Tonsure, or My Year of Detachments
I want to write about why I’ve been walking around all year with a fully shaved head and eyebrows. If you follow me on social media platforms that aren’t Facebook, you likely already knew I’ve been looking all alien with it, but if you don’t, well, now you know. Once per week, I take a cartridge razor and shave my head against the grain in all directions. Eyebrows too. No more time spent styling my hair, no more time spent worrying about thinning patches. Its been a reset, and a revitalization, and its kinda weird in that most everyone in my life doesn’t realize that I’ve been on an emotional struggle with my appearance.
It’s something that my friends don’t really ask about; neither do I bring it up as a talking point. It’s hard to casually converse about something that I conceive of as spiritual. It’s a religious habit. A tonsure. And how do you even talk about that, you know? Especially when most of your interlocutors aren’t at all familiar with your polytheist religious cosmology and its orthopraxic understandings of offerings and oaths. Neither is this a religious blog (unless readers want it to be more of that! But I’m not moving that way without feedback asking me to), so I’m not going to be talking about my tonsure as a religious act today.
What I want to write about is everything else that has come with this severe look: my experiences in the world and with myself; what it is like emotionally to live as a trans woman without my oldest attachment to aesthetic femininity. My hair.
I like to joke that “I transitioned for the hairstyles,” but you have to understand that for me hair has never been just hair.
8th grade for me (1999 & 2000); the time in my life where I was bombarded with evangelical messaging on one end of my family and thanks to the other end I was undergoing pastoral care in the Methodist church that I now understand as akin to conversion therapy. I came out of those experiences having made a lot of compromises with myself, I think. My memory is so hazy from that time and I struggled deeply with self-repression ever since. But one thing I would not compromise on was my hair. I wanted to grow it out longer and longer. I allowed myself to care about embodied self-expression for the first time in my life, at least in a small way.
The years before that I always asked the family hairdresser for “a regular haircut.” A generic length and shape. Self-expression then for me was strictly about clothing signifiers: sneakers, sports jerseys, graphic tees (No Fear, parody shirts from Big Dog, etc). Expressing cultural interests and such. But an expression of embodied selfhood? That never occurred to me as something I was allowed to have; others could have it, and I could understand the idea of hair as self-expression or cultural expression. I just thought such expressions were for other people. I was clearly already experiencing deep gender dysphoria and depersonalization, my hair was just my subconscious made visible. I just wanted to be as neutral as possible, to take up as little space as possible.
Thanks to that year of conversion pastoring and to the “academic” work of J. Michael Bailey it would be over another decade before I could accept to myself that I don’t have to keep my truest selves hidden from everyone else, that it was ok for me to pursue actual embodiment. That I could live as myself publicly. But until that point? My long hair was the one bit of embodied self-expression I allowed myself, the one thing keeping the closet door from locking, and the rebellion of having even that probably saved my life.
But even then it was a safety blanket. It was never styled, just long. Longer and longer, down to my ass at its longest point. And most of the time It was tied back into a ponytail because, well, a stiff wind would tangle the shit out of my fine & thin hair and the feeling of my hair blowing across my face was big sensory agitation from an autism perspective. I didn’t really care about my appearance still, in a bad way still. I wore clothes that were too big for me, to help me not have to think about my body. I had one of the worst beards you’ve ever seen. All the examples of people I wished I looked like were women or genderqueers with short hair, but I thought I was doomed to be unable to change my sex, so I found the only male aesthetic I could tolerate (being the Long Hair Guy) and planted my ass there & built my closet around it. All of my energy those years was put into my academic and artistic studies. I basically didn’t even date or pursue relationships ‘til my mid-20s.
Hair to me is maybe like free will. Stick with me here. We all either have head hair growing out of our follicles or we have circumstances that prevent it from growing. We have different textures, porosities, and other genetic or culturally inherited factors. What we choose to do with our hair within these parameters is up to us. Well, I wasn’t choosing. I was utterly passive in my life.
