Misgendering

Recently, Laura wrote a post that's really about child gendering.

I tried to add this comment, but blogger is broken and won't allow it:

Personally, I think it's hilarious when strangers assume I'm female based on my hair from behind. The look on their faces when I turn back, and they see my scruffy facial hair, and I got to say something vapid like "Oh, never mind little old me" in the deepest bass I can manage is priceless.

I thought a bit more about it while I ranted and raved and bounced off the walls about the technical issue that keeps me from commenting on that post.

It dredged up a lot of old, painful memories.

Mom never wanted me to grow my hair out.

The way I remember it, I decided that I did, shortly after my parents decided to divorce. Dad took me to the barbershop where I'd gotten my hair cut my entire life.

I vividly remember the place. Two guys ran it: Mac and Leroy. I don't know why, but I always preferred Leroy.

Going there was a treat. I'd hang out and play with stuff while I waited in line. They always had cool toys for this purpose. This was where I learned to solve that puzzle with the horse shoes, chains, and rings (TODO: find an image/gif link, assuming kids these days don't know what I mean).

Recycling was starting to be a thing back then. We'd buy a bottle of, say, Coca-Cola. We'd also buy some peanuts to dribble into the neck and make it extra-delicious. And then we'd spend an extra $0.10 to take the bottle home.

Then we'd get a $0.10 refund to bring it back intact.

As a huge bonus, we could also get $0.10 for every other bottle we found on the side of the road and also brought back.

I never delved into the details of what actually counted for a refund. I didn't have a clue about numbers and money back then. Much less ideas about what counted as an "intact bottle." It was just something obvious that everyone knew.

A few years later, I had a civics teacher (I've forgotten his name, which makes me sad) who spent his nights as a security guard at the Planters peanut plant. If a glass jar of peanuts fell off the pallet, they couldn't sell the things. So they just gave them away to whichever employees might want them.

He always had a jars of peanuts available to share with anyone who might be interested.

I think that, in that day and age, none of us considered the basic fact that Planters couldn't sell those peanuts because of the possibility that glass shards had fragmented into the inside.

Or maybe that was just those of us who considered ourselves poor and desperate for food.

Now I have a flashback that's even more vivid.

You drove out of our neighborhood and took a right onto this road that led to my elementary school. When I was 8 (or maybe 9 or 10), I decided that I was old enough to ride my bike to school.

It was probably a mile. Maybe a mile and a half. I remember being super-embarrassed because my dad assembled my bike incorrectly, so the goose-neck leading to the handlebars was backwards. To this day, I don't know whether he or the designer was wrong.

On the way home, I missed the left turn back into our neighborhood.

I wound up in a little cul de sac packed with mobile homes and a lot of African-American faces.

I shamefully remember a feeling of terror. I felt all these people looking at me, and I felt their hatred.

In retrospect, I suspect I probably just felt their fear. "What's that chubby white kid doing here on that shiny bike?" comes to mind.

This was somewhere around 1980, so racism was alive and well in America. The KKK was still doing just fine when I graduated high school 10 years (ish) later.

I don't remember anything that I'd ever experienced up to that point that would have given me any reason to think that darker-skinned people are different.

But my father, at least, had some pretty seriously racist opinions.

And my mother's family...well, I'm not sure what I learned from them. I know that my mother gloated a little bit when one of my cousins had a kid with an African-American father. But then she told me that she knows they don't like Mexicans when I half-jokingly asked her what Arizonans know about them.

All this has wandered very far afield.

This post isn't really about racism. If I had an editor, this part would all get filtered into a different post.

It's about genderism.

Shortly after I decided to start letting my hair grow out, which was shortly after my parents' decision to divorce, my dad took me back to Mac and Leroy's barbershop.

I just had another vivid memory. They had these big handles on their chairs, kind of like you have on the side if old recliners. It let them raise and lower the chairs, and spin them around. It was usually a big treat when they'd spin the chair around and stick a mirror in front of your face, and let you see what they'd done to the back of your head in the other mirror.

I will never forget the way my soul collapsed when Leroy showed me the way he'd trimmed my hair exactly the same way he'd done it my entire life.

I had decided to change my hairstyle months before that. I told him so, and that I was just starting.

I strongly suspect that my father told him "No, just keep it business as usual, and get rid of that extra fuzz that's started to grow in since I ditched his mom."

But I'll never know.

My hair was just starting to look scruffy, and he chopped it off.

When Leroy died of cancer, and that barbershop closed, I'm ashamed to admit that I was glad.

I mean, really, I'm horrified now that that was my reaction. This is probably the moment that prepared me, emotionally, for shaving it all off again when I got into boot camp. And I'm sad now that people die.

But, at the time?

It's been 35 or 40 years, and I'm still angry about this!

All this has been a fun (?) trip down nostalgia lane. But I didn't want to write about me.

I'm a full-grown man. It doesn't challenge my masculinity if someone else mistakes me for a woman from behind.

Does it challenge Mal's?

Will it make a long-term difference if it does?

When we're out in public, he regularly corrects people who assume he's female due to his hair. Sometimes, we will also.

Are we ruining his life by not playing into stereotypes?

Laura already noted that it would be "easy" to chop his hair off and make him "look like a boy."

Would we make his life easier if we did?

Better question: would we make his life better?

Important detail: we offer to just chop all his hair off every time we have to comb through its tangles.

Which is awful.

He isn't ready.

I haven't been around for any of his hair trims. The last one sounds like it was awful enough that I'm terribly sad I wasn't there.