I started to grow a beard when I was around fourteen. It didn’t happen overnight, no Kafkaesque horror. It was slow and steady, more terrifying by half. My gender identity did not match this physical manifestation. I fought it as hard as I could with depilatories, bleaches, home wax kits, and tweezers. Spent countless hours “dealing” with “it,” frantically burning and searing and flaying myself in a desperate effort to be free.  It was the beard or me: one of us had to go. This was the early nineties in southern California. I attended an expensive, punitively high-achieving secondary school…