all these graduations, even I would have thought I would have grown tired of the process. But I did not. I started to crave the next step in my occupation and my life as a transgender woman. Which put me on a collision course for my future. It came down to which one I would save after the major gender collision in my life. Following years and years of success, one would just have to go. Just trying to look ahead up my winding gender path became a major problem as increasingly carving out a life as a novice transfeminine person on my own terms became a priority over every thing else, I loved in my life.

At this point, my graduations began to slow down and became smaller in nature. Every time I was successful at trying to be the person I always wanted to be, I celebrated my own mini gender victory and resolved to do better on my path. No longer did I have to be envious of the ciswomen around me, since I was allowed to be behind the gender curtain. Which was another graduation for me, as I loved it. It was a major reward for all the work I put into filling out my gender workbook. As a matter of fact, it was the best graduation I had ever had in my life.  If I wanted to, I could wear the pretty dress all the other women around me were wearing.

Until then, I think I was taking all the graduations and transitions I was taking for granted. I was not raised to think anything I did was good enough, so being pleased with my progress towards my dream and being happy about it was a first for me. Ironically, I even was able to use the same restroom in the dinner club I took my second prom date to years later when it became a gay venue. It was as close as I could ever come to reliving the inadequacies I felt so long ago as I looked at myself in the women’s restroom mirror.

Humans are blessed to be able to graduate to many different levels as they transition through life. It is sad because of whatever reason, some people (men and women) are never socialized to make it to a point when they can claim the status of being a man or a woman. They are doomed to never making it past the stage of being male or female and never took the opportunity to graduate to the next level of life. They are the ones who are jealous of and hate transgender women and transgender men for reasons they do not even understand. Often, they are stuck in the past and never have the chance to escape.

If you are busy trying to figure out your next stop on your gender journey, I hope you can take the next careful step and graduate to the level you want to be. In the end, graduation is much more than having a framed certificate for your wall and who would consider having a framed certificate saying you made it to your own form of womanhood above your desk anyhow. Wouldn’t that be something?

Your destination should be your own sense of satisfaction or even happiness because you undertook one of the most difficult journeys a human can take. Congratulations!