Showing posts with label hair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hair. Show all posts

Monday, December 12, 2011

Fat Trans* Woman with Shortish Hair

Following up on Liss' post of a few weeks back (Fat Woman With a Pixie Cut), I mentioned in comments there that I was feeling inspired, and considering cutting my own hair short for the first time since I transitioned. Well, sorta - I did it once, about six months after I transitioned (in 1992), but it...wasn't successful.

(TW transphobia, non-graphic mention of violence)

I mean, I thought it looked cute, and of fairly similar length to my own here, but I was so early on in my transition that I just couldn't make it work. I got misgendered very VERY often, as opposed to the just "often" that was happening daily. I found that being misgendered was seriously a bad thing: it not infrequently led to violence against me. It's likely that's mitigated somewhat by it being twenty years later, but this is a reality that trans*-spectrum people face.

(end TW)

So there's a certain amount of screwing the courage to the sticking-point involved, for me, in having my hair cut short, as well as something of a political statement - the latter's value considerably lessened by the fact that being misgendered is now a thing of my past pretty much exclusively.

I am also, like Liss, fat. I'm currently something like 174 cm (5'9")*, and weigh approximately 120kg (~244 lb, 17st7). So there's some intersectionality here between being fat and being trans, but then I have a privilege in "getting away with" having short hair that Liss doesn't: my hair is almost completely grey, and I'm ten or so years older than Liss, so mainstream feminine identity means I should be shortening my hair at this point, so I can signal my unavailability to fertile males**, or some such evopsych bullshit. This is in tension with the societal precept that we fat women oughta have long hair anyway, because round-face-blah-long-lines-blah-bullshit-blah.

In the earlier thread, I posted a few pictures of my hair as it had been recently. While it looked lovely long and dyed, it was somewhat less lovely in grey (sadly, I am grey, not silver or white, as is often the case for genetic redheads - red runs in my family strongly, and parts of my not-scalp hair have always been reddish), and besides, given that i tend to feel hot far more often than cold, I found that I almost always wore it up in one manner or another, clipped, ponytailed, braided, whatever. At which point, I may as well have short hair!

In the end, I ceded my all-grey privilege to have short hair, because after I cut it - yes, I cut it, in about three minutes, last Wednesday morning - I then went on to dye it blue. Advantage to my particular type of greyness, it takes semi-perm dyes BEAUTIFULLY.

Enough blather. I'm going to take a shower now (7 minutes! Down from 27!), then take the picture you see below.

Full-face portrait of a fat white trans woman in her 40s, with chin-length curly blue hair

There we go: fat trans woman with shortish hair. Which is also blue.

Thanks to Liss for the inspiration, and to the Shakers with the incredible pictures and stories from that thread as well.

* My disability is such that I am shrinking notably - the doctor expects me to lose 10-12 cm (4-5") before I'm done, assuming I live my family's usual long life.

** As if!

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

More on Hair

by Shaker GoldFishy

[Trigger warning for brief mention of surgical procedures.]

Hi all, Shaker Goldfishy here...

After I commented on Liss's post about my own recent change of hairstyle, and how it required me to overcome some internalized judgements of a different flavor, Liss invited me to open a thread for further discussion based on my experience.

I'm 40 years old, and my hair has been thinning quite noticeably in the last 5-10 years. I've always loved the look of very short hair on men, anyway, and, once it became clear that as time marched on, it was planning to take my hair with it, I wanted to closely cut my hair. (If you know about hair clippers, I've wanted the #1 setting, which is 1/8 inch.) My hair wasn't very long to begin with, but the texture of my hair and the thinning always left me feeling like it was a mess and not very flattering.

But I had one big hesitation: When I was much younger, I had a series of surgeries to remove a birthmark. The birthmark straddled my hairline on my forehead and was of a type that could eventually become malignant. When I was 13, doctors surgically removed the birthmark (then about 2.5 inches wide and 3.5 inches long) and replaced it with a skin graft from my leg. At age 18, I underwent a series of surgeries to "expand" (i.e., stretch) the skin and tissue around the graft so that it could be removed. A small amount of the skin graft remains at the top of my forehead and the final surgery left scars around the "crown" of my head. I was worried that if I cut my hair too short that I'd draw unwanted attention to them. The scarring includes a couple "bumps" that to my fingers feel HUGE but I think in appearance are all but invisible. I don't think I look awful, but I know that my scars are noticeable and I sometimes feel self-conscious about that.

My partner, The Captain, has been cutting his hair very short for a little while, and I loved it so much I felt more determined than ever to take the leap. So this fall, I finally took a chance and got a "#1 all around." I figured that the worst that could happen is I'd have to wear a hat for a few weeks while it grew back in.

Well, I LOVE it!!! A couple folks have commented on the scarring, but if people are noticing, most of them aren't indicating so.

Shaker GoldFishy before (with Liss) and after haircut
Left, with Liss, before haircuts. Right, after haircut.

The Captain and I were in Chicago last week (while Liss was so terribly sick...talk about unfortunate timing!) and I felt so terrific with my new style. It just feels...right. (What you see in the photo is me with a couple weeks' growth...I'm due for another trim this weekend.)

Liss suggested--and I agree--that my little story might present an opportunity for other lines of discussion about how insecurities impact our hairstyle choices. I acknowledge that a great many factors affect one's choices (or lack thereof) about hairstyle, and I value that Shakesville provides a safe space to discuss topics that affect us personally.