On Shaving
Jul. 20th, 2023 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaks[I want to preface this by saying that this is about my personal experience of shaving and of masculinity. Facial hair on women, cis and trans alike, is not inherently unfeminine. Lack of facial hair is not inherently unmasculine. Nothing I say here should be taken as a critique of how bodies of any gender ought to be. This is about how I experience my own gender identity, as well as the expectations put on my body by the society I live in.
CW for discussions of dysphoria, body policing, mentions of menstruation and related health conditions, and the threat of transphobic violence.]
I used to watch my father shave sometimes. The bathroom would be steamy, smelling of pine and Irish Spring and whatever other scents go into cheap men's grooming products. I would watch as each strip of smooth skin would be revealed and each stubble-flecked mound of shaving cream rinsed away. The slow rasp of the razor seemed so loud. My father would be left with little wisps of shaving cream in the curve of the tragus. Maybe a tiny scrap of tissue plastered to a knick, just there on the jut of his jaw, one bright spot of blood with a ragged white halo.
This was probably the closest anyone has ever come to teaching me how to be a man. It was never intended to be a lesson--certainly not one intended for me. It wasn't even about spending time with me. We just lived in a single-wide with only one bathroom for a family of three. If we were all going somewhere together, somewhere nice enough to warrant a freshly-shaved face for my father, getting ready was going to involve some shared space.
I've always learned best by watching and imitating. I've learned all sorts of things by being too persistent or too oblivious to look away when I was probably expected to. Hell, that's how I got my job as a mechanic--I wouldn't stop watching people fix the machines, even when I was expected to go do some other task or just take a break. Pretty soon, I knew how to do things I wasn't really supposed to. Giving me the job almost qualified as damage control at that point. Train me up right, because I clearly wasn't going to stop.
There's probably a life theme there.
I've been shaving routinely for almost a decade now. I was diagnosed with PCOS at nineteen, based mainly on symptoms relating to my erratic menstrual cycle and less on my supply of body hair. I was given no treatment options at the time, so my body just did whatever it pleased. What it pleased, ultimately, was to stop fucking around with my cycle and instead fuck around with giving me a lovely fur coat.
When my facial hair first started really coming in, in my late twenties, I originally dealt with it using handheld tweezers and, later, an electric tweezer (a truly perverse invention.) Eventually, though, my beard got heavy enough that it was just too impractical and too painful to pluck the hairs out individually.
I had stopped shaving my legs and pits already, but I still had a razor. I didn't have shaving cream, but I had soap. And I had a basic, second-hand understanding of how shaving one's face was supposed to work. What more did I need?
To be clear, at that point, I was pre-T, just barely starting to use the word nonbinary to describe myself, and fully presenting as a woman. Not even a particularly masculine woman. I had left behind my days of binding and cropped hair and men's clothes in high school. I had been beaten down by the disappointments of a particularly aggressive puberty that left me too well-endowed to hope ever to hide it. Too neurodivergent to keep up with the rigors of femininity, by college I defaulted to a practical wardrobe of basics and a presentation best described as "former tomboy with depression."
Shaving became my first source of gender euphoria in adulthood. I did it before I ever cut my hair short again. Before I bought myself a pile of boxer briefs and undershirts to go under the cargo pants and plain t-shirts and flannels. (Yes, I am a tremendous stereotype. Literal blue-hair-and-pronouns levels of typical butch enby nonsense.) Before I ever allowed myself, even in the privacy of my own brain, to think about the possibility of hormones or surgery. Before any of that, there was just a practical need: I had hair on my face, I needed it to go, and I knew roughly how to make that happen.
There was much more than practicality in sweeping lather up over my cheeks and down the column of my throat. More than practicality in the rasp of the razor, so familiar even in the new privacy of a bathroom I didn't have to share with anyone else. Far more than mere practicality in the brush of my rough fingertips over the suddenly smooth planes of my jaw, tender and damp after I wiped away the last of the shaving cream.
It felt like I had gotten away with something. Like I had stolen the sun. The crown from a king's head.
Up to this point, I could skip a day at most between shaves. I have a five o'clock shadow, but since I wear a mask at work, I have sort of been able to skate by using that to hide my second-day stubble. As my T shots start to do their work, I'm shaving daily. Not just because I don't want to have to explain to anyone why, exactly, I have the rugged chin of a scruffy cowboy. It's a cleanroom facility; people with facial hair, including more than the barest scrape of stubble, have to wear beard covers.
I am not going to be able to explain that to my coworkers.
I've had women coworkers with visible remnants of facial hair, most of whom look like other likely PCOS candidates. The hair looked to be managed in some way, though I couldn't say if it was by plucking, waxing, shaving, or what. But they were always conventionally feminine, otherwise gender-conforming women.