When I buzzed all that hair off in 2012 it registered in my bodymind as an act of will against compulsory femininity. I know how it looked to everyone else, given that I was closeted. It looked like a gender conforming choice, a move towards more conventional masculinity. But for me I was having my Sinead moment, my Sigourney moment, an initiation experience for rebellious femininity. I looked more like a normal dude than ever and yet I felt closer to my own femininity. It was like I had released something, some blockage. Like I had worked magic on myself. Because all my inner shit would soon come to the fore to finally work on, and I would finally come out as trans a few years later.
O! to be grounded in my body! I reveled in the euphoria of embodied self-expression. I was truly, finally, me. My plethora of different hairstyle eras is testament to that. I had my era of pixie cuts, then bowl cuts (platinum blonde, and also playing with colors like seafoam green or cotton candy pink and blue), then I played around with bobs & microbangs. I buzzed my hair off again after me & my ex-wife broke up, again as a releasing. I kept that buzzcut going through the end of that year, then started growing my hair out. Had a cool mullet era in 2021 before things started evening out, and last year my hair was all shoulder length again. Perhaps not coincidentally I was also doing work the past two years to reintegrate my long-haired younger self that was closed off from herself and from the Us that is my consciousness.
And then, around Yule last December, I shaved all of my hair off.
The rest of this essay is about dysphoria and detachment.
My hair started falling out sometime around covid infection #2, in 2021. Thinning just noticeably enough to set off all my personal hang-ups with my hairline, with my face, with my blahblahblah we all know what gender dysphoria is like or at least anyone reading this knows enough that I don’t need to describe the experience. It pissed me off that my hard-won embodiment could be jeopardized by some hair loss. I felt disappointed, like I was backsliding or something. That’s a wrong way to look at it, and I knew that at the time, so it was curious to me that I still felt that way, that disappointment in myself. I wanted to release myself from the insecurities causing that dysphoria. I wanted a cleansing.
To be as clear as I can: what I have done is not what most trans women should do. Dysphoria is intense and real and no one is to blame for how their dysphoria manifests. The very best medical advice for transfems is to get that FFS, girl. There is nothing proscriptive about my bonkers-ass “scrape everything away, drag my dysphoria down to a mud pit, and choke it to death in a contest of wills” approach to working on my dysphoria. If I didn’t have my spiritual practice grounding me in this tonsure experience then I’d have been at significant risk for anxiety attacks, feelings of oblivion and doom, maybe even self-harm. It’s far, far better to treat your dysphoria than it is to try and overpower it. (That said, overpowering is cheaper if (like me) you’re in no shape to pay for surgeries, don’t understand how to navigate any bureaucracy, and are too nervous to crowdfund for anything.)
As with many things in my life in 2023, I wanted to detach myself from my insecurities about my embodiment so that I could see what it is that I *really* *actually* want, beyond expectations I put on myself, beyond patterns and choices and familiar behaviors. 2023 has been my year of detachment from the life I lived before long covid brought me into a new paradigm of disability that I couldn’t mask over or pretend I’m able for the sake of a job. My brain doesn’t work well for my writing style any longer. My cognitive pace is so different, so many more deadends and unimpressive trails of thought. It has actively felt bad to try and write. Which is why I have not been in right relationship with you, blog readers. Even now, I feel like I’m not writing well. These sentences are trash, this structure is meandering even for a blog post, etc. But I’ve worked on how to feel detached from that artistic disappointment. I actually consider myself to be on hiatus from being A Writer. I am semi-retired from being A Writer, with all the expectations that comes with that from a publishing world that grows ever more exploitative. I also worked on detaching myself from being A Teacher. Everything was on the table to be questioned. What use are any of my identities to the person I actually am now?
I have spent this year looking at the most plain and unadorned, severe-featured face in the mirror. Can I love this person? This me with dysautonomia, this me who can’t risk another covid infection, this me who is never getting her sense of community back to what it used to be, this me who can’t write well, this me with all of my sharp angles of bone, this me whose facial hair is growing back because of hormone imbalances from trying to get my tachycardia and my joint pain to stabilize, this me whose breasts have gotten smaller from weight loss while ill, this me who wonders what gender even is when you’re as alone as much as I am, this me who isn’t out performing her work like she used to, this me who doesn't get distressed over her hair anymore and wow this makes a difference actually, this me who finds more and more joy in the smallest parts of a day actually, this me who talks to trees, this me who is still learning, this me who works on her traumas, this me who does so with her ancestors, this me who has clawed her way back from such darkness, this me who knows she is beautiful.
