Botched Brow Waxing, Showing Off Your Tits and Having to Come Out Again and Again.
Emotional labour comes in many forms.
I got my brows waxed and I fucking hated the result. That’s what I get for going to the shopping-centre-minimum-wage-walk-ups-only-chain-store. I’ve never had the same beautician twice and I’m exhausted with having to explain what I need them to do.
I started writing this screed as I sat and waited for another appointment at a beauty salon with a complete menu of services and beauticians paid at slightly above-award rates to fix the almighty fuck up that’s been wrought.
Let me break some things down for you. There’s no one feature that makes a face masculine or feminine. The transgender experience is one that will direct your attention to the smallest detail of your appearance and feel like it is betraying you. In your mind this small detail about your appearance will be writ large, proclaiming to everyone and anyone that you are a fraud and not “a real [insert what you identify as]”.
It fuckin’ sucks.
Truth is, the way people perceive gender is a combination of so many factors, some obvious, some subtle, but it is never really one thing. Each face is a gestalt of elements. So many different things all combining to be more than the sum of its parts: You.
You are more than an assembly of nose, eyes, mouth etc. You are more than this corporal physical presence and as such the process of transitioning your gender presentation is a balancing act. For those of us who are binary trans it’s a delicate art of pulling a thousand tiny levers the tiniest amount to shift the tide. To subtly nudge people from subconsciously assuming you are one gender, to consciously seeing you as not conforming to one of the binary genders, to then breaking through the barrier on the other side to again subconsciously assuming you are the other gender. The blessed NB folks get to ignore this bullshit completely and mish-mash, remix and generally just fuck about with gender, dancing around with delight in this no-man’s (no-genders) land between being perceived as one thing or the other.
And while I love that, it isn’t for me. I’m playing the game of nudging levers.
Despite all my body-positivity for others it turns out I don’t have much compassion for myself. And while I am more than just my face, it is still my nexus of identity and expression. It is forgivable for anyone to want their face to look a certain way. I myself am paying for a man to surgically rearrange mine later this year. But that is one of the bigger levers to pull after I have nudged countless tiny ones already. If you want a really excellent example of small, subtle changes to make a face more femme or masc go and image-oogle ‘face contrast masculine feminine’.
Go on, I’ll wait.
Did you do it? If you did you would see numerous examples of the same face, one with higher contrast and one with lower. Instantly, you would see the way that higher contrast in the brows, lips and lashes against fairer skin presents as feminine. Where the more homogenized colour palate (less disparity in contrast) reads much more masculine. That is all that image is demonstrating. There is no trick, just some hard coded wiring in your mind to recognise the same face being a different gender based on simple colour tone values. This is one of the easiest levers to pull: Get your brows and lashes tinted. For extra points go and darken the lip and use a smidge of slightly lighter foundation and you can nudge more levers a little bit in the direction of femininity. It’s the first piece of advice I give any brand new trans girlies when I’m being mother goose to them all. “Honey, go get yo lashes and brows did! It’s cheap, it’s easy, and you will appreciate the little bit of help.”
Great advice but clearly, I’ve found the flaw in my logic ‘cause I haven’t got someone to do it consistently for me and so I have to explain some fundamentals every fucking time. This is the predicament I have found myself in. It wasn’t a failure of the kid who was waxing my brows, they just wanted to get on with their minimum wage service job. It was my failure for being too exhausted to explain colour theory and our brain’s hard coded wiring of gender perception to a teenager who has likely been inundated with a plethora of other needy, bushy-browed ladies before me.
Like most things I brought this on myself.
This face, this thing that lovers have kissed, that friends have been brought to tears of laughter with… For all the things that I love that it has done, it struggles to be feminine. Or at least, feminine in the way I wish it did. Usually, I lean into my brow-waxing-tech conspiratorially and let them know, like it’s some secret, that they can’t just give me the robust, power-brow that all the cute young things have. Sure, if I was a delicate, bird-boned waif with razor-sharp cheekbones and a steely glare they could give me big bushy numbers and I would look fucking fierce… but I have a face like a boiled potato. And if you put those big, powerful brows on this scrubbed russet of a mug then I’m going to look more like a middle aged man than ever. You see, men’s eyebrows sit on the brow ridge, women’s sit above. The structures of the face that genetics (I presume I’m genetically male? It’s not like I’ve had my chromosomes sequenced!) have given me, means I need a fine arch of a brow, not two furry caterpillars fighting for dominance of the unclaimed territory over the top of my nose.
But for some reason I didn’t do that this time.
