At some point recently, my hair reached the longest it's been since before I transitioned (about a dozen years ago). I had long hair my entire life before that point.
(I would describe myself as a tomboy in childhood, but I never wanted my hair to be short. There's probably a bunch of reasons. Familiarity with my long hair and fear of change is likely the main one. For a long time, I wouldn't let hairdressers trim my hair more than was absolutely necessary. I also did not want to be mistaken for a boy, which is the opposite of what you might have expected from someone who eventually tried to live as one. (Surely that should have been a red flag in considering whether or not I should transition. But anyway.))
I started detransitioning in November 2020. Most of my detransition was administrative (changing documents back to my birth name and correct sex). Although I’d stopped taking testosterone in 2016, most strangers continued to perceive me as male. So growing my hair out became part of my detransition process. I figured that might be one of the main things affecting that perception… and it was one of the few things I could easily do.
Not too easily, though. A bunch of times in the past decade I had tentatively wanted to grow my hair out, but I always reached that one mid-stage where I absolutely hate how my hair looks and cut it all off. When I hit that stage last year, I dealt with it by giving myself an undercut. (So now I have one shorter layer under the rest of it, but at least I made it through.)
I didn’t realize how much I had riding on my hair until I had a dark moment a while ago in which I wondered what the most amount of “damage” I could do to myself was, and one of the answers I came up with was cutting my hair off.
I think somewhere in the back of my mind I kind of hoped that there was a possibility of seamlessly sliding back into my life as it was going when I was 21, resume “living as a woman,” and on most days, I could completely forget this whole thing ever happened. After one giant setback, I might finally get to live as the “Authentic” version of myself — the one who is a 34-year-old woman.
My hair length reached my shoulders in the spring of this year, and at that time, I started realizing that having long hair wasn’t going to help strangers perceive me as female as much as I hoped it would.
It was disappointing. But it was a stage of acceptance that was necessary for me to pass through. The way that I walk through the world is never going to be the way it was before.
So I went from medium-length hair into having long hair without much fanfare. Any magical change in the perception of me was not coming. So I thought.
I’d accepted that I was a woman (and have been a woman my entire life) really early on in the detransition process. (I mean, the logic is incredibly simple.) So throughout my detransition, as I grow my hair out and as I experiment with clothing style, I’ve had that certainty of knowing what I am. I assumed that most of the disconnect I was feeling was because I knew who I was and nobody else was recognizing it.
Things have felt differently lately, though. They feel… familiar.
While showering the other day, it occurred to me that despite how long it’s been since my hair has been this length, the way I manage it is the same. Like… my muscles—in my hands and arms particularly—have retained the memory of having long hair… how I gather it all back in both hands when I’m washing it, how I untangle it with my fingers, how to use hair claws and scrunchies, how I fidget with my bangs. There’s no struggle. It’s just effortless.
Despite the concept of detransition sometimes seen as a “going back,” there aren’t very many things that detransition returned to me. Mostly I’ve just been left with what was taken away and with new things I’ve had to learn how to process. I wasn’t expecting something familiar. It was something I didn’t know that I even missed.
It’s a small thing, but it’s something I can feel with my senses. And I didn’t know there were any embodied experiences that could help me feel more like a version of myself I thought might be gone.
Maybe the disconnect I felt was not in others failing to see me but in failing to see myself.
I’ve taken an embarrassing amount of selfies in the past couple weeks. I like how I look lately. I like my hair at this length. I like that I’ve tanned enough to see freckles. I like that I’ve lost weight.
I’d been looking at recent pictures of myself—and from the last decade—and comparing them to what I have of myself from childhood and just before I transitioned. And I kept feeling like I’d gotten so far away from who I was that I just didn’t look like the person I expected myself to become as an adult.
That’s what’s changed lately. I look like what I expected myself to look like. I recognize myself.
But I also see who I became despite the expectations, and she also feels like me.
Maybe I don’t look like a 34-year-old woman to every person, but I look like 34-year-old Michelle to myself, and maybe that’s good enough.