Dearest Family,

I am aware that you are concerned about me and only want the best for me, in your limited sense of what “best” means. (Hint: what you accept as “best” is nothing that makes me happy, and, in fact, tends to be exactly that which makes my life most unbearable. See: trying to convince me to waste my time at a vocational school or community college rather than pursuing a degree at an excellent, if expensive, school, in an area which excites me. See: trying to break me up with my boyfriend, who is in fact the reason I am going back to school and who is demonstratively good for me by most objective measures…just not the ones you think are important, apparently.) I appreciate that you genuinely care about me even if you do not understand me and generally give poor, unsolicited advice. I love you anyway, even when I sometimes probably shouldn’t. (See: trying to break me up with my boyfriend. Assholes.)

However, I cannot help but notice the irony of the girl with the terrifying facial piercings and tattoo in a dead-end job with no professional or intellectual aspirations in life lecturing the clean-cut aspiring art and creative writing student about her unprofessional appearance due to her short hair. I cannot also help but notice that the coincidence when this conversation coincides with a recent transphobic diatribe about the aforementioned sister’s distaste for people who defy conventional gender norms and preference for “girls who are feminine” and “men who are masculine”. This, combined with the failure of Congress to recognize that, once again, trans issues are everyone else’s issues, and that gender-nonconformity is in fact a very real area of concern re: discrimination in employment for the cisgendered, results in lectures about my appearance being far more personally hurtful and infuriating than you can possibly realize.

Furthermore, suggested solutions to this issue — “buy a cheap wig” — are laughable.

Having known women in the scenario I am about to propose, I would like it to be known that I am not attempting to compare my decision to shave my head with anyone’s life-threatening medical issues. But would anyone even consider making these suggestions to a woman with little or no hair due to an autoimmune disorder or chemotherapy? (And jokes have been made to the effect that random people on the street will assume that I have cancer. I watched a coworker die of cancer in 2006. I know a girl from high school with incurable brain cancer who may or may not live another year — but who, admirably, is using her experience to inspire others and as a stimulus to drive her own activism and charity in the area of childhood cancer research, because she is that awesome. Not fucking funny, family. Not cool.) Or are these women simply assumed to have a proper level of personal trauma and shame for failing to live up to feminine beauty standards, so that we can allow them a little leeway? Is it just assumed that anyone without a full luxurious head of hair will be so ashamed of her conspicuous lapse in the performance of “femininity” that she will wear a wig, or at least a hat, a scarf?, to hide her illness from others? (And I do not think anyone who wants to wear a wig is a bad person; I understand why it would be important to a lot of people. But it’s a fine line between appreciating what a suffering person is going through and expecting them to be horrified and ashamed of their own body.)

Why are lectures necessary? Can we give me a little more credit, here? Can we assume for one minute that I am not a complete fucking idiot? Does it not occur to you, family, that I am very much aware of the weird looks people give me, and the fact that at certain jobs I would be considered unemployable (but, frankly, I would not be interested in working anywhere so conservative to begin with if I could help it)? Do you not realize that this concern has in fact factored into my decisions, and that I put off cutting my hair for this reason, and that I let it grow out a few months while jobhunting recently for this reason? (Well, that, and to avoid further lecturing.) Do you really think that you can tell me anything I have not already thought of myself?

Maybe, just maybe, my appearance is important to me. Perhaps, dear family, you could consider that there is a reason I keep shaving my head. Maybe one of these days you could be so considerate as to inquire what that reason is?

The reason is fairly simple and uncomplicated. It is that I can look in the mirror and actually be happy with the way that I look for the first time in my life. It is that I no longer have to fend off unwanted male attention and because I might just find myself on the receiving end of wanted female attention when others around me see my shaved head and rightly assume that it means I am a militant queer feminist. It is that I have managed to surround myself with people who find my bald head and hairy pits unbearably attractive and who think that I am beautiful, that I, finding myself for the first time confident in my appearance have been able to allow these people into my life.

