I'm getting ready to apply for a "real" (long-term) job at my uni, and I had to print out and peruse several years' worth of student evals that go back to transition and pre-transition. I need to address some of the issues and complaints in my self-statement, so I could not escape reading the comments.
I was so focused on not letting negative comments get me down that I forgot to put on my dysphoria armor. There are a lot of female pronouns at a certain point. Very jarring and a bit demoralizing, but I slogged through them to the very end.
I was gratified to see an occasional male pronoun as far back as 2006 or 2007. A couple of classes had a 50-50 mix. One student used both pronouns in the same comment. Very odd. So the experience should have been horrible but really was not that bad. I do feel a bit weird, as if I've been through a time warp, but the negative feelings did not last. I haven't been derailed. I'm not melting down. I just moved on to the next task on my list. Soon I'll go to bed. In the morning, I will do a bunch of other useful things. Life goes on.
So the dysphoria was short-lived and outweighed by wonderment at how little the pronouns truly bothered me and how far I've come in five years. My therapist used to tell me that I would find a way to transition and make a new life for myself. I took his word for it because that was all I had. But I didn't really believe him because my hurdles seemed insurmountable. He also told me to envision myself as a man, as I would look a few years down the road. I just couldn't do it. Honestly, I doubted that I would live that long.
Yet here I am, and things are looking pretty good at the moment. That's all.
