Hey,
One of the more horrifying things for me about the Luna Younger story is a particular detail of the abuse— and I have zero qualms referring to it as abuse— she suffers from her father. When the 7-year-old trans girl is forced to leave her mom as per the custody agreement in place, her father makes a point forcibly shaving her head to make her look more masculine.
As I mentioned on Twitter back in October, that detail about her hair hit home.
When I was little I had zero say in what I could do with my hair. My mom cut my hair every month, an uneven and unflattering bowl cut that she did in the kitchen using fabric scissors. Once a year she would “splurge” and send me to a SuperCuts, telling the stylist to give me the same haircut she gives me at home.
When I was about 12 I stopped submitting to those cuts and started growing my hair out. I didn’t know I was trans back then— my very early questions about gender wouldn’t really bubble to the surface until sophomore year of high school, when I got myself sent home for wearing a skirt to class— but I knew I didn’t want be seen as a typical boy. My mom wasn’t happy, and she made that clear every single day that I lived under her roof. I had an uncle who would “joke” about holding me down and cutting my hair off to make me look “normal” again. For years, whenever he saw me, he would make a scissor-cutting gesture with his index and middle fingers and say “snip snip!” in a taunting sing-song voice. Said uncle had long hair himself, but that was beside the point. It was never about looks for him (or my mom). It was about power.
(This is the same uncle who, earlier this year, outed me as trans to my mom without my consent, apparently for no other reason than because he could.)
I kept my hair long well through adulthood. Partly due to repressed dysphoria and partly due to comorbid depression and poor self esteem, I never really knew what to do with my hair beyond that. All I knew was that having it long was non-negotiable. Starting in my teens and carrying on well into my 20s, I tied it back into a ponytail, because it was the only thing I can think of to do that didn’t require either a lot of work, posing questions I didn’t want answered, or giving up the ghost and cutting it.
But as an overweight masc-presenting person with long hair tied back into a ponytail who had stereotypically geeky interests, I inadvertently sent signals to others about what kind of person I was that didn’t quite match my internal reality. At some point I gave up on the ponytail. Late in my 20s, I started dyeing my hair whenever I could sweet-talk a friend into helping me with it. It was closer to what I was looking for, but there were still some missing pieces.
Earlier in the decade, queer femmes sporting undercuts had A Moment. It was one of those looks that inspired an all-too-familiar feeling for me: “gosh, I wish I could pull that off.” But there was no way. Even after I came out as nonbinary, I still read mostly as masculine. Even with long hair, even with occasional lip gloss. (The beard I had back then tended to override everything else.) I worried that being a mostly masc-presenting person with an undercut would, uh, send the wrong message. And I wasn’t totally sure to what extent I could claim femininity; I was still working through some complicated feelings, all of which were tinged by a deep-seated worry that I was appropriating trans identity and queerness.
I was also still stuck on this idea that hair length was the only means I had to signal to other people that I wasn’t, strictly speaking, a guy. Even in very recent years, when I started going to a salon once or twice a year to get my hair dyed. I never asked for it to be cut or styled; at most, I’d ask for a trim at the edges to get rid of split ends, and even then, I was terrified at the idea of losing too much length.
After I realized I was a trans woman, and started being open and public about that, I started feeling like I had more options available to me. Like maybe I could experiment a bit and see what being a girl actually meant to me. That was what was running through my head when I saw a photo of a queer femme sporting an asymmetrical bob with an undercut on the side.
My usual script started to play out. “Oh, I wish I could pull off something like that.”
But then:
“Well. Why can’t I?”
Long story short: I got my hair did yesterday.
This is the first time I’ve had it cut above my shoulders in at least a decade. It’s the first time I’ve had any part of my head shaved ever.
Past me likely would’ve been horrified at what I’ve done. And indeed, when my stylist first took her razor to the side of my head— the undercut was the very first thing she did during my visit— I had a moment of extreme terror.
But the thing is, it passed.
I really like this look. Besides the color— which my stylist did an amazing job of— I like how genderfucky it makes me look. I like the wavy layers. I like how it frames my face. I like that it gives me some versatility in terms of how I style it at home.
But mostly, I feel a sense of relief. I’ve spent so many years feeling like I had to keep my hair extremely long, because that was all I had to work with. Now I don’t feel like I have as much to prove. That feeling of freedom means everything to me right now.
And anyway: if I end up not liking it, it’s just hair. It will grow back.
Take care,
Bridget