Strands

The following story was written pre-transition by Carla.

Except for three bad haircuts, the details of which I have buried in my memory, I’ve worn my curly, dark blonde hair long. I’ve never had to get a perm or sleep with a head full of curlers. I braid my wet hair in the evening and unravel the dry strands in the morning, shake my head like the women on the Pantene commercials and go about my day. Despite a number of personally undesirable physical features, I know this: I have good hair. On warm summer days, I enjoy riding my bike shirtless, hair blowing in the wind, caressing my back like a gentle lover. 

Beside the hair on my head, I have hair around my mastectomy scars. More noticeable is the patch in the center of my chest: one long silver hair surrounded by a dozen or so black ones. I’ve got hair growing down the sides of my face–not as thick as, but resembling, sideburns–a mustache that is becoming darker as I age, and a patch of fuzz beneath my chin I absentmindedly tug on when deep in thought. Sometimes I wake mid-tug, realizing that the hairs have grown out of control, pull out a pair of scissors from the ball jar on my desk and trim without looking. I usually throw the  remnants into the garbage, but occasionally I let them fall to the floor, to be vacuumed  up by the service that cleans the office monthly. 

My mother’s hair was similar to mine in color, not texture. “I would pay to have your hair,” she told me on more than one occasion and pay for it she did, getting permed every sixth Saturday, while my father stayed home to mow the lawn, after which he drank one-piss colored beer, and watched my brother and me.  

When mom was ready to buy her first post-chemotherapy wig, she was unwilling  to spend what money we had on quality–Dad’s fatal heart attack eight months earlier  had left us with many bills, but no income. No matter, as the chosen blonde-brown  mullet of a hairpiece was an improvement over her head scarf–a telltale sign of cancer– more obvious than her puffy hands and arms, full of lymph that could not flow.

One afternoon after the purchase, my brother, and I, along with Andrea, a  neighborhood friend, sat in the family room as Mom readied herself in our small  downstairs bathroom for an afternoon of sunbathing: wig on head, straw cap on wig,  sunglasses. She pranced out of that bathroom and did a little pirouette for us, grabbed the straw cap with her left hand as she spun, only to have the wig fall off with it. She grabbed the wig and ran back into the bathroom. I hoped that Andrea hadn’t noticed the hair falling, though if she did, she was a tactful child and didn’t mention it.  

That incident led to a more expensive wig. As my mother expressed concern in the store over the cost, I reassured her with my nine-year-old bravado that it was worth  the money–the long brown-blonde locks looked much better than the previous one.  Besides, she could feel confident that it wouldn’t fall off. Whether to feel better herself or prevent me from having another potential “oops, my mother’s hair just fell off, please pretend that you didn’t notice” moment, she made the purchase.  

During this time, I refused to look at her bald. It was a small, self-imposed protection from a sight I imagined would scare me. It was enough to see the chunks of hair that clogged the shower drain and feel the strands that wrapped themselves around  the soap. I detested the texture, the hairy lines that disrupted the formally smooth surface. I’d stand away from the shower head as the water beat down in front of me,  stick the bar underneath the controlled rain, and try to unravel the hair. If that technique failed, I scraped off my mother’s lost hair with my fingernails and worked the ridges down to an acceptable evenness before using. 

Her hair started to return a year after it fell out. She was in remission then and  jovial — luxuriating in the thicker, curlier hair growing on her scalp. Called into her bathroom one afternoon, I bound down the hall, trying to prepare myself for whatever was to come. She was gazing at her reflection. “This is how your hair grew in when you were a baby. You were the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead,” she  said, pointing to the curl on her own head that had started to form in the center. I endured her recitation: “And when you were good, you were very, very good, and when you were bad, you were horrid.” Nausea washed over me. The comparison: I was like her. I didn’t want to be anything like her: weak, sick, dependent. I looked at her, trying to hide my disgust, then walked away. 

Today my hair is my only overt feminine feature. The shape of my lower body is  obscured — though not nearly as much as I’d like — by baggy men’s jeans. Because I  lift weights, my post-mastectomy chest looks like man-pecs if I wear a tight shirt. My  large blue eyes might appear feminine in a face with a delicate nose and mouth — i.e.  not mine. Cropped short, my hair would scream lesbian, dyke, queer, hard ass, and  occasionally sir, as sometimes happens, most often when I have my hair hidden from  view. Instead, my long hair brings to mind words like pretty, soft, feminine–not how I  want to be seen. I never wanted to be a girl.

