His/Her-Story Part Two

As far back as I can remember I wanted to grow my hair long. My mother insisted on getting me a short boy's cut, and at the time she was well within her rights to override my naive fashion sense. If it was up to me I would've gone to kindergarten in the nude.

I remember liking the cute MacGyver curls that formed naturally along my neck. Recently I've returned to a shorter cut, not so much like Richard Dean Anderson's 80s mullet, but with the cute curls. All my life, I've always seen something pretty in the mirror that I wanted to amplify.

Once the choice was mine to make, I stopped getting haircuts. I went through a phase of being known at high school as "white afro boy." Pretty soon it was shoulder length. Later I would discover that long hair also fits into the Otaku stereotype. I wonder if there's a lot of crossover between anime nerds and transvestites, or if it's just me.

People always asked me why I kept my hair long, cycling through the catalog of relatable cliches to try and pin one on me. Are you a surfer? Um, in interior Alaska? No. Are you a stoner? In fact, I'm about as psychedelic as a person can be without doing drugs - I didn't so much as try a pot brownie until my thirties. Are you a heavy metal fan? Not really. Music is a big part of my life and there is a place in it for metal, but I tend to find the emotional palette limited and too overtly macho.

No one ever asked if I was a transvestite. I suppose if the thought occurred to them, they might have stifled it for fear of offense. Up until recently, I would have resisted the label, which has become rather derogatory. New terms like genderqueer have arisen to cover the middle ground between the sexes. But Eddie Izzard reclaimed "transvestite," which is still a distinct term, if misunderstood. "Eonism" goes further back and has a cooler sound to it that would make a catchy blog title, although hardly anyone knows what it means.

The real failure of "transvestite" is that it presumes that cross-dressing is the whole story. The truth is everyone ends up with a mixture of male and female traits. The key trait that gets misplaced in a transvestite's psyche is the desire to be cute, pretty, or beautiful, to display oneself, and to be appreciated as such. This behavior borders on sexual but is distinct from it, and it involves fashion only insofar as fashion is the means to achieve the desired display of beauty.

Recently, at my first gig with shorter hair, I discovered a small but vocal contingent of fans who liked the long hair. You just can't win.