Gender Performance and Cis Affirmance
Whether it’s storming or cloudless, exhausting or pleasurable, one thing is for certain—I’m going to wake up 30 minutes early to fry my hair.
Like many young women, I grew up fixated on my appearance, following the advice of any beauty guru that crossed my digital path. YouTube tutorials titled “How to Look 5 Years Older INSTANTLY” and “Makeup Products All Teenage Girls Need” frequented my search history. At age ten, I threw a plastic razor, decorated in carnation pink lilies, into our shopping cart whilst my father wasn’t looking. At age eleven, I coated my lashes in gloopy drugstore mascara and pressed coral blush onto my already flushed cheeks. At age twelve, I sectioned my hair and applied 400 degrees Fahrenheit to my Shirley Temple-esque curls—a ritual that stuck with me throughout my adolescence and time as a self-identified woman.
At last, the day I waited my entire childhood for… All of the hours spent scanning through J-14, Teen Vogue, and Tiger Beat magazines, watching 18-year-old women on the internet give their 13-year-old audience contouring tips, and admiring my hairdresser mother’s flat ironing technique paid off. It’s the first day of high school.
I sprung out of bed and sat down at my desk-turned-vanity, prepared to recreate the 10-step beauty routine I perfected during the summer. Following the repetitious blending of pore eraser, primer, foundation, concealer, bronzer, blush, highlighter, setting powder, eyebrow powder, and eyeshadow, I moved on to flat iron my hair—my personal favorite part of the routine.
As I tugged each strand, I felt myself growing more confident, appearing more beautiful, attractive, and desirable. I felt myself becoming more mature, like the grown women I aspired to be since I was a child. To me, straight hair meant elegance. It meant sophistication and beauty, which, in my head, correlated with popularity and acceptance.
I was never one to question the reasoning behind the choices I made regarding my appearance. For the majority of my teenage years, my insecurities led me to the desire to fit in. I wanted to look like my peers because, well, I wanted them to accept me. If I looked like them, then they would accept me, and if they accepted me, then that would prove my desirability. Without straightened hair, my delicate confidence would weaken, my slight beauty would diminish, and my perceived maturity would obscure. I would no longer look like a woman, I’d look like a girl… and that’s something I refused to be seen as.
When I arrived at school with my freshly straightened and oiled hair, I had hope—hope that all of my effort would pay off in the form of new friendships or love interests. By the end of the day, I acquired neither. I acquired neither for two entire years following my first day of freshman year, and despite that, I repeated my makeup and hair routine daily, even if it meant missing the bus or getting less sleep. I obsessed over hiding my natural features because of how much I despised them. I aimed to appear like a person who I wasn’t to get the attention of those who I deemed important. For me, performing femininity was never about being in touch with my womanhood or feeling comfortable in my skin, it was about acceptance. I performed gender for acceptance.
As much as I cringe thinking about the effort I put into my appearance for a ninth grade biology class, I recognize now—as someone who is very comfortable in their genderqueerness and multitudes—that my ritualistic hair straightening was a performance as well. As a child with traditional female gender roles and expectations engrained in my mind, of course I was going to do whatever my other female peers were doing. Of course I was going to shave my legs, wear makeup, and straighten my hair. “That’s just what us girls do,” as my mother would say.
Years later, my thoughts about my gender still do influence my hairstyling choices. Much like my approach to understanding and accepting my gender, I have the same thoughts surrounding my hair when I wake up every morning: “It is what it is.”
Cover Photo by Maria Orlova.