So now, I’m sitting, looking like Groucho fucking Marx, waiting for another appointment because I didn’t want to have to say the words, “I’m trans, so do it like this”. Had they asked it would have been fine! I don’t mistreat genuine curiosity about the lives of trans folk. It isn’t a bad thing to ask questions so long as they’re polite. Believe it or not most trans people can tell the difference between genuine, kind curiosity and some rubber-necker gawking at them, or some smug-faced buffoon thinking it’s the height of comedy to ask a perfect stranger about their genitals. Turns out trans people can actually tell the difference between a hate-crime and someone just being an awkward ally.
But it means that I don’t get to come out once and be done with it. Let me give you another example.
I wanted to get some new active-wear and was talking to the shop assistant about how I needed the thickest material they had in stock. She was confused, and pointed out that the thinner ones feel much nicer. So I was faced with a difficult choice: Do I say, “ I need the thicker material so it is harder to see the outline of my cock and balls” to a twenty-something shop-girl who genuinely doesn’t care about my gender (because she is of a generation that has normalised the existence of people like me) or do I say, “I just prefer them”.
I chose the latter.
But sometimes I don’t have a choice, and more often than not when I do have the choice, I choose to come out. And because I have to come out to strangers – talk about something that is such a deep level of personal – I don’t think I really have any sense of privacy or propriety left. Sure, having no sense to withhold makes it easier to write funny shit on the internet about the pursuit of cringy sex, personal grief and the shit-show that is the state of world politics right now. But it would be nice to not have to say, “as a trans person…” so regularly in conversations. I particularly hate having to say, “when I was living as a man…” so that cisgendered people breathe a sigh of relief that the elephant in the room has been identified, catalogued, and the threat to them neutralised. It happens all the time. I can see their hesitation. I know it comes from a place of not wanting to cause harm or hurt to me, but sometimes it feels like people are waiting for me to explode. Like some rusting sea-mine has bobbed up towards them and they are wondering what will set off this unexploded ordinance in their presence.
“My darling, it’s okay, you aren’t going to commit a hate crime by asking me a question”.
I throw out the line all the time. You see the tension in their shoulders release and their words fall out in a breathless bubble about how they just didn’t want to cause offense and they weren’t sure and they wanted you to know that it’s no problem and they think it’s great and they are very supportive and how brave they think it is and that if I ever wanted to talk or if there was something you need…
It’s sweet.
It’s cute.
It’s a little exhausting at times.
But it really is okay.
I don’t think the people in my life realise how often I have to do this. Don’t realise how often I must reassure, bolster and comfort cisgendered people who are navigating the mine field (me, I’m the mine field). No doubt it’s terrifying for them. Never mind what it’s like for me… such is the nature of being cisgendered.
With a little harder thought, what at first glance might seem so foreign, so alien to them really isn’t. So much of this is akin to the things that most young women feel as they struggle under the weight of what society tells them they need to look like to be “beautiful”. No, I’m not saying that gender dysphoria is the same as teenage dysmorphia, but goddamn it is close enough for us to find common ground. When my trans masc friends tell me about their struggles I’m stunned at how much it reminds me of young cisgendered men struggling to find their place in the world, trying to understand this identity of “man” and having to live up to impossible standards.
Imagine being that teenage kid, struggling to be the sort of man or woman that all the magazines say you should look like in order to have any worth, any value in this world. Now imagine that everywhere you go you have to draw attention to how you don’t meet that standard, and you have to make sure everyone around you is comforted and safe and not in danger of causing a full-blown catastrophic meltdown because the said the wrong word that will trigger the universally feared transgender-auto-destruct sequence.
It’s why I show off my tits so much.
They are great tits. Genuinely lovely. And no, I am not oblivious to how they look bouncing around in a tight singlet, untethered by a bra. I am very much aware of how they look. In fact, I am acutely aware that my top is ever so slightly transparent. No, it was not a mistake, thank you. ‘Cause while there are a whole lot of things going on with how I look that don’t read as “woman” having long bouncy hair and big bouncy boobs absolutely helps people get the message that they should see me as a woman.
It is just another form of invisible labour that a woman is doing to make you feel more comfortable. Consider it a gift from me.
It’s a signpost, a reminder, a blazing fucking billboard staring you dead in the face shouting “THIS IS A WOMAN”. I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what the ratio of people who encounter me day-to-day understand the nature of my gender to be. On a bad day, sure I probably think that everyone looks at me and thinks, “that’s a man in a dress” and on a good day? Shit… I don’t think I ever actually pass… On a good day, I choose to believe that the people who encounter me think, “damn that’s a fine looking trans woman, good for her.”
I have resigned myself to that being enough. I will continue to have to come out again and again. I’d be happy to just be allowed to live in the bubble that I’ve created, secure with my community that I don’t need to explain all *this* to over and over. It will be a long road not just for me personally but for all of us to normalise and, like that wonderfully oblivious shop girl, to not even register the difference at all.
But the first step is to find someone who’ll consistently do my fucking eyebrows.
–S