Tales of a Semiotic Anomaly

Nonsense

2006-06-12T21:30:00.000-07:00

It shouldn't be true, but it is. It shouldn't be the way the world works. But it is. I swear. Hair. I swear! Where would we be without hair. Not only have I felt more sane, more happy, more centered since the shearing - but the world has responded in kind. It's as if we all knew that the long hair was an abnormal deviation, so we can now all sigh a huge sigh of relief, like it was a bad dream and the order of the universe has been set right again.

Even my three year old got used to it quick. Now he says he loves my hair.

One new friend was a little sad when she first saw me with the new "do" - she said she liked my hair. I said:

I kept it. It's in a bag at home, you can have it.

Another woman who never knew me with a shaved head, said upon seeing me that I have such a natural shaved head she couldn't even remember what it was like before!

And then, today, after years of living with a shaved head and coming to delight in and enjoy all the responses that come with it - I heard a new one, and really, felt at home when the visitor asked if I was dealing with an infestation of lice!!

Ahhhh....

Shear

2006-06-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

I shaved it all off tonight. Actually my five year old did most of the work - with my three year old assisting on scissors... For the five year old - it was a dream job - messy, yet detail oriented, somehow powerful without getting him into trouble. For the younger, it was just another silly game - until enough hair was gone that it changed the way I look. At that point, he got quiet, retreated - and later wouldn't let me put him to bed. He cried.

And you know, I feel sad too. I do - partly for his sadness, and the sadness of other friends and family who liked, no, loved, the hair - loved the me with the hair... I wish I could do this without hurting people's feelings... And without the external drama of change. Because inside, nothing really has changed, if anything now I am more in line with my insides.

But then there is also the part of me that is sad for myself. For leaving behind the girl who wore that hair, and the hair itself and the unique options it gave me, the easy ins in certain situations, the cultural currency, the automatic accessory, the feminity. And it is a dramatic change, if only on the outside, and for some reason, that's a little sad.

Then again - there is the huge welling of joy - a long and deep joy that doesn't need to compete with the sadness. Relief. The past few days I have found myself carrying a strong sense of peace deep in the middle of everything - and I think part of it was knowing that I was on the verge of this important re-transformation.

I'll admit it took a couple passes at the mirror, but pretty soon there was recognition. Oh yeah! I remember this, I remember this me.

Semiotic occurances

2006-05-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

The woman who called me a semiotic anomaly was particularly confused by the fact that I am a life-long, Broncos fan (the Colorado professional football team). I was there when they won their first Superbowl, in fact, I even cried. Somehow - she found my shaven headed-dyke identity incongruent with being a Broncos fan. I can't even keep track of the ways people misinterpret me based on their own presuppositions and assumptions. But I thought it would be fun to try and make a list. Things people have assumed about me (on more than one occasion) based on surface information:

That I'm a vegetarian
That I'm white
That I'm naive
That I'm heterosexual
That I'm Italian
That I'm a boy
That I'm a lesbian
That I'm Asian
That I speak English
That I can be trusted to watch their laptop while they run to the restroom
That I'm my partner's son
That I want to have sex with them
That I don't want to have sex with them
That I gave birth to both my kids
That I'm not the mother of my kids
That I'm particularly health conscious
That I had sex with a man to get my kids
That I'm a bad mom
That I'm a good mom
That I was once a punk
That I am a hippie
That I need an adult signature to open a checking account
That I am witholding something
That I'm not organized or detail oriented
That I like to process too much
That I'm emotional
That I'm distant
That I'm not the kind of person who would have sex on a public bus
That I am the kind of person who would...

Hmmm... Interesting exercise. I'd recommend it. Try it! Send me your lists!

It's all about hair

2006-05-16T22:06:00.000-07:00

Some cosmetologists are philosophers. The woman who has been cutting my hair - or not cutting it as the case may be - had this to say about the impending chop: if you can grow your hair out - you can do anything. It was nice to have the journey of the past three years put into that context. Yeah - it was something rather noble and important. Something sort of transcendant... I have a friend with dreads as long as my hair - that's a six year journey there. So - I know I am no champion either. Just a single voice in a cacophany of human hair endeavors.

Hair as Spiritual Teacher

2006-05-08T21:46:00.000-07:00

Nahhh... Never mind about liking it. Today - forget it. I can't take it - want it off! The only thing preventing an immediate removal (cause I still have my trusty electric razor) is the fact that I want to do a series of gender-bending photos - so I need to take advantage of the long hair while it's here. In the meantime, the hair is like everything in life right now, something to breathe through, something to pratice patience with, something to transcend. And the photos, at the very least, will be something I can use to remind myself that I'm not crazy, that I have been here and there. That I could return. Or re-return as the case may be. So with that in mind I will breathe - because today is not the day, and that's okay.

Oh, Under Here!

2006-04-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

Today I like it. I like the flowy thing, even felt pretty a couple times. Still feels like a trick though. And I have wondered if a wig wouldn't do just as well. Or maybe I could figure out how to do it up all butch. Probably takes a helluva lot of time, sticky stuff, and bobby pins and still doesn't feel right. Which is the problem with a wig too. Do people really feel pretty in wigs?

Gender Queer Under Where?