I am quite obviously not.
It took twenty-some years, but I'm back to those early teenage ways. I've got a distinctively masculine (and chaotic, but never mind that) haircut. I wear almost exclusively men's clothing. I have, let's say, mixed mannerisms and body language. My voice is, to my ear, on the high side, but I swear like a sailor and snarl like a junkyard dog.
I have, in short, a few factors already working against me, if my goal is to pass as my AGAB and not get my ass beat. I walk a fine, wobbly line between satisfying my own need for gender affirmation through my appearance and the need to maintain plausible deniability if confronted. I figure, given where I live and work, I'm (relatively) safe being perceived as a butch dyke.
If I start going around with a visible beard on top of all that, it will just be a few too many black marks on my record. I'm not in a position to publicly transition like that. I'm mostly planning to deflect, lie, and gaslight my coworkers if anyone tries to make a fuss as my appearance continues to masculinize.
I'm not sure, exactly, which of my coworkers would reject me for being (recognized as) trans. I'm not sure, exactly, which ones I would need to worry about being in an otherwise empty room with during the earliest hours of my shift. I'm not sure, exactly, which options they would pick in a game of "harass, rape, beat," given the opportunity and impulse.
Shaving, despite being a deeply masculine act in my mind, and a euphoric one, is also about undoing that masculinity. Because no matter how scraggly and disappointing my facial hair is to me, it is still several orders of magnitude more than a woman is "supposed" to have. Shaving is a way of keeping myself safe. I might press myself into a binder (or the next nearest thing I can manage on my body). Pile on layer after layer to mask my shape. Armor myself in buckles and chains and boots. But so long as I can tip up my smooth chin, I can claim there's nothing to see here.
A normal body. A normal woman. Sort of. Close enough. Plausibly. For now, anyway.
Sometimes, I dream of having someone watch me shave. Not in a kinky way--though, no shade, I get the appeal--just in a domestic way. An intimate way.
The intimacy is in what comes before: seeing my face dark with stubble, not yet wrangled into respectability. I dream of someone who has seen my rough edges and touched them tenderly. Someone who wouldn't flinch if my stubble scraped their skin when I kiss their neck. Someone who knows my secrets and keeps them with me.
Let them share the foggy mirror with me and watch me work. There will be a lesson there, still unintentional:
This is how to be a man like me, not a man at all. This is how to make and unmake me.
This is the blood, barely staying beneath the skin, and this is the blade, wielded by a self-taught hand. Watch me and learn the things no one is meant to know.
CW for discussions of dysphoria, body policing, mentions of menstruation and related health conditions, and the threat of transphobic violence.]
I used to watch my father shave sometimes. The bathroom would be steamy, smelling of pine and Irish Spring and whatever other scents go into cheap men's grooming products. I would watch as each strip of smooth skin would be revealed and each stubble-flecked mound of shaving cream rinsed away. The slow rasp of the razor seemed so loud. My father would be left with little wisps of shaving cream in the curve of the tragus. Maybe a tiny scrap of tissue plastered to a knick, just there on the jut of his jaw, one bright spot of blood with a ragged white halo.
This was probably the closest anyone has ever come to teaching me how to be a man. It was never intended to be a lesson--certainly not one intended for me. It wasn't even about spending time with me. We just lived in a single-wide with only one bathroom for a family of three. If we were all going somewhere together, somewhere nice enough to warrant a freshly-shaved face for my father, getting ready was going to involve some shared space.
I've always learned best by watching and imitating. I've learned all sorts of things by being too persistent or too oblivious to look away when I was probably expected to. Hell, that's how I got my job as a mechanic--I wouldn't stop watching people fix the machines, even when I was expected to go do some other task or just take a break. Pretty soon, I knew how to do things I wasn't really supposed to. Giving me the job almost qualified as damage control at that point. Train me up right, because I clearly wasn't going to stop.
There's probably a life theme there.
I've been shaving routinely for almost a decade now. I was diagnosed with PCOS at nineteen, based mainly on symptoms relating to my erratic menstrual cycle and less on my supply of body hair. I was given no treatment options at the time, so my body just did whatever it pleased. What it pleased, ultimately, was to stop fucking around with my cycle and instead fuck around with giving me a lovely fur coat.
When my facial hair first started really coming in, in my late twenties, I originally dealt with it using handheld tweezers and, later, an electric tweezer (a truly perverse invention.) Eventually, though, my beard got heavy enough that it was just too impractical and too painful to pluck the hairs out individually.
I had stopped shaving my legs and pits already, but I still had a razor. I didn't have shaving cream, but I had soap. And I had a basic, second-hand understanding of how shaving one's face was supposed to work. What more did I need?
