The Haircut

Reflections on the terror and magic of parenting a gender-diverse child.

Jul 06, 2024

I’m back – and I’ve learned how to pause your paid subscriptions, so thank you for your patience. I owe you a few months of free stories, and I intend to deliver.

At the moment, the secrets of other people feel dangerous, perhaps because I’ve brushed a little too close to some truths that have hurt. I am currently reluctant to play fiction with very real weapons, if you will.

So I will continue to write out my own stories, for now. Explorations on strange encounters with existence. The vulnerability is worth it, I think. I behold my fellow writers on here and feel so grateful for their open studios on Substack. Whether or not you feel like still reading my words, thank you for your patience.

I’ve been off gallivanting, by the way - working as an actor again for almost six months straight - and Jesus I’ve felt my age. This old girl can’t handle a Naarm night shoot with a lukewarm cup of tea at 2am anymore. I get cold. But I digress.

There are plenty of stories to share from plays and films and broken hearts and first times and soft miracles and brazen scripts. But I’m home now, and my focus is deeply and hungrily zeroed in on my domestic world of parenting. I still parented whilst acting, but not how I usually do. It was liberating and it was brutal.

The last six months were a uniquely rough time to suddenly have strict work hours away from my kids. My first-born, A, was starting her first year of school. My second-born, B started presenting as a gender non-conforming for the first time.

I’ve debated about writing on this topic, since B is so young and fluid in their process. But waiting for something to be unchanging before you write about it leaves you silent. And things are allowed to change. I’ve decided my child’s fluidity informs this writing – my words are a marker of time, not a cemented creed. I also want to be clear that although B has communicated with me about who they are since they could talk, I do not speak for them. I speak only as a co-parenting mother who is seeking her child’s health and happiness amidst a violently conflicted world. After all, if we don’t talk about it, how will we know we’re not alone?

My child is four years and three months old. They’re little: they still co-sleep with me, and need me to wipe their poos. They can draw little stick figures and a few backwards letters, and they tell me they would like to be a dinosaur or a builder when they grow up. They have never watched a single social media video about gender, or seen a drag show. They don’t know what a pronoun is. They are ignorant of politics. Yet they have told me with and without words, since they were approximately eighteen months old, that they were not a girl.

At first, we simply noted it as a matter of taste. My eldest, A, has veins that run with pink glitter, and at the age of two she slept solely in tutus. I’d found this hyper-femininity a bit confusing, as I believed in gender neutral parenting, and it took a lot of unlearning my own misogyny to lean into it. At the same age, B didn’t want a bar of it – no dresses, no pink, no prettiness. Hurrah! I thought. A bit of androgyny at last!

However, B’s self-image was complex. From birth, B was a deeply sensual and embodied human, who loved being in their own skin, but they seemed to hate their reflection. They didn’t often want their picture taken. They didn’t care for creative ways of doing hair. They put up with the earthier kinds of clothes I found them but didn’t enjoy them, either. I put their intolerance of getting dressed down to an innately nudist spirit.

At the age of two and a half, B was in bed with me when they said very seriously: ‘Mummy, I’m not a girl. I’m a B’. In the moment I laughed at the wokeness, and to be perfectly honest I didn’t think much of it. B was a B, and some days a monster, and other days a bunny. But I had to admit it wasn’t a new phase. B had never been anything close to ‘a girl’, in the generalised sense. A masculine expression was all we’d ever known of them, even if we’d never called it that.

People would gift B Barbies and unicorns, and they’d cry for trucks and dinosaurs instead. Of course, many girls naturally have those interests, and toys and clothes should not be gendered, but this urge began to stretch beyond my supportive catch-cry of ‘Dinosaurs and trucks are for girls too!’

‘I want boy things,’ 3-year-old B would insist, ‘Because I’m not a girl.’

I want to pause B’s story here to quickly (ha) discuss my own complex relationship with transgender politics. I wish I could say I’ve always been an ally, but that isn’t true. My feminism has only recently (in the past three years) come to include and celebrate transgender expression. I was raised by a sassy androgynous woman, was an androgynous kid myself, and went to an all-girls high school which proclaimed girls could do anything. I came out as queer in the 2000s, before the most recent genderqueer revolution, and all the masc-presenting people with vaginas were still calling themselves butch lesbians. I then entered conservative Christianity (yay, literal gender roles!) and queerness was no longer encouraged, let alone transgender expression or gender-affirming healthcare.

