A Moment of Portland PFLAG Joy is a place where our members can anonymously share meaningful experiences they’ve had as an LGBTQ+ person or someone special to an LGBTQ+ person. Let us know at info@pflagpdx.org if you have a story you’d like to share.
Since my daughter socially transitioned from male to female at the age of seven, hair has been a big deal.
As it is with other trappings of “traditional feminine identity”—the color pink, rainbows, unicorns, and all things cute—long hair is a signal: I am a girl.
Even back then I believed there were no “boy things” or “girl things.” Target and Carter’s and anywhere else I could get kids’ clothes for cheap had separate lanes for different genders, but I knew these associations were made up. And yet… Looking at the “boy haircut” my husband and I had imposed, I understood what motivates parents to wrap a pink bow around their bald newborn daughter’s head: we needed to increase strangers’ chances of correctly assuming our daughter’s gender identity. A two-week old might not care if someone misgenders them, but a person who has the courage to step forward and insist—This is who I am—sure does.
So, five years later, when she sat in a salon chair and asked a stylist to cut it off—not off (though it felt like off) but significantly shorter—I was apprehensive.
Though much of her early transition style had been feminine-forward, once everyone understood her to be a girl, she swapped skirts with jeans, pink with black, Dove Cameron with Billie Eilish. But no one could touch her hair. It grew past her chin, past her shoulders, longer than mine, until it fell halfway down her back, which is what her stylist held in one hand, a pair of gleaming scissors in the other.
Please, I’d said to the stylist—who is also trans—she has been growing out her hair for so long. We’re worried she’ll be misgendered and it would devastate her. Sitting in the waiting area—the parking lot for helicopter parents—I audibly gasped when twelve inches of hair fell to the floor in a single wet curl.
I couldn’t watch the rest. Pretending to read my book, I composed lines of reassurance I could repeat on the drive back home, whisper in her ear as she cried herself to sleep. Then I composed my face into neutrality as I heard her walk up behind me.
I—she began, her face crumpling into tears—I love it. I absolutely love it.
She cried, and her stylist cried, and everyone posed for photos. I can’t stop touching it! She giggled and gasped, returning her eyes to the mirror for reassurance that yes, this was she. My getting-too-cool-for-mom preteen was literally giddy with delight.
They say that gender transitions don’t happen to the transgender person; they happen to everyone else, who must transition to understanding. At this moment, I reached two realizations.
- My daughter was more comfortable with herself and her identity in society as a girl. She didn’t need to signal femininity because she already feels and is feminine.
- While I have opposed the binary, I’d been asking my daughter to maintain its dress code.
I don’t know what brought about the change. Maybe it was leaving Texas. Maybe it was not regularly hearing that her state leaders wanted to deny her access to healthcare or separate her from her parents. Maybe it was living in Portland and seeing trans and nonbinary people out living their best lives. Maybe she has begun to trust that she can more safely live her best life too.
The next day’s reveal at school was everything I’d hoped it would be: most people seemed to like her haircut, a few whispered little opinions behind her back, but my daughter was happy.
How do you feel about your haircut? I asked that night.
She smiled and snuggled down into her covers. I feel like exactly myself.