Turkish Hairlines, Leg-Lengthening Surgery and Gender-Affirming Cisgender Men

Modern Masculinity is complicated y'all.

Lads, fellas, boys… I hate to break it to ya, but ya’ll are receiving gender affirming care.

I know, I know it sounds like I’m a bout leap into some rambling snarking screed. It sounds like I’m about to poke fun at every cisgendered man of the world about how their gym sessions, their skin care routine, their choice of motor vehicle is a shallow and pathetic pursuit. All the while sitting here sipping French-press from a tiny white cup pressed to my exquisite, surgically-enhanced lips.

Nah, that’d be real cunt behaviour.

I’m not gonna ridicule your hair plugs. For real. The sensitive readers are sure to find a smirk in my tone (because I’m an obnoxious internet shit-head after all) but I really don’t want to belittle the experience that y’all are having. You are actualising the vision you have of your gender. I respect that process. I’d be the worst sort of hypocrite if I didn’t. There are those who would gleefully laugh up their sleeves at photo after photo of the backs of balding men’s heads peeking over the top of airline seats. Row after row of the fresh hair plugs glistening, dark and wet so much that I wonder if the boom in Turkish hair transplants has fundamentally changed the cabin disinfection protocols on airlines. But I am NOT gonna disrespect the choice you’ve made. Cause honestly I’d make that choice too if I was still a man, and hell, may still do it as a woman if the “hairline dysphoria” jostles to the top of the pile of things I detest about this body.

Ultimately it’s your body to do with what you will.

I’m still a little freaked out by the leg-lengthening surgery though. Again, not going to dismiss it out of hand. My discomfort might have something to do with the deep queasy feeling I get when I give any thought to the wet, calcium-scaffolding that holds up my meat-prison?

Yeah, my stomach just flipped.

So, I’ll never forget that moment when I watched in amazed horror as short kings started having their legs surgically broken and lengthened. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of rehabilitation for a couple of extra inches [Dear reader, you can write your own cheap joke about men being willing to pay anything for a couple of extra inches]. I suppose I can’t really balk as there’s very little in the way of “upper limit” that I’d expend or endure to achieve the body I want. I wanna be a snarky shithead here. I can feel the coiling slither in my chest rummaging around for a cutting remark, but I can’t.

This is gender-affirming care.

These are men who view themselves through a lens of inadequacy and are doing everything in their power to manage and mitigate it. Many would say “just accept you’re a short man and be the best version of the short man that you can be”. It’d be easy to have that assessment, to dismiss the complexities out of hand, but that would be no different than someone saying to me, a transwoman, “just accept you’re a man and be the best version of man that you can be.”

Which would be a fucking hate-crime in my opinion.

I say this with confidence because I DID attempt to “be the best version of a man that you can be.” There was an entire lifetime of oscillating back and forth between different kinds of men, some positive, some less so, trying to discover what felt right. But when it comes to this body, this “physical instrument”, long before I started transitioning to be a woman, I was transitioning to be “a man”. I had no idea what that was supposed to be and so I tried it all.

“Look at the size of that cunt!” I think. This was the result of months and months of “going to the gym to talk to some weights about my feelings". Months and months of knowing that something was fundamentally wrong with my body and that I needed to change it, sculpt it, remake it anew.

These photos don’t give me dysphoria by the way. Quite the opposite, in fact.

They bring me such immense joy because I look like neither of these two dudes. They affirm what I am now, in this moment, this woman, or “version of the woman” that I currently am. These photos remind me of how I lived with an unfillable hole inside my chest, a longing that I didn’t understand, let alone know how to deal with. I expanded this body to occupy more space, more mass, more agency in the world cause clearly, I felt I had none and that is what “men” are supposed to do right? But no matter how many reps and sets, no matter that I’d cultivated the physical power to bench press a full-grown man or throw out squats with multiple roller derby girls on my back, it was a failure in filling that absence I felt inside.

But, you see it wasn’t MY failure.

I’d been bathed in the “waters of masculinity” from birth. There was no overt insistence from my parents, neither of them in their parenting ever told me to “be a man”, but instead gave a gentle acceptance of my oddness. When I first told my father about my transition he reached for my hand, his eyes damp. The first thing he told me was that he was sorry. Sorry for not having asked years earlier, suddenly feeling the weight of responsibility that maybe he could’ve helped me find this sooner. And my mother? Just the other day as I sat with her while she ran errands, as daughters do, and she told me that seeing the woman I am has given her a reassurance in her memories of “her little boy”. The beloved child who, to her bewilderment, was so clearly an oddity to any who met him. “Sweet and gentle and a joy, yes, but still an oddity”.

