During my girlfriend’s gender transition, we experienced many “firsts” together, some of them resonating with me in unexpected ways. This past Memorial Day when we were at the Jersey Shore, she asked me to teach her how to braid her hair.
All I knew how to do was a basic braid, which entails wrapping three sections of hair around each other as evenly as possible. She sat on a chair across from me. I demonstrated (rather sloppily, but with care) with one braid down her left shoulder and another on her right. It came with memory for me, and she didn’t mind that I couldn’t articulate the process.
Her hair felt so smooth, so lush and silken. I’d mess up every time she moved her head around, so I braided and re-braided. On the third attempt, I gently turned her chin towards me, and she smiled. My heart felt lighter. I kissed her and she grinned. I wasn’t just bearing witness to her femininity. I was invited into it. And something in me shifted.
When I was a child, I didn’t understand what it meant to be invited into femininity — mine or anyone else’s. Now, as a transgender and genderfluid adult, I realize that’s because it was never pleasurable. When it came to my hair, one of the few physical features I always liked about myself, there was no room to experiment nor play. My mother controlled every strand.
My first memory of that pain was when I was 3 years old. She brushed my hair in the living room of my childhood home, but I winced in pain: “Mommy, it hurts!”
That only made her brush harder.
My dad soon enough walked in. “Hey!”
My mom continued without a flinch.
“HEY,” he raised his voice. “You’re hurting her!” My dad snatched the brush from her hands.
The incident, like all the others, was never spoken of again.
I have scattered memories at the hair salon, a place I associated with betrayal. However, it wasn’t always that way. My first memory of being at a hair salon involved me collaborating with the stylist, where we agreed on merely trimming my mid-length hair.
“Just an inch,” she pinky-promised, and then the hairdresser intentionally spun the chair away from the mirror, so I couldn’t see my reflection and, therefore, how much hair was actually being cut off in real time.
When my new hair length was finally revealed, it was much shorter. My hairstyle had completely changed, far shorter than we had discussed. I bawled my eyes out and kicked my feet in the chair.
My mother gritted her teeth and whispered in my ear about how the women in the salon stared at her, that they thought she was a bad mother, and that if I “kept this act up,” next time I’d have my head shaved. My tears were my only ammunition and my mother’s shame was the only defense I had. I regret not crying harder.
When it came to my hair, it was always about her. I eventually realized that my hair was not my own. It was hers.
On school nights growing up, I spent at least an hour under heated hair tools because of my mother. After washing my hair in the shower, there was the initial blow dry, and then the straightening.
When I was 11, my mother once burned my ear with the straightener. When I yelped, she criticized me for moving too much, for being antsy in the blue butterfly chair in front of her. Although she never apologized, I assumed it was an accident. My dad noticed the dry, inflamed skin on my ear I couldn’t stop picking at.
“Did she do that on purpose?” he asked.
I insisted she didn’t at the time, but I couldn’t help ruminating on it.
I don’t know if my mother was strategic about me not getting a haircut around the time of the burn mark, but I know a hairdresser never saw the burn mark. In fact, hairdressers applauded how healthy my hair looked despite the frequent heat styling, a sneaky way to disguise her work. My mother always used name-brand heat protectant, like some kind of self-protecting ritual.
Eventually, to get out of the nightly heat hair styling routine, I began occasionally using a shower cap while bathing — but never more than one night in a row, as my mother nagged me for how greasy it could get. When it came to my hair, it was always about her. I eventually realized that my hair was not my own. It was hers.
By the time I was 13, my hair became brittle. My mom didn’t need to do my hair anymore, because I did it myself. I internalized what she thought of my hair, the very physical feature I inherited from her that I once cherished. I hadn’t left the house with my natural hair texture in years.
“Natty,” my mother called it. It’d be years until I learned how that word — short for “natural” — was racially weaponized against Black people, particularly Black women.
That morning, I decided not to style my hair before going to school. It was a sudden decision. Up late from a restless night of tossing and turning in bed, I didn’t have it in me to straighten it. Despite the discomfort of how my natural hair felt on my shoulders, I knew I had to leave the house with my natural hair one day eventually. It wasn’t right to hide such an integral part of who I was.
I walked from the bus to my locker with my head down, not to make any eye contact with a peer, uncertain about whether I’d regret the snap decision.
“Wow!” said a classmate named Katie, one of the pretty girls I sat in front of in homeroom.
I always secretly admired how thin and beautiful she was with straight, mid-length blond hair. Her eyeliner and mascara never seemed to smudge. She wore the best color-coordinated outfits, each a masterpiece only to be reborn the next following day. (In hindsight, my admiration for her was for sure queer-coded, though she will never know.) That day, her hair was braided.
“Is that your natural hair?” She asked.
I nodded, shy from the attention.
“It’s so pretty!”
Once Katie admitted it, it felt real. I only wished my mother was there to hear it. The compliment would have wounded her, perhaps to a place of self-reckoning.
A week after Memorial Day, my girlfriend hung out at another friend’s house together to play with her new kittens. As she softened and raised the pitch of her voice to talk to the squirmy kittens, she glowed. I noticed, then, that her hair was braided. No longer did I need to secretly admire a pretty girl from afar — I was part of her feminine journey.
I never considered that a ritual once associated with such profound childhood trauma could be transformed into something intimate and even healing. Braiding my girlfriend’s hair helped me not just feel closer to her, but reclaim what was stolen from me years ago.