My Hair. My Gender. My Identity. Part Two

2000 - Seattle Aquarium Touch Tanks

“I told them to look for the girl with the curly, blonde ponytail. You’re hard to miss.” My supervisor sent me down to the floor to meet with a tour group. My hair was my defining feature. My calling card. Easily picked out of a crowd, my halo of frizzy, blonde hair, even only 5’6” above the ground, was distinct. Commented on. Marveled at. And even ridiculed.

My father’s genes are responsible for the texture of my hair, but his hair, like his sisters’, is coarse and mostly short. I didn’t understand the texture of my hair very well until high school (and then really didn’t truly master it until my late twenties). Taking a second period, high school swimming class meant that my hair had to air dry while I sat through Algebra and lunch. No longer fussing with it or sleeping on it, the natural curls that I inherited from my Irish family emerged. My hair went from frizzy and nappy (yes, a particularly venomous middle school acquaintance used this to describe the blonde bird’s nest atop my head) to curly and frizzy.

And so began my life as a host to blonde curls.

In high school Latin class, someone tried to convince me to play Eros (aka Cupid) in their class project.

I would regularly get stopped in parking lots and asked who did my hair. Even extended members of my family told me how much people paid to get hair like mine.

And then hairdressers would marvel that my hair wasn’t fried to kingdom come from products when they sat me in their chair.

Those same hairdressers would blow my hair out for me after the appointment because I had no patience to do that on my own. I’d live for a few days in an alternate reality of straight blonde hair, able to run my fingers through it, and completely unrecognizable to people at times. Without my curls, who even was I?

2012 - Straight Hair

Blonde curls. Heart-shaped face. Female. Cute.

My first boyfriend, and later my fiancé, was into my cuteness. I’ll admit that I was easily mold-able in this six-year-long relationship. Eager to please and to keep the primarily long-distance relationship alive, I asked his opinion about everything, including my hair. He met me when my hair was curling to somewhere between my shoulders and chin. As my hair length fluctuated and I toyed with the idea of growing things out, he always voted for a bob that made me look “cute.”

It was easy enough to oblige; remember, I didn’t get a handle on the texture of my hair until my late-twenties and, until then, really hated how brittle and frizzy my hair got as it grew out. I would often fantasize about that bob with an undercut I tried to get when I was ten. What if I just shaved off the kinkiest, most offensive curls at the nape of my neck? Maybe then I’d have beautiful, flowing locks like the movie stars that were embracing a tousled, loose-curl look in the early 2000’s.

I have never done that. Instead I fell deeper and deeper into the cult of my blonde, curly hair. A love-hate relationship that most people with natural curls will understand. My calling card. Unique and different. Hair that made me conspicuous (and clogged my bathtub drain).

When that ill-fated relationship above finally ended, I was as cliche as the movies, declaring I would shed my cuteness and the baggage of my first love! Time for a drastic change! No, I did not shave my hair off, though I did offer to. (Shortly after this relationship ended, my father’s other daughter was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I offered to shave my hair in solidarity with her chemo treatment that would result in hair loss. She did not take me up on it. I was mostly relieved.)

Instead, it took me over 3 years to be drastically changed. I grew my hair out long past my shoulders. I graduated with my MFA. I moved to California with a new beau to follow my post-graduate school dreams of being a resident scenic designer at a theatre company. And I started over.

Though my hair can never reach my waist, like my mother’s when I was little, because it’s too brittle and prone to tangling (and I’m not patient enough to coax it to that length, really), I had turned in my cute card to become what I was told was Woman.

And yet, I was still the woman in a male-dominated field, with soft, curly hair.

My identity has always been at odds with society. And itself.

I was told by one side of my family that women were to be docile, dress-wearing, long-haired housewives. The other encouraged me to follow my dreams to become the first person in my family to graduate from a four-year college. When my dreams took me into building and painting for theatre where t-shirts and jeans were the primary uniform, I was labeled a lesbian by my family and peers. Never mind that I, like so many teenagers, was too painfully self-conscious to consider dating (let alone being the survivor of sexual abuse).

The only thing that has remained constant: my blonde, curly hair. My calling card. My claim to femininity.

2003 - Grinnell College

   My claim to femininity.

   My claim to femininity.

   Why do I need something to claim that part of myself?

   ?

My Hair. My Gender. Part One

1994 - Before & After

My step-mother likes to say this haircut happened when she wasn’t looking. We both went into a bargain place to get our hair cut. I wanted to cut my long hair into an inverted bob with an undercut. It was a cool new 'do in the early ‘90s and I was headed back down to California to live with my mother for a year and did not want to deal with sweaty hair on the nape of my neck.