2006-04-20T00:11:00.000-07:00

I'm having a crisis. I look like a totally average unassuming white lady. And it's starting to get more and more demoralizing every day. No offense to the totally average unassuming white ladies out there - as if there were a way to generalize such a diverse group. Don't let me do that. That is dangerous. There is no singular unassuming white lady. That's a cognitive trap - a simplistic glitch in our otherwise complex and sophisticated neuro-wiring... Sorry. Let me try again.

I look like, well, not large, not small, medium. Not pretty, not ugly, just medium. And at the moment my hair is long, brown (though not light brown or super dark brown either), not straight or curly, and not super long, just medium. My voice is not too big, not too small either, but maybe one step up from medium (in general, though it has range - rarely witnessed). I tend to slouch a bit, not take up too much space, but not disappearing either. I move not too fast and not too slow. I'm nice, but not too friendly. I talk some, and am also quiet some which does mean I am more than just medium mysterious. I usually wear jeans and t-shirts. My skin is way past medium and well into light, actually verging on literally white.

Most of these factors have been pretty consistent my whole life. Except the hair. Age nineteen, I shaved it all off. Kept it short-short most of my adult life. I passed as a boy a lot. I liked it. It made sense of me in a lot of ways. I felt like a reverse Samson - always more powerful with a shaved head, more clear. In some ways. Less clear in others. Other's minds that is. Their own gender anxieties came out. They would call me sir, then say, oh I'm sorry ma'am, and blush. At first it made me blush too - then I got used to it and realized it wasn't about me. It was about revealing one of those cognitive traps. It's just something we do, simplify before thinking - it's what we're hard-wired to do. We have to practice strategies to dismantle that. Shaving my head was one way. I got to confront paradox every day. I got to be male and female sometimes all in the same minute. It was good exercise. And I'm always one for a mental challenge. I even did some gender bending performance pieces - transforming gender before the naked eye! People were readily convinced.

All that mediumness serves me well, as it turns out. It seems like there is a priority tracking system in our little human minds. It gets to a point where you can actually see people lumping you into binary code based on height (1 0), shape (1 0), skin color (1 0), hair length (1 0), etc. Height and shape = medium. Everything else fell to skin color and hair (talking would complicate things a bit but I did learn ways to make my voice even more medium so most people would skip that coding option and move on to an easier one). Skin color was easy - most people plop me right in the white pile (unless they have a highly sensitive ethnic analyzer in their brain in which case they might think this ultra white hue is almost beyond white, maybe even asian, occasionally italian and less often, but more accurately, hispanic).

Which means for me - it all comes down to hair.

Somewhere along the lines I decided to grow my hair out. I did feel a little trapped - like my identity was my hair style - and how lame is that? And I started feeling a little bald on the naked side and less on the Samson side, vulnerable. Two years, at least until it crossed over from that awkward growing out stage into official longness. Which means it's been just barely a year. And its felt completely weird for most of that time (just in the past few months I have had moments of actually not thinking about my hair). And what a pile of cognitive blips. Slowly but surely the sir's faded. I crossed over the medium hair line and firmly into "not short." And as my young children will tell you, boys can't have long hair - so if it's not short, it's also, not male.

But being not-male, is one thing. Being female, is quite another. Especially, female in a heterosexual world. I caught a guy checking me out in my rear-view mirror - did he like the shape of myhead? No. It was the hair. In general, people had less defenses up when talking to me with hair, they weren't on the tippy, flippy, floppy gender-bending scale. They didn't have to worry about any incongruity.

And a few people were even more willing to accept the possibility that I might be, not just white (because, again, I am more than just a little light), but, okay, maybe I could be latina (tons, and tons of light-skinned hispanic folks, by the way). Because without that dark, sexy facial stubble, that I know I could grow with the proper hormonal recombination, there was no room for this hairless, light-skinned latino in the binary code. Hair, now I know some latina's who can do hair - in a performance of femininity that I could never embody, much less aspire to. In fact, it almost takes my breath away, scares me even in a bizarre combination of ethnic and gender anxiety. If that is female then I am no way, never, no how, gonna live up to that! In fact, it was once such mestiza who made the promise of a sea of chocolate brown particularly intriguing. I always said, I like my hair, I just don't want it on my head. But, it was interesting to consider. What if it was on my head?

And so it is.

I used to define my gender as this: a boy who wanted to be a girl. Now I have tried on the mantle of woman and the boy can't breathe. He's sweating and suffocating and his eyes are bulging out. Roots of the patriarchy? I don't know. But it doesn't feel right. Doesn't feel fair. I don't want this hair.

Actually, I finally feel at peace with the hair. The hair itself. It's fine. It's interesting. It's vcrsatile and sometimes keeps my head warm. I like the hair itself, well enough. But what I don't want, is all the goo that comes with it. I don't want people to feel more at ease with me (usually), I don't want the social responsibilities of wearing the hair, the social reposnibilities of being checked-out in the rearview mirror. I don't want the way it softens me, the way it obscures me, the way it makes me seem more feminine, female; takes away all the other medium points. The way it makes it easier for people to avoid my incongruities.

Though it is a useful tool. I wish I could just whip out the hair when talking to a scared kids' mom, or when building bridges with the extremely non-queer of whatever stripe. I don't need for people to feel uncomfortable around me, that's not the point, but I also don't want you to see, something I'm not.

But that's the story of a semiotic anomaly; seeing something that's not.