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 and a strictly socially stratified Jewish summer camp. The explicit goal of the former was Ivy League matriculation; of the latter, romantic attachments to fellow Jews, leading, as soon as possible, to marriage and procreation. I didn’t care about Yale, but I was extremely (read: obsessively) interested in boys, and a “girl” with a beard held no market value.
If gender can be said to serve sexuality, gender-conformity was, or seemed to be (because it… was) the most expedient way to get what I wanted. Which is to say: a boyfriend. Which is to say: power. (Recently I found, in one of my early notebooks, a passage reflecting on erections: “Isn’t it cool how they get boners BECAUSE of us!?”)
I was a dyed-in-the-wool teenage feminist with subscriptions to Ms. and Bitch magazines, but I knew of no conversations about the “binaries” of gender. I never saw armpit or leg hair on a woman, let alone facial hair. There wasn’t mainstream language or cultural currency around gender-fuckery at the time. There was no discussion of pronouns, although by the time I hit college in the late 90’s, “ze” had its fleeting moment as an alternative to “he” or “she.”
It never occurred to me to leave myself alone, to “let” my beard be. I did not want to be a girl with a beard. I wanted to be a “real” girl, a girl who might someday be inspiring of love, or at the very least, boners. It likewise did not occur to me that a girl could have a beard and still be “real,” still a “girl,” still worthy/inspiring of love (and maybe even lust). There was no way, back then, to see any possibility for a good life as a bearded woman.
Was it a failure of imagination, or was it a lack of courage? Or are failure of imagination and lack of courage the same thing?
We’ll take care of it, my mother said, bless her forever. She knew the place: a discreet, high end electrolysis salon tucked high up in a Beverly Hills office building. It was like stepping out of a time machine: every surface was either marbled, gilded, mirrored, or upholstered. The staff wore starched white uniforms and spoke in hushed tones. There was a bar if you needed to have a shot of sherry or whiskey before or after getting your follicles electrocuted one-by-one. There was an impeccably lit “recovery” lounge, with high end magazines, where afterwards you were supposed to press a steaming hot cotton compress up against your still-sizzling flesh for twenty minutes, then slather yourself with a foul-smelling cream, the function of which I never learned.
I always admired myself in the mirror when I was done with this ordeal. Temporarily liberated from my shameful affliction. Problem solved, for now. Able to (literally) face the world and hold my head high, for now. Vigilance was key.
There was no way, back then, to see any possibility for a good life as a bearded woman.
An endocrinologist in Santa Monica prescribed an androgen blocker (still commonly used by transfeminine people), which I swallowed daily for many subsequent years, unambivalent about eradicating the secondary sex characteristic that did not align with who (or what) I knew, or wished, myself to be: A girl! A girl! A girl. A girl.
I was not of age to consent to these treatments, but that didn’t matter, because my desired affirmation was aligned with my assigned gender, so all the hormone blockers and irreversible cosmetic procedures I could want were mine to have. I wasn’t fighting assigned gender, so no one batted an eye. Wasn’t it ever thus?
By the dawn of the twenty-first century, hair removal technology (and I) took a great leap forward with the advent of lasers. I pursued an expensive course of treatment with a pioneer at UCLA. It was faster and hurt less than electrolysis, and once again, Mom covered all expenses. “It’s wonderful to be smart and interesting,” she said, “but it’s essential to be attractive, so that people are open to notice how smart and interesting you are.” A spoonful of sugar makes the feminist medicine go down. (Wasn’t it ever thus?)
I was not of age to consent to any of these treatments, but that didn’t matter, because my desired affirmation was aligned with my assigned gender.
I had most of the hair permanently removed from my face, arms, armpits, belly, thighs, ass, legs, and feet. I kept my pubic hair, roughly the same basic inverted triangle as one saw on the adorable cartoon lady in my childhood copy of Peter Mayle’s Where Did I Come From?
During the many hours we spent together over the better part of a year, my favorite laser technician told me all about her young daughter, who was dying slowly of a genetic disease.
“I just have to cherish whatever time we have left together,” I recall her saying, as she repeated the incremental movement of ice and laser over huge swaths of my skin.
A glimmer of an idea began to assert itself: what if the energy and expense of hair removal was, in fact, a hugely wasteful, idiotic use of my time?
But the train had left the station, and I was relieved to see my hirsutism fade into memory. I emerged into my twenties like the proverbial butterfly. A hetero-dude-magnet. Objectifiable, huzzah! With all the power and eros and choice and pleasure and fun and adventure implied therein. Mission accomplished. Promiscuity is nothing more than travelling, there’s more than one way to see the world, sang Ani Difranco.
