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| 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!
