Art by Bianca Blauth from Pixabay.
Welcome to Trans Tuesday! Something happened to me last year that took me completely by surprise, and not in a good way. Life always throws curveballs, and this one knocked me right on my ass. Let’s talk HAIR 3: WHEN A HAIRCUT GOES WRONG.
Now listen, you’re going to look at the title of this essay and be like… Tilly, c’mon. We’ve all had bad haircuts, it’s not that big of a deal. And first of all, no we haven’t all had them before, and second, there’s much more going on here than you think.
Because this essay is also a follow-up to several others. As I’ve said so many times, uncovering my transness was like untying a huge knot, because it touched so many aspects of my life that I never anticipated.
And as I’ve also said recently, I’m far enough into my medical and social transitions now where multiple aspects of my transition are dovetailing together in unexpected ways. So while this essay is very much HAIR 3, it’s also TRANSITION SETBACKS 2 and TRANS TRAUMA 3: LOSING YOURSELF.
See the original HAIR and HAIR 2: FIRST HAIRCUT for needed context on how important my hair has become to my sense of who I am, the original TRANSITION SETBACKS for an unexpected problem with my HRT that really messed me up, and TRANS TRAUMA 1: THE OLD DYSPHORIC FEELING for how seemingly benign parts of life can suddenly punch you in the gut, and TRANS TRAUMA 2: SOCIETAL GASLIGHTING for how sometimes the traumatic aspects of being trans in a transphobic society are very much by design.
The key piece of information to understanding what happened to me last summer is something I mentioned in the HAIR 2 essay, in regards to getting my bangs and how terrified I was that I’d hate it, or that it would change how I felt about the one and only part of my physical body that, at the time, gave me zero GENDER DYSPHORIA.
It’s a little saying I basically live my life by:
Everything you want is on the other side of fear.
And it’s true! So often in life we let our fears hold us back, force us into boxes, make our lives so much smaller and more confined than they should be. And that definitely happens to trans people so much, especially those of us that transition as adults.
We let society’s IMPLICIT QUEERPHOBIA and our own INTERNALIZED TRANSPHOBIA keep us from accepting ourselves, and the truth of who we are. Once my egg cracked and I started to see the code of the matrix (see Begin Transmission: The Trans Allegories of The Matrix), I saw how fear held me back in so many aspects of my life.
Sometimes those fears are well-founded! It’s not like all of them are made up, or false things forced onto us. Some of them are! But some are also very real, and it’s important to discern between them, so you know which ones are worth challenging.
I have a fear of diving off a huge cliff into the ocean below, and y’know, I feel that one is well-founded. I’m not gonna challenge that one anytime soon! But others do challenge that, and good for them! I guess? If it makes ‘em happy!
My fear of, say, having to be hospitalized for whatever reason if I were in a “red state,” knowing that they’d discontinue my HRT during my stay and thus forcibly medically detransition me? That one is absolutely well-founded, and one I am also not going to challenge.
But I’m a normal (but very smart and hot) human woman, so of course I have fears. One of which was cutting off a lot of my hair to get bangs, and as you saw in HAIR 2, it paid off huge and made me love my hair even more! A smashing success!
And then last summer, my great track record of challenging and overcoming my fears dove off a cliff into the ocean. And hit rock bottom.
In my desire to grow my hair out, as I went in every few months for haircuts, even before my bangs, all I was getting was a very slight trim of any split ends I had. We’re talking less than half an inch, because I just did not want it to be shorter in any way.
This is probably from a pre-transition lifetime of wounding myself by keeping my hair buzzed to 1/8″ long, due to the Complicated Gender Feels I had any time it got any longer.
I allowed the fears I had, that were wormed into me by society, to control me. To cause me to wound my soul by keeping my hair in a style that was no way representative of who I am or wanted to be.
And so when I transitioned, I pushed back against it hard. Growing my hair out was the first thing I did to start transition in a “socially acceptable” way, even before I started BODY HACKING with exercise.
It had been the longest, and most affirming, single part of my transition, and I was determined to keep it that way. This was my own PUSHBACK OVERKILL, though in a much more benign way than the examples in the linked essay.
I’d hurt myself so much by keeping it so short for so long, I went too far the other direction and refused to let it get any shorter. Ever.
But that isn’t always, y’know, great for your hair.
Have a look at my most recent transition timeline, from my SIX YEARS OUT AND ON HRT CHECK-IN.
Compare my hair in the 2022 and 2023 photos…
My hair is pineappled in the 2023 photo, but it’s easy enough to tell. Look at the ends of my hair! They went from fluffy curls to dry as straw. The split ends had crept up really high, because I never let my hairstylist cut more than the tiniest amount of them off.
So much of my hair was unhealthy and in bad shape, because of my fear of cutting it off. My hair had good days and bad, like anyone’s, but it looks so bad in the 2023 photo because I didn’t even realize at the time what condition it was actually in. I didn’t even know how to take care of my hair for a long time, so it wasn’t always in great shape (and at this point had probably been growing without a cut for… five or six years, at least?).
And this just kept going, because even though my hair’s behind me in a high ponytail, you can still see how bad the ends are even in the 2024 photo.
I mean just look, in both of those, how much healthier the hair on my bangs is! Because those were being regularly trimmed.
And you can definitely tell that I finally got all the dead, split ends trimmed by the time my five year timeline photo rolled around… because look how much healthier it looks!!
What you can’t really tell is how long my hair was at the time, because for whatever reason I decided to have it up for both the three and four year timeline photos.
So in the early spring of 2024, here’s where it was at…
Down to the bottom of my boobs! And I loved how long it was, even though you can tell those ends do not look good.