I remember locking myself in the upstairs bathroom of my house when I was ten.  A huge mirror ran the length of the two-sink washroom, which was separated by a door  from the toilet and bathtub. I took off my t-shirt and shorts, peeled down my underwear and stepped out of it.

With my first sock gone, I recoiled at the feeling of the matted gold carpeting beneath my foot as I wobbled to remove the other. Locating the stool, I took one step up and turned toward the mirror. I grabbed my right thigh and pulled up a handful of flesh, an immense flesh that filled up the bottom of my classroom chairs at school, my fat spilling over into the air.

My thighs were thick like my mother’s, visible proof that we were linked, in our physicality, our feminine vulnerability. Round, soft hips had begun to sprout, like beans planted for a school experiment, seemingly overnight. My hands clasped the curves and stretched the skin as far as it would travel. Releasing one roll to attack the next, I noticed my stomach flowed with the same softness. There  were no clean, straight lines on my body, just layer upon layer of wasted food forming an undesired feminine plushness. I wanted none of it.  

After my stomach, came my breasts. “I asked the doctors’ about your breasts when you were born,” my mother explained once after I’d inquired about my baby pictures. “He told me that some babies are born with them.” Despite their presence  with me since the beginning, they’d started to migrate out in the last few months — filing up space that instinctively felt like it wasn’t mine to take up. I cupped and pulled them to  the side, tried to imagine my body without them. These must go, too, I thought.  My attention turned towards my face: chubby cheeks that inspired classmates to call me Ms. Piggy. Distraught over how to change my facial structure, I ran my fingers through the knots in my hair and smiled, remembering how when I was five I’d opened up a fortune cookie that told me I had beautiful hair and even then I believed it to be  true.  

I stepped down from the stool and felt the carpet underneath my toes–gross and  dirty–I hated the carpeting. Everything else in the house had been redone — the walls,  kitchen floor, the bedrooms, even the ceiling of the closet-sized downstairs powder  room, which had been painted peach–but this had been left, waiting. I slid my feet  across it, like a horse kicking up its back legs, creating a friction that burned the bottom  of my heels. When I got winded, I stopped and turned again towards the mirror. I took  a step sideways with one leg, so that my upper thighs no longer touch and released a hot stream of urine onto the matted floor. After my bladder emptied, I put my clothes back on and opened the door.  

“Mom,” I hollered. “I peed on the floor.” 

She walked into the bathroom, glanced down at the mess, and sighed as she bent down to find cleaning rags in the cupboard.  

“Why did you do this?” 

“I wanted to know what it felt like,” I responded. 

When I was 25, I played around with my image while preparing for my mastectomy; a surgery chosen in hopes that it would reduce my inherited risk of cancer from 78 percent down to two. I wanted to avoid being shocked by the change.

Again, I  locked myself in my bathroom and removed my tight, electric blue long john shirt and  tossed it on top of the toilet seat. Turning my attention to the mirror, I grabbed one of the rolls of ace bandages that my girlfriend and I kept around and began the slow process of wrapping the cloth around my chest, trying to figure out how to flatten my  breasts without cutting off circulation.

It was awkward, trying to keep the bandage taut while rolling it around my body and I quickly lost patience. One breast spread out as if flattened in a mammography machine, but the other bulked up and threatened to spill out of the top, like I’d cinched my waist to make my bosom spill over the top of a corset. Nonetheless, it was as good as I could get it. I put my shirt back on with my eyes closed, pausing to pull the sleeves down before appraising my work. Eyes opened: I looked like a football player, puffed up in the chest, but slightly lopsided. My reflection was hardly flattering. I thought about using the business card of the plastic surgeon I’d been referred to in my desk drawer.  

The memory of my three-year-old self helped me decide to throw away the card.  Someone had mailed me a present that year, a handmade doll. The baby came with  her own crocheted blue blanket and a bottle forever grasped by her hand. My favorite  toys were matchbox cars, but my mother was determined to get me to play with the doll.  She explained how ‘playing’ with my new present involved wrapping her up in the  crocheted blanket attached to her gown to make sure that she was warm and sticking  the nipple into the hole in her mouth. Bored after a few days, I put the doll away. As she tucked me into bed one night, my mother asked about the baby which I’d put in a box with my other stuffed animals. Satisfied with the answer, she kissed my forehead, patted my stomach, and said goodnight. I stiffened at her touch. The patting  reminded me of where babies came from, which reminded me that I was a girl — a girl  who would one day be capable of procreation.  

