My stupid long hair and my stupid ideas

It isn't stupid, but it really is important to do things like growing your hair out for your own reasons, not to try and fit in.

I pictured having longer hair being such a huge growth moment for me in my transition. Like, I'd grow my hair out and I'd suddenly feel the most feminine I've ever been. I had saved pictures of the hair I wanted on faces that weren't mine and couldn't wait to see it on me. At every haircut along the way I had someone else’s face to show and a hairstyle that was meant to be mine. I know this is how going to the stylist works—-you show them a hairstyle and they help you achieve those goals. But, it turns out, when you have a brain that is not only thinking about hair, but also other transition goals attached to hair, it doesn't work that way.

I've finally grown my hair past shoulders, but I'm not the person in the pictures I've saved. I’m not any of them at any stage I have saved. I don't look like them and I don't have the smile they do either. It turns out that if you don't feel good about yourself or don't really know why you're growing out your hair, hair just looks like hair. And when hair just looks like hair, and not a part of you, I have learned it just makes you look like an 80s hair band singer or perhaps the renegade cop half of a late 80s/early 90s buddy cop comedy movie (I’m looking at you Mel Gibson).

As part of transition, you kind of need to know why you are doing things for yourself. Do I want long hair because I want to look like the women in the pictures I've saved (I won't), or because I want long hair (turns out, I don't). It isn’t wrong to get this wrong along the way, because transition is confusing and there is not a very good guidebook for it and we are all just doing the best we can for ourselves and one another. But making choices for how some part of our transition is going to make us feel, versus how other people are going to feel seeing us, is certainly a lesson to keep in mind.

Transition is so personal and it is so hard to not get caught up in trying to fit in because fitting in is safer. But when I sit and think about what feels best for me, not what an ideal woman version of me might look like, I think about how I like how shorter hair looks on me and how it feels more like me to have shorter hair. Screw the rest, short hair feels most me. It did pre-transition and it does now. This does not mean I go back to having a beard and shaving the sides of my head to look like I did five years ago (electrolysis and greyness have made sure of that not happening anyhow), but it does mean that I am allowed to let myself still enjoy something I liked when I was presenting in a more masculine way.

I’m sharing this for any young transition people or older trans folks still struggling to figure out something that is so hard to figure out. I’m sharing this for me, because years into my own journey, I’m still just figuring this out. I talked about there being no guidebook, no instruction manual for being a trans person, and there isn’t. But we do have one another, and I do continually learn from other trans folks and what they have gone through, both the good and the hard parts of their transition. It isn’t only that we don’t all appear cis years into our transition, it is that that isn’t our goal, need, or want.

It doesn’t matter what part of our journey we come to that realization, or if we come to it at all. Being trans doesn’t mean transitioning to cis. It is something all its own.