Late Bloomer

I'm a late-blooming flower, a last flourish of color before the frost.

I'm haunted by the other life that passed me by, the one I wished for but never lived.  The dreams many girls have, of a beautiful prom dress, a fairytale wedding, of beautiful children.  Learning how to fix my hair, how to sew, or the names of all the myriad colors.  My girlhood, my young womanhood, these are chimeras. Never a bridesmaid, never a bride.

The darker side, too--the realities of a woman's life beyond stereotypes and storybook fantasies, are absent from my past.  My second-class citizenship was not inculcated in me from an early age, nor the societal expectations that value beauty over intelligence or character.  No monthly visitor, no high school mean girls, no labor pains.  I was not taught to fear being alone at night, or how to fend off unwanted advances.  No glass ceiling. Not #metoo.  I don't really want those things, of course--who would?--but they set me apart.

In my youth I was a woman in my heart, but that was very infrequently manifested in my lived experience.  Can I really be in the sisterhood, having spent most of my life as a nominal part of the brotherhood?  Can I really say "we women"?  I feel strangely presumptuous when I say it.

I know--the reality is that the individual things I listed above are not universal among women.  Every woman has a unique set of experiences that shape her life and outlook.  And I long ago found that despite my male socialization, I absorbed the expectations society places on women; whenever I, however briefly, took on the outward trappings of womanhood, I felt the pressure of those expectations. For years, I have been welcomed into women's spaces.  But I feel so different sometimes, like I don't truly belong, because my past was so unlike those of the cisgender women I know.


Transition is not a one-time event, or something that can truly be completed; it is a becoming.  It's not even two years since I began truly and fully living as myself.  I believe that I will progressively feel more confident in my womanhood. In a strange way, I take comfort in my imagined future as an old woman, that all my future days will be lived, and that I will die, a woman.

I'm grateful that I finally did bloom, even in autumn.