Ive been growing my hair out a while, and now that it reaches my shoulders I'm getting misgendered again.
Its a bizarre experience because its really making it clear how tenuous the ability to pass can be- my dose of T is the same, I dress the same, I talk the same.It could be dysphoria inducing but thankfully it's not. It is really fucking frustrating though.
Not that it should matter but I'm not just doing it for personal preference, I'm doing it for cultural reasons. Im doing it because hair is sacred, braiding it is ceremony and its a symbol of cultural connection and pride. When we cut our own hair its often when we're in mourning, or when we've experienced a really big life change, but it has to be a personal choice.
Native men are still having their hair chopped off without consent, even now that everyone has learned to acknowledge the atrocities done at residential schools.
Literally just last year an elder's braid was cut off and thrown away when he was anesthetized for a surgery on his leg. He had been growing it for 30 years, and he was going to give it to his sister when he passed. In his 80s he wont have time to grow it out that long again. Young boys still have their hair cut at schools, they get bullied, misgendered, emasculated for expressing a masculinity that isn't white.
This comes from a long tradition of forcing us into white expressions of gender- boys had their hair cut when they were kidnapped by the government and put in residential schools. It went along with punishing Native kids for speaking their languages, taking their toys and forcing them to pray to a christian god.
That's what hurts when people misgender me now. It's not dysphoria, it's because I'm being misgendered for expressing my cultural identity. This is why it fucking sucks when trans people criticize other trans people for not "trying hard enough to pass" because what the fuck does that mean? Let's unpack it for a second, because if it means we should cut our hair and stop wearing beaded jewelry then you're asking us to assimilate.
You don't have to be native to feel masculine with long hair, and I want you to be respected no matter how you express your gender, but this just feels like obvious racism that people don't want to admit to. It's not just a talking point that different cultures have different expressions of gender. It's real, it's personal, and it hurts.
This isn't even getting into the erasure of two-spirit people. The gender binary, the lie of biological sex and all the pseudoscience that comes with it- that was imposed on us. It's not natural and it's not science.
Decolonization requires the acceptance of trans people, of all kinds, no matter what they look like.