In my late twenties, I fell in love, got pregnant, and immediately stopped taking the hormone blockers, panicking that they might already have had an effect on the fetus.
My old endocrinologist, reached for comment, just shrugged; it was probably (probably!?) fine.
As it turned out, I was way into childbearing. The “womanly” glory of it. All those annoying mammalian realities, the physical/animal demands—this was my jam. I screamed and squatted in a bathtub on the fourth floor of a one-bedroom condo in downtown Brooklyn, then nursed that kid for so long the relatives gossiped.
By the time I was able to think about anything other than child-rearing, something had shifted in the culture (and/or maybe the water). I looked around my circles in the Hudson Valley and Brooklyn and Vermont and Western Mass and Los Angeles, at so many students and writers and artists and MFA party-goers and textile whores and bookstore-lovers and baristas and feeds, and noticed something astonishing: it was increasingly very cool to be a gender freak.
How to name what I felt? Jealousy. Frustration. Resentment. Lo: I had been cheated. Worse: I had cheated myself. All my towering, definitive, formative shame had been optional, after all!? All that struggle and pain and self-loathing?
The once-urgent necessity to align within the narrowest borders of femininity was suddenly (well, gradually) revealed to be a common, crappy capitulation. And now I can’t help but wonder what my life might have been like, and what it might be like today, if I had been “allowed” to exist with a beard. If I had somehow been “able” to insist that I be “allowed.” If I had “allowed” myself. If I had been privy, in other words, to an inkling that life as a person with two X-chromosomes, ovaries, a uterus, big boobs, boner-affinities, and a beard could be worthwhile (nay, fun).
What coveted cultural currency I’d enjoy today in my ever-so-progressive, rarified intellectual/creative-class circles! OG deluxe queer nonbinary elder. Organic. Authentic. Born this way. Politically righteous. Heroic. Persecuted, undaunted, unassailable.
I’ve had a postcard portrait of one such person taped up over my desk for years: Jennifer Miller does Marilyn, by Zoe Leonard. A reminder of who (or what) I might have been. Who or what I “really” am. Who or what I sold out.
Jennifer Miller, mon ami. Seventeen years my senior, hiding in plain sight at the Coney Island freak show around the time I was still finishing up laser treatments and dutifully swallowing hormone blockers. In photos from the time, she wears a full, natural beard and sequined ball gown. Her gaze is calm and confrontational and deep and unafraid and gorgeous and wonderful. Her smile, pure heaven. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wanted to be her and I was madly in love with her. Did I want to study her or kiss her!? Confusing. Revelatory. She dared exist! Whereas I … did not, exactly.
Did I grow a beard because my father and both brothers vanished, and I yearned to go with them?
In Juggling Gender, Tami Gold’s documentary short, Miller speaks with her usual clarity and guts: “Having a beard has really given me a cause to become radical and courageous, and I think those are things that it takes.”
Damn it, why couldn’t I be that brave? Why couldn’t I keep my beard? Why wasn’t I “allowed”? Why couldn’t I “allow” myself? The long answer: I was horny, lonely, scared, impatient, and couldn’t afford the psychic expense. The short answer: timing.
I write to Miller, seeking audience with the bearded sage. (Though of course no actual sage, bearded or otherwise, wishes to be treated as such.) We meet at her place in Brooklyn and speak at length about courage and identity and history and family and culture and hair removal and matriarchy and loss and fate. I was seeking some sort of benediction or grace, I guess.
Yeah, yeah: I did what I “had” to do to keep myself “safe,” but how deflating to see things differently now. I confess my shame: about having had the beard and about having removed the beard and about feeling “too late” now.
She understands. We eat croissants and drink tea and that’s that.
“You think Ed would have asked you out if you’d been sporting a beard?” my mother cackles when I tell her I wish I had been “able” to keep my beard.
No, my husband of sixteen years would never have asked me out if I had been bearded when we met. He is many things—hot, talented, funny—but he is not (yet!?) particularly genderqueer.
I achieved peak femininity and snared myself a manly man: exactly what I wanted. Good for me! Unless achieving peak femininity and snaring a manly man wasn’t my soul’s true path. (LOL omg, bitch please, the “soul,” shut up.)
At forty, I visited a local barber for a buzz cut/mohawk. The first time since toddlerhood I didn’t sport a flowing mane. Would Ed be “put off”? I certainly didn’t ask for anything so ridiculous as his “permission.”
