The bearded lady
December 2004
While searching for a book in the local library, I bumped into a trans woman with five o'clock shadow. She clearly didn't give a damn: no makeup, no apologies.
I can cope with my hairy legs, even make fun of my hobbit toes. I don't mind the hirsute ’pits: they keep me warmer in the winter.
After letting my beard grow in I looked like an old English sheep dog. The hair on the top of my head fell in front of my face to cover up the whiskers. That new 'do, however, came out of embarrassment.
I wear men's clothes, open doors for the fairer sex and snort at gender stereotypes. Call me mister and I'll laugh. But I am a girl -- and this girl doesn't have a beard.
Very soon, I went back to plucking every hint of stubble that peeks out of the flesh beneath my chin. The bristles beneath my nose are carefully bleached every couple of weeks.
I once refused to whiten for a full month, and eventually worried that, happily settled as one-half of a fat-cat couple, I was getting lazy and letting myself go. Started sniffing my clothes to make sure I didn't stink. Can't have the bed mate turning away with a strangled gasp and a need for air.
Hairy dykes are a punch line to a nasty joke. Said one positive review of "The L Word" on the Zap2it site: "Indeed, cliches are avoided. There are no plaid flannel shirts or fat, hairy women in sight."
It's all so silly. There are gay men who shave every bit of their bodies. Metrosexuals are doing it, and athletes, too. The girls in Playboy look ridiculous with their little slivers pointing the way to the sweet spot.
For straight women, Brazilian waxes are all the rage. Ann Landers (or rather, her advice column's heirs) were appalled this summer with a women showing off the hair on her inner thighs while wearing a bathing suit.
Electrolysis and laser hair removal can make it all permanently go away. They're multi-million-dollar industries.
Lesbians like to think we've worked all this stuff through -- that we're better adjusted. Het chick Min Liao once attended a lesbian bathhouse night in Seattle and wrote: "Women lounged around in twos and threes, chattering in low voices. With the exception of one grumpy dyke who glared disapprovingly at my neatly trimmed pubic hair, every other woman seemed friendly; everyone was courteous, uninhibited, and (yay!) very, very hairy. Girls were slouching around like overfed cats, confident and nonchalant: pot bellies, jiggly thighs, taut stomachs, wide hips, bulky calves -- I saw every size and shape imaginable."
So why can't I, a leftie dyke, perfectly comfy with my body's ubiquitous soft gorilla fuzz, cope with a goatee?
When Liao visited the lesbian tubs, she did the hetero thing. "To prepare, I plucked, shaved, exfoliated, and moisturized myself within an inch of my life," she wrote in wrote in the alt weekly The Stranger. "It wasn't because I was vain. I fussed and primped because I am, like most straight women, more concerned about other women seeing me naked than I am about guys seeing me naked."
Lesbian aesthetics aside, my body is visible to the heterosexual world. I must also cope with the mainstream and its expectations.
No matter how I deny the beauty myth, its spears have worked into my brain, digging themselves so far in I can't see where to begin to excavate.
Yeah, that's it. It's not my fault!
That trans woman in the library really did look great. I admired her guts and her looks. Me? I don't think so.