To be clear, at that point, I was pre-T, just barely starting to use the word nonbinary to describe myself, and fully presenting as a woman. Not even a particularly masculine woman. I had left behind my days of binding and cropped hair and men's clothes in high school. I had been beaten down by the disappointments of a particularly aggressive puberty that left me too well-endowed to hope ever to hide it. Too neurodivergent to keep up with the rigors of femininity, by college I defaulted to a practical wardrobe of basics and a presentation best described as "former tomboy with depression."
Shaving became my first source of gender euphoria in adulthood. I did it before I ever cut my hair short again. Before I bought myself a pile of boxer briefs and undershirts to go under the cargo pants and plain t-shirts and flannels. (Yes, I am a tremendous stereotype. Literal blue-hair-and-pronouns levels of typical butch enby nonsense.) Before I ever allowed myself, even in the privacy of my own brain, to think about the possibility of hormones or surgery. Before any of that, there was just a practical need: I had hair on my face, I needed it to go, and I knew roughly how to make that happen.
There was much more than practicality in sweeping lather up over my cheeks and down the column of my throat. More than practicality in the rasp of the razor, so familiar even in the new privacy of a bathroom I didn't have to share with anyone else. Far more than mere practicality in the brush of my rough fingertips over the suddenly smooth planes of my jaw, tender and damp after I wiped away the last of the shaving cream.
It felt like I had gotten away with something. Like I had stolen the sun. The crown from a king's head.
Up to this point, I could skip a day at most between shaves. I have a five o'clock shadow, but since I wear a mask at work, I have sort of been able to skate by using that to hide my second-day stubble. As my T shots start to do their work, I'm shaving daily. Not just because I don't want to have to explain to anyone why, exactly, I have the rugged chin of a scruffy cowboy. It's a cleanroom facility; people with facial hair, including more than the barest scrape of stubble, have to wear beard covers.
I am not going to be able to explain that to my coworkers.
I've had women coworkers with visible remnants of facial hair, most of whom look like other likely PCOS candidates. The hair looked to be managed in some way, though I couldn't say if it was by plucking, waxing, shaving, or what. But they were always conventionally feminine, otherwise gender-conforming women.
I am quite obviously not.
It took twenty-some years, but I'm back to those early teenage ways. I've got a distinctively masculine (and chaotic, but never mind that) haircut. I wear almost exclusively men's clothing. I have, let's say, mixed mannerisms and body language. My voice is, to my ear, on the high side, but I swear like a sailor and snarl like a junkyard dog.
I have, in short, a few factors already working against me, if my goal is to pass as my AGAB and not get my ass beat. I walk a fine, wobbly line between satisfying my own need for gender affirmation through my appearance and the need to maintain plausible deniability if confronted. I figure, given where I live and work, I'm (relatively) safe being perceived as a butch dyke.
If I start going around with a visible beard on top of all that, it will just be a few too many black marks on my record. I'm not in a position to publicly transition like that. I'm mostly planning to deflect, lie, and gaslight my coworkers if anyone tries to make a fuss as my appearance continues to masculinize.
I'm not sure, exactly, which of my coworkers would reject me for being (recognized as) trans. I'm not sure, exactly, which ones I would need to worry about being in an otherwise empty room with during the earliest hours of my shift. I'm not sure, exactly, which options they would pick in a game of "harass, rape, beat," given the opportunity and impulse.
Shaving, despite being a deeply masculine act in my mind, and a euphoric one, is also about undoing that masculinity. Because no matter how scraggly and disappointing my facial hair is to me, it is still several orders of magnitude more than a woman is "supposed" to have. Shaving is a way of keeping myself safe. I might press myself into a binder (or the next nearest thing I can manage on my body). Pile on layer after layer to mask my shape. Armor myself in buckles and chains and boots. But so long as I can tip up my smooth chin, I can claim there's nothing to see here.
A normal body. A normal woman. Sort of. Close enough. Plausibly. For now, anyway.
Sometimes, I dream of having someone watch me shave. Not in a kinky way--though, no shade, I get the appeal--just in a domestic way. An intimate way.
The intimacy is in what comes before: seeing my face dark with stubble, not yet wrangled into respectability. I dream of someone who has seen my rough edges and touched them tenderly. Someone who wouldn't flinch if my stubble scraped their skin when I kiss their neck. Someone who knows my secrets and keeps them with me.
Let them share the foggy mirror with me and watch me work. There will be a lesson there, still unintentional:
This is how to be a man like me, not a man at all. This is how to make and unmake me.
This is the blood, barely staying beneath the skin, and this is the blade, wielded by a self-taught hand. Watch me and learn the things no one is meant to know.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-21 08:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-23 08:46 pm (UTC)