At 8 years old I developed an acute case of trichotillomania: a compulsive urge to pull out my body hair. I would sit in class plucking out each individual arm hair like it was my job. One time my teacher noticed and asked me to stop. How curious it was that she asked me to cease, not the kids in my class who told me I looked like a monkey.
A few years later I began to use my sister’s razors and shave off all of my body hair: my body became one prolonged razor burn.
A few years after that my classmates started to call me a “terrorist” because I was brown and had facial hair. I begged my father every day to let me shave my face. On my 13th birthday he gifted me a razor. That first shave — there were no visible cuts (but that doesn’t mean they weren’t still there).
I looked in the mirror and I remember thinking: I look beautiful (by which I meant — I look more white). A few years later I learned about a movement called “Beards for Peace,” to protest the war. I did not shave for a year — my beard, it was the run-on sentence that taught me poetry — finding beauty outside standard grammar, creating my own definition.
A decade later when I started my gender transition, so many people told me that I would be more “believable” if I “just shaved.” I had spent so many years coming into myself and yet here I was, once again, being told that I was the problem.
I remembered my sister and mom being told that they were “mannish” for having arm hair and a slight mustache. I remembered all of the brown women I knew who were made to feel like they were never feminine enough. I resolved then and there not to remove my body hair because I believed in the femininity of my hairy brown foremothers.
Why should we have to look like what white men have told white women to be in order to be regarded as feminine? I would rather be my own kind of beautiful.
Their beauty is a razor. It disappears. My beauty, it blooms.
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