Hair, Gender, & the In-Betweem

HAIR PLAYS A MAJOR ROLE IN NOT ONLY HOW WE SEE OURSELVES BUT HOW SOCIETY VIEWS US. VICTORIA SOLIZ EXPLORES HER HAIR’S MEANING AND HOW IT’S IMPACTED HER JOURNEY TO FIND WHO SHE REALLY IS.

When I was little, I remember constantly dropping hints to my mom that I wanted to cut my hair. “But you look so pretty,” she would say. “You’ve been growing it since you were a baby.”

My hair was so long that I couldn’t braid it without having to twist and contort my body to reach it. I used to sit on my bedroom floor at night, trying to do a simple braid on myself and breaking down because it didn’t turn out correctly.

I continued to push on cutting my hair. My nana would always chime in, “You don’t want to look like a boy.”

Those words haunted me. I felt the only remaining piece of my femininity was my hair. I already pushed the limit by not agreeing with a lot of feminine traits – I didn’t like the things other girls liked, and didn’t feel quite right with the term ‘girl.’ But my hair was the one thing I couldn’t change. If I changed that, I wondered, how else would I even be a girl?

Long hair has always been deemed ‘feminine’ across many cultures. However, Katie Walters, a therapist who specializes in LGBTQ+ based care with Life Works DSM, notes how times are changing.

“I think our culture is increasingly diversifying in terms of social acceptability with gender expression and hair. The days of boys having short hair and girls having long hair are definitely behind us, though there are still challenges with assumptions,” she says.

Walters notices this frequently with her clients. “Of the clients I see, clients who actively explore or have more exposure to gender construct and gender expression seem more aware of and intentional about the use of hair to express their gender,” she says. “[They] tend to stand outside of the antiquated gender norm idea that ‘boys have short hair and girls have long hair’.”

It can be difficult and scary to navigate gender exploration especially because of societal norms. Samantha Kemp Carlin, another Life Works DSM therapist, has found a useful way to discuss this with clients.

“I like to pull other people from media that we know and say ‘look, here’s this person that has this identity you’re looking to embrace and they have this hairstyle and nobody sees that as feminine or masculine or whatever,’” Carlin says.

In middle school, I started to not feel in tune with my femininity. It’s hard to explain how it feels. All I knew is that it didn’t feel right.

It was in that same time frame that I was finally allowed to chop off my hair. I started small with a couple of inches. Then freshman year of high school I went for the big chop. I was terrified that my mother or nana would be disappointed in me but, surprisingly, they welcomed it. I even seemed to empower my own mother to cut off her hair and with each snip of the scissors, things started to align.

Then started the bleaching. Hues of pinks and blues, greens and oranges, covered my head. I loved it.

Then came the ultimate decision: to shave my head.

While my hair was still pretty short, it didn’t feel right. I was already exploring my gender outside of the feminine norms but because of my longer hair, I felt that’s how people saw me: feminine. No matter how I dressed, with this hairstyle I was only going to be seen as feminine.

That’s when I decided to shave my head.

I remember sitting down in the bathroom, heart racing as my friend got her razor ready. She had previously shaved her head and was encouraging me to do the same from the start of when we met. However, I was still conflicted. What if I looked bad? Would my boyfriend still find me attractive with a shaved head? My stomach was in knots. How would my mother react? What if the only thing I had going for me was my hair — this small part of my femininity that I wanted so desperately to cling onto.

“Maybe I should wait,” I said to my friend. She snapped the guard on the razor in place. “Maybe I’m just not ready.

I wondered, though, would I ever be ready? Would I ever want to go against the societal norm that I was told since a baby?

The buzzing sound pulled me back into the moment. In one fluid motion, my friend had shaved a line directly down the center of my scalp. There was no going back.

Afterwards, I stared at myself in the mirror to take it all in. I didn’t feel so weighed down, both physically and mentally. I was still the same me. I was still loved by the people in my life and the femininity I had before shaving my head was still there, only stronger.

Shaving my head allowed me to fully express the way I see my gender. While I’m comfortable in my femininity, I also identify with something more. Something outside of the binary. I didn’t need my hair to tell me I was feminine or to be in tune with that side of myself. Underneath, I remained the same person I’d been my whole life. So, if you’ve been debating whether or not to shave your head, rally those razors and go for it.