My hairstylist had been trying to get me to cut all the split ends off for probably over a year, and I always told her no, because of the very fear I’ve been talking about.
But I hit a point where I finally realized how dry and dead the ends were, and knew it would be better for my hair health to chop ‘em off. And I took comfort in my “everything you want is on the other side of fear” and “do what scares you” mantras I live my life by.
It worked out great for me many times before! So I finally told her, yeah, let’s do it.
Now it’s hard to tell how long my hair actually is because the products I use help bring out the curls, and curls make the hair appear shorter. So as she was actually cutting all the split ends off… I was a little shocked, because it sure was a lot of hair.
She kept checking in with me to be sure it was okay, because she knew how sensitive I was about it, and I told her yes, even though I was already feeling like, wait– when this isn’t wet and curls up, it’s going to be a lot shorter than where she’s cutting it now…
My hair always looks like shit right after getting it cut, because it’s got no product in it and it’s not styled right, and so it doesn’t look like my hair. I hate hate hate every day it has to be like that, for whatever reason. But a full wash, detangle, and style takes me over an hour and I just can’t do that everyday.
When it finally got time to style it for the first time after the cut, I was so super nervous that I was going to hate how short it was. But even then, all I was thinking was that maybe I wouldn’t like it and it would need to grow out some more. Not a huge deal.
Friends, it was such a huge deal.
Because as soon as I was done styling it, I looked in the mirror.
And I could no longer see myself.
If you don’t understand the magnitude of this, please see PHOTOS AND REFLECTIONS. Trans people who transition as adults spend our entire lives never seeing who we really are reflected back at us, and when it finally happens, it’s huge. It’s beyond huge. It’s a stellar event full of cosmic forces that shift the entire way the world operates for you.
You can see when it first happened for me, in realtime, in PHOTOS 2: THE SELFIE APOCALYPSE.
And now she was gone. Gone.
I couldn’t see Tilly in the mirror. I couldn’t see me.
And after a lifetime of hoping and dreaming and fighting and agonizing to finally get to see the real me in the mirror, in an instant it was all snatched away from me.
I’ve mentioned a few times my pre-coffee thoughts that I post on social media everyday. They’re usually goofy nonsense, but sometimes end up much more serious and deep. One about GENDER DYSPHORIA appears in that essay, if you’ve not read it before.
Well.
Here’s the pre-coffee thought I posted on Nov 18, 2024, one day after that disastrous haircut, about how mirrors had again become fraught and dangerous:
lifelong enemies
salvos fired from polished surface
a target with no defenses
she changed,
molded into something better
then from enemies to besties
until one fateful cut
unexpectedly
brought the salvos back
and she wept
I was devastated. Heartbroken. I was lost in a sea of dysphoria for a week, and I didn’t know if it would ever end. I was right back to my entire life, pre-transition. Because, as I’ve said so many times, my dysphoria was caused by a lot of the way my body was pre-transition, but none more than my face. It was the biggest dysphoria culprit.
When I started seeing myself in photos and reflections, even though the rest of my body still had so many more changes to go through, it probably removed like 85% of my dysphoria. That was legitimately life-changing. It was the first time I started to actually feel like I was alive.
I knew how precious and important that was, but… even after the time my HRT stopped working, as discussed in the original TRANSITION SETBACKS, it’s not that I never thought there would be no more setbacks ever.
It just hadn’t ever occurred to me that once I found my true reflection, that I could lose it.
And it just crushed the life out of me. I was on the verge of tears all day, every day for that entire first week post haircut.
As you saw above, from both the 2025 and 2026 timeline photos, obviously my hair kept growing and is now possibly even longer than it was before this devastating cut. And it’s healthy at this length, which is fabulous!
But I just never thought that a simple trim, even a kind of big one, could change so much of my own self-perception.
What I came to realize is that my hair was so important to me, as the first part of my body to never ever cause me dysphoria, that having that change enough to give me dysphoria felt like the worst betrayal in the universe. It was the one, good, pure, true part of my body that was me, and the universe snatched it away from me.
Over the course of that incredibly difficult week, as I leaned on trans friends for support because they could understand what I was going through (you know who you are, and I thank you and love you), and I leaned on my wife Susan… who at first also didn’t understand my reaction to a haircut I didn’t like, until she quickly realized it brought my dysphoria back. I eventually figured out what actually happened.
My hair had changed in length, yes, but my face hadn’t. I was just so used to seeing it longer, that suddenly it slightly changing the way it hung and framed my face made me not recognize the face looking back at me.
Eventually I found I was still in there, even if the reflection was just a little bit different now. It was still me, and I thank all the stars in the sky for that.
Once I thought she/me was back in the mirror, I braved some selfies, which I had been too terrified to take for that whole week as I struggled under the dysphoria ocean, lost and terrified and alone.
And, to my surprise and true joy, I was still there. I think… that feeling kind of comes through in the photos, and you can see just how much shorter my hair had become. In fact, I think you can even see me progressing through it, from “I don’t know, maybe?” to “holy shit” to “it’s me!”
There’s a couple important lessons I learned from this ordeal, and if you take anything away from this essay, I hope it’s these:
Absolutely challenge your fears and push past them! It’s how we grow and get the life we want. But that doesn’t mean it’ll always turn out the way we want.
Transition setbacks can pop up anytime, anywhere… but they’re not the end. They’re never the end.
They’re setbacks, not complete and total protonic reversals that end the universe. Lean on the community, on your friends, on your loved ones when you need, and let them help carry you through.
Because you can reach the other side.
As long as you don’t give up.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com