Yes. Yes, I can love this person. Yes, I do love this person. I love the way I look. I love the way I feel. I love myself, flaws and all.
I have gained a newly-resolute confidence in my beauty, and that carries over into how others see me, strangers even. During the 2 or 3 days a week I would be out of the house this year, to go to my retail job (that has since ended because the owner suddenly closed the store. I can’t catch a financial break this year!) I would get complimented so often, and always as a woman. I’ve never been misgendered at a job less. Despite my obvious gender nonconformity, the love that I built up for myself was speaking for me and people see sisterhood in that. I can’t explain it; it’s like I was casting a glamour on everyone. People would marvel at my beauty or tell me about their queer granddaughter or hold up the checkout line telling me about a painful experience they went through—telling me, holding my hand, telling me because I have the vibes of someone who Gets It—or burst into tears when I walk into a room. Whether my bald head was shining out in the sun or whether I was wearing a headscarf or other head covering (which is almost 100% of the time when I’m outside, as per the rules of my tonsure), I have felt like the most powerful version of myself.
I scraped myself down to the rawest level of person I could be, and in so doing my womanhood claimed herself. That’s an important thing that I want folks to understand. It’s not that I was considering “detransition,” it’s that I was testing all of my identities to see what sticks around, what I am vs what I’ve been. It’s that I was interested in the question: “If I could feel grounded in my transfemininity & in my androgynous beauty without my favorite signifiers, if I could effectively assert my will over my dysphoria, would it matter to me what other people see me as?” Well, my womanhood sure stuck around, sure told me it matters. My female ancestors claimed me, held me. It’s not that I have defeated gender dysphoria. It’s that I know what my very core feels like. Its that I will never again be shaken from self-knowledge. You cannot kill me. You can’t even hurt me. Who is this You I’m suddenly referring to? Maybe it’s me. Maybe its cissexist society. Maybe it’s nobody. Maybe the assertion has its own value. Maybe asserting myself has its own value. Like my friend Sarah (whose awesome new novel, "Ripe," you should totally buy) told me I was last week, I am a badass bitch! I assert as much! I HAVE SURVIVED. Look at me. Drink your fill.
And here I am fighting on this Word document like I fought my dysphoria in the mirror. Struggling with the words, hoping to learn to love myself as a writer, hard-won phrase by hard-won phrase. I’m just asserting that too; this whole essay is barely artful, is mostly assertion. And here I am recognizing that kind of writerly meta-move as a move I tend to make. And here I am smiling because enough of my mind is elastic & bouncy that it almost feels like the old me. And here I am tempering that smile because I know it is fleeting, at least for now, and that the “old me” is at best an old friend I can check in with.
But why I made that meta-move is to avoid thinking about the paradox of self-restriction that I’ve realized with my life. Because like…I am restricting myself, that’s the point of a sacrificial tonsure. I’m choosing to keep from myself a site of embodied joy and self-expression, my favorite site of such things in fact. This should feel like a compromise, like a stifling, and the panic almost starts to set in with that “inner child” part of me only…it doesn’t. Because I’m choosing, and that makes all the difference. It’s my will, not a passive letting-happen. I am seen for who I am more clearly than ever, and I don’t know if I can get you to believe my will to know myself and love myself means that I “pass” better, and I don’t know if I can get you to believe it for the same reasons I don’t really talk about my tonsure with my friends: how do you put words to a religious experience?
We’ll see what I choose to do with my hair after this Yule, after a full year. We’ll see other parts of me I detached myself from, identities like Teacher or Writer, come back into ourselves in a healthier way. I won’t define myself or “My Work” by the university classroom, I won’t define myself by small press publishing’ s glorified MLM rat race, I won’t define myself by markers of progress in systems that I abhor. But I’ll be writing, and I’ll be teaching, and I’ll be joyously embodied. If this tonsure allows me to be all of those things, then that is not a self-restriction any more than a poem finding its best form is a restriction on the poem. This is pedagogy of selfhood. This is finding that finding yourself is a relationship between content and form. That living life is a process of revision.