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...