You'll Be a Woman Soon

Hannah McKnight talks about our early inspirations and aspirations:

I attended Catholic school from kindergarten all the way through my senior year....one of my clearest memories of this time was how badly I wanted to wear the same plaid jumper uniform that the girls in my class wore.

As I got older, I continued to notice (and grow envious) of what girls my age were wearing. I loved the combination of flirty dresses and Doc Martens boots girls wore when I was in high school. When I had my first office job I was really drawn to the professional attire the women I worked with wore.

[A]s I got more comfortable with accepting and embracing who I am, I would think more about the clothes I wanted to wear, and about the clothes that I wanted to wear as I was growing up.

One of the first things I remember wanting to wear was the Catholic school uniform when I was in grade school. This uniform has becomes incredibly sexualized and become a common fetish, but I didn’t want to wear the uniform for anything erotic. I wanted to wear it in my twenties because it had such an impact on me when I was young.

Accepting, acknowledging, and embracing your gender identity is a rebirth in a way. What was hidden and denied what was a part of us that is now who we are. We are learning who we are. We are learning who SHE is. And for some of us, we have some catching up to do.

For lack of a better word, many of us go through an accelerated and abbreviated form of adolescence or puberty.