On my way out of the church, I was surrounded by second-wave, gender-critical feminists, at times trans-exclusionary. Their focus was on female oppression specifically due to biological sex. I wrestled with these ideologies, and I wrestled with my own expansive experience of womanhood – which included power, magic, marginalisation and exploitation. Womanhood contains myriad expressions, I thought. Isn’t a desire to not be a woman just internalised misogyny? Does it not reduce us? Why would these young people be encouraged to give it up? IS IT THE PATRIARCHY AGAIN? All this to say, I wasn’t necessarily the perfect candidate to parent a trans or gender-creative kid, and it was certainly not something I planted in my child. If anything, I was fiercely proud to have had two daughters, and wanted them both to be empowered by their femaleness. In fact, I never expected it to be otherwise.

So we fast-forward to 2023. I had just finished shooting a screen project in which most of the friends I made were trans/non-binary people. I had even begun dating a non-binary person from the project – also a single mother of small children - and we’d fallen madly in love. My perspective on genderqueer identity, expression, sovereignty and safety had shifted massively, but my child’s own identity still felt inconclusive. B (now 3 years old) was too young to know, surely? And besides, I was co-parenting with my ex-husband -someone who had significantly more conservative values at the time. My non-binary partner supported me in affirming B’s self-expression, but they never spoke to B about gender directly, and we were sure never to push the conversation.

As the year stretched on, B limited their daily wardrobe to a Spiderman suit, a soccer uniform, and a monster truck shirt from an op-shop. They were vocal about not being a girl, but didn’t push for any specific gender expression until I made the pivotal mistake of cutting their infuriatingly long mop of hair. ‘Can I get a boy haircut?’ they asked, wide-eyed, as I pulled out the scissors. ‘Can it be short, like Daddy’s?’ A fringe will solve this and look extremely cute, I thought, so I cut them some bangs. The response was cataclysmic.

B was inconsolable. They refused to look at themselves, refused to be touched. They found a baseball cap and covered their hair immediately. I messaged my partner, confused, who told me gently ‘You might not understand this, but I remember loathing my first fringe. A fringe is so much more feminine than just having long hair…’.

I was deeply impacted at how distressed B was, especially at what seemed like something so innocuous. B made me search ‘boy haircuts’ on Google, and pointed out all the ones they actually wanted. If I showed them pictures of girls with short hair they would cry out in alarm. They begged and pleaded for the haircut they wanted. ‘One day…’ I promised, internally panicking.

A few weeks went by, and A was taken for a haircut this time. Triggered by the mere mention of hair, B again petitioned me for a ‘boy cut’. ‘Not yet,’ I said, trying to be diplomatic, but I knew my child needed support they simply weren’t receiving. I pondered my partner’s own gender dysphoria, an experience I’d personally never had, and sought their advice. I tried to think of other ways to help B feel like themselves, that I didn’t need co-parent approval for.

The next day we went to Kmart, and they chose their first ever full wardrobe of ‘boy’ clothes. We came home, the baseball cap still firmly over the bangs, and they put on an outfit immediately, including ‘boy undies’ and ‘boy socks’. They rushed to the mirror and stood in front of their own reflection, quietly taking it in. They tested out moving their body, and pulled some superhero moves. They grinned and posed as I took their photograph. They held themselves with pride and adoration. Then they proceeded to put on every other piece of new clothing. They pulled them over the top of one another, as if every added layer of correctly gendered attire only made them stronger and more visible – like a videogame character gaining extra lives. Their smile was so potently genuine that it broke my concerns into pieces.

From that day, B’s chest of drawers became a kind of shrine. They learned how to fold and put away their own clothes, so they’d know where everything was. They dressed themselves as soon as they woke up in the morning, just to have the joy of doing so, then changed outfits multiple times to experience the feeling again. I was taken aback at the realisation I had never seen my child this happy, independent or whole.