The stylist sat me down and started to hack away at my hair. It’s important to note that at this time my hair wasn’t curly like it is now; that kicked in with puberty. There were small curls at the nape of my neck and at the crown of my head and I definitely had a wave, but no, not ringlets. She got the hair up to roughly the length of the bob and then began the undercut. Then she realized that my bob was uneven. One correction led to another, and suddenly I was getting a pixie cut with a deep fade

My step-mother was livid. I was pretty traumatized, but only because I wasn’t prepared. I thought it didn’t look too bad. Maybe.

Thus shorn, I embarked on my last prepubescent summer. We took a road-trip up to Vancouver, BC, and then through Victoria. A Canadian adventure with my dad, very pregnant step-mother, her mother, and her step-father. It was a really fun experience that I remember fondly. And then we road-tripped down to California and a milestone of sorts occurred.

On this day, I was wearing knee-length shorts and a lose, magenta tank top that was about a size too big for me. With certain movements, it would shift and you could see more of my chest than would be considered appropriate if I had any breasts at the time. We stopped at a rest stop where I quickly hurried, by myself, to the restroom. Being summer in the full swing of early ‘90s road-trips, there was a tiny bit of a line, and there I stood, just passed the entrance, when a woman stopped me.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You know this is the women’s bathroom.” I can still hear the accusation in her voice.

“Yeah.” I had no idea what she was on about. Thank you for pointing that out, lady.

“The women’s bathroom,” she repeated. Perhaps she thought I didn’t speak English.

“Yes. I know.” I probably looked at her with a mixture of confusion and horror as my brain figured out what she was implying.

No one else said anything. She probably sighed or huffed before leaving. And I used the bathroom. But while standing at the sink washing my hands, I looked in the mirror and it hit me. She thought I was a boy.

I ran back to my parents’ vehicle and shared the exchange in disbelief. We had a laugh. At ten it was funny given the haircut debacle. I brushed it off. We went on our way, driving deeper into the heartland of California where my mother lived: Bangor, CA. A place that is more akin to the American South than to the liberal-leaning California cities everyone has actually heard of -- San Francisco, Berkeley, Los Angeles.

I had no intention of keeping my hair short, but it became even more imperative that I grow it out as my body began to change that year. Hips. Gaining weight. A period. And little breasts that my mother insisted on showing off to my grandmother during one exceptionally embarrassing afternoon. The two women declared I was finally a woman. Hooray. Suddenly conversations about crushes and boys and sex came into focus in a very overwhelming way. Living with my religiously conservative family, in the farmlands of California, meant that I needed to toe the line, which included growing out my hair. My mother’s hair at this time was at her waist.

Cross Country

Nevertheless, I fought hard to stay on the cross country and basketball teams. I could always be found playing soccer at lunch. I was also skipped from fifth to sixth grade shortly after I was enrolled in Bangor Union Elementary, a K-8 school that only needed one classroom per grade level, that was how small it was! I became conspicuous. A short-haired, pale girl from the big city who thought she was so smart and got called up at the quarterly all-school assembly to be presented with certificates of achievement, including perfect attendance. Who did she think she was?

What my classmates didn’t understand was why I kept my nose buried in my school work and welcomed away-games and meets to get me out of the house. It wasn’t just my mom and grandmother who remarked on my change into womanhood. My mother’s partner at the time paid me a lot of attention. We lived in a one-bedroom mobile home. He and my mother slept in the bedroom on one end, and I slept with my three younger siblings (one of whom was his first child with my mother, a daughter) in the living room area of the mobile home. The only door I really had to change behind was to the bathroom. Despite my pubescence (and her born-again religion), my mother, a child of the 1970’s, encouraged a free-love experience of being naked at home with her partner, even in the communal spaces. With no boundaries placed around this behavior, and the regular disruption of domestic abuse in our home, my mother's partner’s behavior during this time wrapped my formative, sexualized gender identity in a thick patina of sexual abuse and toxic patriarchy.

I wanted nothing more than to disappear.

Or at least revert back to my “tomboy” days that were not filled with hormones or a changing body, and when short hair didn't matter. But I also wanted to avoid being teased by my peers and my extended family. I wanted to fit in and be a woman they understood. I was a mess: a product of the collision of a religious upbringing that holds hard to patriarchy and heteronormativity combined with hormones and puberty.

I vowed to never have short hair again.

Left: 1994-95 School Portrait
Right: 1995-96 School Portrait
(I liked vests. It was the 1990s!)

To Be Continued...