As it happened, he didn’t much care, other than to say it looked “cool.”
“I was done trying to be a woman,” writes Ari Brostoff as an aside in their 2021 essay collection Missing Time, in a piece ostensibly about something else altogether.
I was the “baby” of a broken family. Not “consciously uncoupled”; broken. Every member of it, irrevocably. The eldest of two brothers was off to college when I was in third grade, the same year our father vanished from the household. The middle brother hit puberty right at the same time, and the change in him was stark. I was confused by his hostility, which I mistook for some sort of personal test. So, at eight, nine, ten years old, I learned to front, act tough and fearless, as though the angry young man in the next room didn’t bother me one bit. He made himself scarce as adolescence wore on, and I missed him desperately. Then the eldest began the long process of dying from brain cancer, which felt less like an isolated travesty and more like the cherry on top of a flaming karmic garbage sundae.
I can recognize only now that our family broke neatly along gender lines—the “males” disappeared (via choice, circumstance, and/or death); the “females” remained. Me and my mother, my mother and me. I clung to her—and her worldviews—for life.
Did the aggression and abandonment that defined my childhood alter the development of my hormones? Did I grow a beard because my father and both brothers vanished, and I yearned to go with them? Did I feel the need to be a husband or a son to my mother? Was I in the process of trying to become my own brother?
A propensity for storytelling and daydreaming about metaphysics, as evidenced in such questions, can be a curse. I grew a beard because sometimes women have facial hair. Biological sex characteristics exist on no less of a spectrum than does gender.
Still, I can’t resist a personal narrative about my beard as some sort of adaptive, unconscious coping mechanism: if I were male, maybe I could have left. If I were male, maybe I could’ve properly fought and/or befriended the middle brother. If I were male, maybe the men would’ve looked out for me, taken care of me, extended more of a hand. But I didn’t think any of this, then. I had no framework for imagining myself as male, or trans, or nonbinary, or—God forbid—just a girl with a beard. I had no intellectual or emotional resources for troubling those waters. I simply assumed that the reason my family had turned to ashes, the reason I was so desperately lonely, was because I myself was so hideous, so wrong. A freak, a beast. Unloved, ergo unlovable. Unlovable, ergo unloved.
Pop cultural depictions of menopausal women often include jokes about whiskers. Hilarious: “women” sprout little goatees when “we” get old and presumably undesirable. Ha! Amateurs: I’ve been a menopausal wretch since shortly after my bat mitzvah. “Dried up from the start,” muses the protagonist of Colombian writer Pilar Quintana’s brutal infertility novel, The Bitch.
The first time I get misgendered is at age forty-three, in the low light of an elaborate postmodern funhouse in Santa Fe, N.M. My hair was buzzed, and I was wearing huge canvas overalls over a giant hoodie. Sir, said a docent, we’re closing in half an hour. I was delighted, in an enraged-depressed-luteal-perimenopausal kind of way.
Closing in on fifty, I still patrol my chin. A few whiskers remain, stubborn frenemies, and I take some ancient joy in rooting them out. I feel good—“safe”—whenever I get a big one from the root. Bye, fucker. It’s an unbreakable habit. It’s custom. A well-worn neuropathway. It comforts me. There are so few things in life I can control. I recently tweezed a white one. Sunrise, sunset.
Maybe the time is nigh to “let” my beard grow. I wonder what remains. Surely it wouldn’t be the full, luscious expression of my youth. I imagine I might someday eventually lose all cognizance, and be tended by careless robot nurses who’ll ignore my elderly scruff, which will then, at long last, be free to grow of its own accord. Nature always gets “her” way, does she not?
I regret fighting my beard, bending my body, via electrified needles and lasers and hormones, toward the binary that was, for all I knew at the time, my only option. Not wrong in an abstract way, nor a moral or intellectual way (though perhaps those too). Wrong for me. Wrong for my own purpose. In striving to pass, to fit in, to be conventionally acceptable, to claim my place at the table of femininity (read: get some heteronormative dick), I traded in something infinitely more valuable.
But I’d probably do the same thing all over again, if magically given the chance. Via, you know, time travel? Oh, the galling limits of “having” one little life in one little body. We make our choices and live our stories. The stories we’re given, the stories we invent, and some bizarre intersection of the two. I should never have “had” to eradicate my stupid beard in the first place. And I shouldn’t “have” to align with any newfangled orientation now, imposed from within or from without. I don’t appreciate old labels, don’t covet new ones, and don’t get any charge from checking boxes. Except for “Jew,” but that’s another story altogether.