Fat Trans* Woman with Shortish Hair

Following up on Liss' post of a few weeks back (Fat Woman With a Pixie Cut), I mentioned in comments there that I was feeling inspired, and considering cutting my own hair short for the first time since I transitioned. Well, sorta - I did it once, about six months after I transitioned (in 1992), but it...wasn't successful.

(TW transphobia, non-graphic mention of violence)

I mean, I thought it looked cute, and of fairly similar length to my own here, but I was so early on in my transition that I just couldn't make it work. I got misgendered very VERY often, as opposed to the just "often" that was happening daily. I found that being misgendered was seriously a bad thing: it not infrequently led to violence against me. It's likely that's mitigated somewhat by it being twenty years later, but this is a reality that trans*-spectrum people face.

(end TW)

So there's a certain amount of screwing the courage to the sticking-point involved, for me, in having my hair cut short, as well as something of a political statement - the latter's value considerably lessened by the fact that being misgendered is now a thing of my past pretty much exclusively.

I am also, like Liss, fat. I'm currently something like 174 cm (5'9")*, and weigh approximately 120kg (~244 lb, 17st7). So there's some intersectionality here between being fat and being trans, but then I have a privilege in "getting away with" having short hair that Liss doesn't: my hair is almost completely grey, and I'm ten or so years older than Liss, so mainstream feminine identity means I should be shortening my hair at this point, so I can signal my unavailability to fertile males**, or some such evopsych bullshit. This is in tension with the societal precept that we fat women oughta have long hair anyway, because round-face-blah-long-lines-blah-bullshit-blah.

In the earlier thread, I posted a few pictures of my hair as it had been recently. While it looked lovely long and dyed, it was somewhat less lovely in grey (sadly, I am grey, not silver or white, as is often the case for genetic redheads - red runs in my family strongly, and parts of my not-scalp hair have always been reddish), and besides, given that i tend to feel hot far more often than cold, I found that I almost always wore it up in one manner or another, clipped, ponytailed, braided, whatever. At which point, I may as well have short hair!

In the end, I ceded my all-grey privilege to have short hair, because after I cut it - yes, I cut it, in about three minutes, last Wednesday morning - I then went on to dye it blue. Advantage to my particular type of greyness, it takes semi-perm dyes BEAUTIFULLY.

Enough blather. I'm going to take a shower now (7 minutes! Down from 27!), then take the picture you see below.



There we go: fat trans woman with shortish hair. Which is also blue.

Thanks to Liss for the inspiration, and to the Shakers with the incredible pictures and stories from that thread as well.

* My disability is such that I am shrinking notably - the doctor expects me to lose 10-12 cm (4-5") before I'm done, assuming I live my family's usual long life.

** As if!