My co-parent and I realised the days of hand-me-downs from A were over, and we began to throw away the dresses and skirts B had always refused to wear anyway. By three and a half, B became bolder, and started lining up their collection of toys and clothes on their bed, in an elaborate bower-bird construction they called ‘My Boy Things’. Whenever they needed to regulate they would sit and rearrange their possessions one by one, as if as a reminder of who they were. If I moved a single matchbox car, they knew. I recognised the behaviour as being a bit neuro-spicy, but I also knew the items signified identity.

‘She’s just a tomboy’, well-meaning relatives and educators would say, and it could very well have been true, but I had started deconstructing my ideas about female masculinity, and wondering if words like that only existed because nothing else was offered as an option. Five-year-old A was frustrated by the gender rhetoric: ‘B has a VAGINA. She’s my sister. She’s a GIRL.” ‘Not necessarily,’ I would try to explain. ‘B can be whoever B wants to be.’ B would nod, picking their nose next me. ‘Because I’m not a girl, A. I’m a B.’

B and I had a lot of complex conversations in those few months:

‘Were you a girl or a boy when you were a kid, Mummy?’

‘I want to have a baby. But I want to be the Daddy.’

‘Why do some people say I’m a girl and you say I get to choose?’

‘I hate girls. Girls aren’t allowed at my party, it’s just for boys like me.’

‘I don’t know if I want to be a boy OR a girl. I’m neither.’

‘Why do you get to have short hair and I don’t? Why do you have short hair if you’re not a boy?’

At the start of 2024, I got a truly unexpected phone call from my co-parent. ‘B still wants the haircut, and I think we should just let it happen. It’s just hair, it’ll grow back.’ I sprang up from where I was sitting. ‘Yes. Let’s do it today.’

I don’t know why the haircut felt so significant to me. Perhaps because I knew that from the moment it was cut, B would effortlessly present as a little boy (whether they wanted to or not) and I would present as the mother of a little boy. Perhaps I didn’t feel qualified enough to have a son? I didn’t have the same experiences as other boy mums, hadn’t taught a boy how to wee standing up, hadn’t taken the rite of passage any woman who has conceived a male must take, to integrate her masculine and feminine – to forgive the hurts of men to unconditionally love the one she’s created. I felt like a fraud, even if I didn’t perceive my child to be one. A ‘boy’ was a thing I understood to be entirely unknown, if not dangerous.

In the thick of a strange grief, I remembered back to being pregnant with B, and having a friend pray over my unborn child, not yet ‘gendered’ by an ultrasound. She saw visions, a normal practice for us both at the time, and shared one with me. I see a warrior. He’s strong, he’s a leader. Fierce and gentle. A beautiful, powerful son. We laughed about it after B was born, bemoaning the crossed wires of prophetic words. And yet, here I was.

B was almost four the day we had the haircut. They were in their Lionel Messi Liverpool jersey and matching shorts, a present from their Dad. They were afraid, long hair like a golden muzzle around their sense of self, chubby arms and legs hiding their face from the mirrors of the hairdresser. But I promised them it would not hurt, and they sat on their father’s lap bravely and let the smock be placed around their neck. The anxiety on their tiny face was excruciating. I was nervous too. What if they didn’t like it, and we couldn’t change it back? I showed the hairdresser the photo B had chosen. ‘Like a boy? Are you sure?’ the woman asked. ‘Yes, like a boy.’

I had to leave for most of the haircut, to give A some much-needed attention. When we came back, it was almost finished. I saw B, and I immediately burst into tears. My child was looking directly at themselves in the mirror, overcome with wonder. They made eyes with their Daddy, and gave a small, thrilled nod. I saw my child smile at themselves the way a person is supposed to smile when beholding someone they love. I realised I had never met a man who has looked at me the way my son was finally able to look at himself. I realised that in that moment I had birthed him all over again.

We exist now as we’ve always existed. We all make art, we all watch Spidey, we all play soccer, we all dance in the living room. We all watch The Little Mermaid, we all play with Lego, we all love babies. We all believe in fairies, we all climb trees, and we all get different kinds of haircuts.

We call B her, them, him.

We call B a monster.

We call B a bug.

We call B a B.

When we go to the park, people ask me the names of my kids.

‘It’s so nice having one of each, isn’t it? Little boys are so different to little girls!’

‘It is,’ I say. ‘They are.’