And it is that, growing my hair out while applying for jobs, I spent every day for two months looking in the mirror and hating myself and my appearance. I would frankly rather not spend every day despising myself and the pressures being put upon me to the point where it makes my relationship with myself and my SO miserable because I feel ugly all the time.

And frankly, family, I don’t think it matters nearly as much as you think it does. I doubt my personality would fly anywhere that my hair is an issue. And, yes, that is a great number of places. Openly queer is openly queer. Strange is strange. If I’m not shouting “fuck you” to the status quo with my bald head it’s evident in my everpresent commitment to activism and social justice, the casual references to “my exgirlfriend” in conversation even though I am with a man at the moment, the insuppressible interest in politics and art and intellectualism which I cannot hide in conversation for long. It’s in a resume that states “tarot reader” because I figure being honest about my occupation for a year of my life is better than a huge gap in precious little work experience (given that I am only 21 and was, if you remember, family, discouraged from seeking a job in high school so that I could concentrate on schoolwork and community service). “Queer” in the sense of eclectic, outside the norm, threatening, strange, permeates the entirety of me, every pore, and is evident in the force of my identity. It’s immediately apparent anyway, with or without waist-length hair.

And let’s not even address the fact that a Spanish last name is probably the thing that gets my resume tossed in the trash, with all the panic about illegal immigrants on the local level, before anyone even sees the person behind the application. So many of them are online now, anyway. They don’t know what the fuck I look like until the interview that may or may not come. We don’t like to talk about racism in this household. We like to pretend we’re different. This is another rant for another day, too long to address here.

All I ask is this: let’s be honest, here. This isn’t about my shaved head, just as your attempts to remove my boyfriend from my life are not actually based on whether or not he makes me happy and encourages me to do things that are good for me. It’s about wanting my life to be easy and confusing that with wanting me to have a good quality of life. It’s about the unthinking assumption that conforming to a discriminatory system will result in a better job, health benefits, and job security. Job security is an illusion. HMOs will drop your policy if you actually get sick. Corporations do not give a shit and will fuck you over without even the hesitant bat of a CEO’s eyelash. Playing the game in the hopes of having an easier life is not actually helpful for the vast majority of people. Even if it makes surviving day-to-day possible in the short term, these supposed “benefits” of selling out are nonexistent. It’s privilege that lets you say my hair or my choice in friends (again, says the drug-abusing sister with convicted felons for friends) is my only obstacle in the pursuit of the American Dream ™. And maybe the earth-destroying, genocidal, capitalistic, colonial American Dream ™ is not my dream. I’m content to survive.

I am a well-educated, creative person and there is no room for that anywhere. My life will be difficult; that is a given. Trying to remove people without what you consider a “successful career” from my life so that they will not influence me with their luxurious hedonistic lifestyle (yes, we enjoy not being able to afford to go on interesting dates, he loves not being able to go to the dentist, we avoid fulltime work on purpose) is not going to make my life better.

“Stop being so openly queer” — which is, yes, exactly what criticism of my appearance amounts to — is not a solution and, furthermore, for many of us not an option. The system is broken. I want to dismantle the system. I want to fix it. I am not going to play this game, especially when I am fairly certain that playing it is not going to get me anywhere, either. I’ve been trying. Don’t think I haven’t tried. There are no jobs open that I am qualified for. No one is hiring. And when they are, they go for the PHD over the high school graduate for an entry level position. My hair is the least of my problems right now. I suppose it’s easier to try to cover up symptoms of a flawed society and a fucked economy because it’s less scary than thinking about the actual root causes.

Please remove your heads from your collective asses.

Much love,

Julie

PS: No one is going to give a shit about my hair this fall in art school. By the time I have my teaching certificate, I’ll probably be sick of the bald head and have a different hairstyle, anyway. What’s the problem?

PPS: Sorry, readers, I’d planned on something very different to launch my revival, but then the “get a wig” conversation happened. Something different tomorrow, I promise.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 10:10 am and is filed under Body and Beauty Standards, Open Letters, Queer Issues, Rants and Rages, Sexuality, Society.