Two years after the mastectomy, I sat with my legs in stir-ups, waiting for the first  male gynecologist that I’d ever seen to take out the speculum. “You have a tipped  uterus,” he informed me; it was my first time hearing such news.

He explained that due to the angle, he’d have to insert a finger into my anus and another into my vagina to  palpate my uterus with his free hand. He thrust his fingers into me and wiggled them around. If he was trying not to cause me pain, I couldn’t tell. I was sore afterwards. The sensation of his hands pushing on my pelvis stayed with me for hours. He reviewed my chart and recommended I have a complete hysterectomy —  because I was a carrier of the Breast Cancer 1 mutation, the physical aspects of the  woman I never wanted to be were a breeding ground for disease. Ovarian cancer, to be  specific. I consented to the surgery. Parts were removed. Options ended. One thing  became conclusive: the only thing that I ever gave birth to was my own uterus, as the surgeon pulled it — along with my ovaries, fallopian tubes and cervix — through my vaginal cavity. 

The same gynecologist informed me I needed to take estrogen replacement pills. The artificial estrogen — which would’ve increased my chances of developing breast  cancer if I still had breasts — would greatly reduce the increased risk of osteoporosis  and heart disease I’d have going through menopause before the age of thirty. I couldn’t help but realize that I was a shot of testosterone — “T” as it’s often referred to in the  queer community — away from changing my identity. 

I fantasized about taking T instead of E. I imagined looking like a shaggy hippie boy. The random pubic-like hairs that had been threatening to overtake my face for the  last eight years would finally have what they needed for a complete takeover, and I — too lazy to be bothered with daily shaving — would acquiesce. But even as I delved into the image, I fought to keep it away. I couldn’t imagine telling my family. Besides, I’d most likely go bald, break out with horrible acne and gain weight–all common side  effects. Yes, I wanted to be a man, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be the man that  taking shots of testosterone would cause me to become.  

I first learned that someone could change her gender when I was seven, glued to the television screen as Kate Bornstein talked about transitioning from male to female on Phil Donahue’s talk show. I knew what she spoke of when she described her childhood, the juxtaposition of feeling one way, but being perceived another. 

I met Bornstein shortly after my mastectomy. She’d come to Portland as part of a tour for a performance piece. During the intermission, despite my normal reluctance to  approach famous people, I walked over and introduced myself, told her about seeing  her on Donahue. “Thanks for fucking with my head,” I said, hoping she would  understand the implication. I jogged back to my seat before I could find out. During the performance, she spoke about getting breast implants, having her penis removed,  learning how to talk like a woman and even how she’d explained it to her mother. After  twenty-some years, she realized that she didn’t feel like a woman, didn’t feel like a man. “I’m somewhere in the middle,” Bornstein explained. 

I’ve been left to ponder this middle ground since my hysterectomy. I could cut my hair, take T, ask friends to refer to me using male pronouns, change my name to Carl, watch my body undergo a second puberty, and learn how to avoid having my voice crack when I laugh — even figure out how to explain it to my family. 

Simply cutting off my hair would be an easier way of signaling to others my gender ambiguity. I’m horrible when it comes to talking care of it anyway; I easily go a week without washing. I trudge through the days: Monday blurs into Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday; the dirt continues to accumulate. I attempt to conceal the neglect by pulling my hair into a ponytail. It resists, becoming fuzzier and fuzzier. I look like I have a messy halo around my head. Around Wednesday, I stop brushing the tangled mass. I try to smooth it down with my fingers, and then pull the hair back and  roll it into a sloppy version of a bun. By Saturday, I consider shaving it off. Instead, I take a long shower, wash my long tresses, comb out the knots, amazed at the wads of hair that have been waiting to come out. I take the hairy clumps between my thumb and index finger and roll them into a ball. I debate on whether to throw it in the trash or out  the window, so that the birds can use it for a nest.  

I’ve been indulging in this ritual for over a decade. 

And so, every day, the electric clippers in my medicine cabinet go unused. Carl waits. But Carl would be only a fraction of the story; the disconnected strands, swept into a dustpan and thrown out with the trash, would hold the rest.