There’s a comfort for her now in discovering an explanation decades later.

Neither of them failed me. Neither of them pressured me to “be something”. The world certainty did. The brutalisation I suffered at the hands of classmates certainly did. The indifference of teachers, and the spiritual leaders of a Christian Boys College certainly told me to “be a man” when I was so clearly something else. Those warm waters, the primordial testosterone-rich soup of media and culture are very much to blame. It was a failure in knowing that this, what I’m doing now, was an option.

Also, I lied.

I WILL be making fun of guys who drive “gender-affirming trucks”.

Sorry, but y’all can go fuck yourself with your obnoxious yank-tank wank-mobiles. I have found my line in the sand for how much I’ll tolerate, and it rests somewhere in relation to these juggernauts that have been allowed to be dumped into the Australian marketplace because of our piss-poor politician’s piss-poor efforts at anything beyond lip-service to “our nation’s stunning natural beauty” and environmental standards.

To be fair, I myself drive a gender-affirming vehicle. It’s one of those small zippy jeep-type ones. The ones with great fuel-economy and a small physical footprint. The ones that you see all the futch camping-lesbians in. You know the sort of car, guys. It’s just like the one that you’d watch being driven away by your girlfriend’s queer bestie while they have a girls-only weekend camping trip while you play CoD with boys. The sort of vehicle that you would catch sight of the bumper sticker on the back that says, “Dear men, if you don’t start going down on your girlfriend, I will.”

Yeah. Let that thought sink in fellas.

So, I have very little patience for these laughable behemoths that have cropped up everywhere. To me they’re the metaphysical inverse of a clown car. I adore the hilarity of a tiny vehicle with buffoon after buffoon after buffoon tumbling out, pouring forth in a cascade. It brings joy and wonderment to my heart that such a tiny object could contain such an immensity. So when the doors unhitch on one of these absurd monuments to fragile masculinity and a solitary buffoon steps out my mind says the opposite. “Isn’t it amazing that an object of immensity could contain such a tiny, tiny man.”

But why would I draw the line here?

Because getting hair plugs, or me taking HRT, or you going to the gym to only do arms and chest and never legs is about YOUR body. I cannot think poorly of the men crowding onto jets, not for European holidays but for the chance, the small glimmer of hope of looking in the mirror and seeing “the man they wish to be” looking back. I know exactly what that feels like. I can’t fault the men who’ve been told again and again that their stature is a failing. I can’t fault their wish to endure brutal pain for just the smallest relief. Sure, the gender standard that these men are attempting to adhere to is absurd and the thing that’s at fault is the notion that as they are not more the 5’8” they are somehow inferior.

However I just can’t fault their desire for relief from it.

These treatments that are so routinely mocked online about “the fragility of manhood” are so very much like the treatments that I undergo, both explicitly AND philosophically. They are alterations to how a body appears in the world and if a cisgendered man, plagued with insecurity can see the overlap between his experience and mine, then I’ll fight for his right to harvest his scalp for a hairline that makes him happy. But of course, changing how your body looks is not the same as changing how you apply it into the world. Affirming your masculinity (or femininity in my case) is not a sin. But if your affirmation of your masculinity is to occupy more space (with a stupid truck or otherwise), make more noise, exert more will into the world already saturated, steeped in those testosterone-rich waters then maybe it isn’t your gender you are seeking to affirm but your need to soak up yet more power and status in a world already tailored to YOUR version of power and status. Maybe you should take a hard look at why you wanna do this? I mean… I had to do through psychological assessments in order to be allowed to transition, maybe if you have the urge to drive a tank on a suburban street you too should do some soul-searching?

Cause hey, masculinity can be so much more than “being attractive for the ladies”, right? But if y’all insist on doing it in ways that reinforce the patriarchy in the world, well I’m gonna redirect your attention to the bumper sticker. No one is going to mind you feeling proud of your body or how you look so long as you are not doing it at the expense of others.

Otherwise, I promise that I’m going to take your girlfriend camping.

–S