You’re gonna have to force me to look at that
No
Fuck me!
Oh fuck oh fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!
Fuck!
Oh Jesus
Sorry
That sucks
Thank you
When I was fifteen, my hair was longer than it’s ever been
in my whole life.
I had been allowed to grow it this long
because I had promised my parents that
I was growing it to donate it to the charity Locks of Love.
Of course the longer it got, the less I wanted my head to be shaved,
and I was also receiving a lot of comments from people,
along the lines of
“are you a boy or a girl?”
“You look like a woman from behind”
I remember an adult woman, a friend of my mother’s,
saying something to the effect of:
“This hair, this beautiful hair, is wasted on a boy.”
Of course, I didn’t feel like a boy
I didn’t know what I felt like, and I didn’t understand the concept of transness yet,
but I desperately wanted to hold onto this long hair.
When my parents finally decided it was time for it to be shaved off and donated,
my dad didn’t want to pay a hairdresser just to shave my head.
So he shaved my head, using his beard trimmer,
in our bathtub, at home.
My mom rubber banded my hair into little segments,
and then he came in and shaved it, down to the scalp.
He took pictures with his digital camera
sort of… the whole way through,
and there’s one picture in particular of my head
where only the right side is shaved,
and I have a frozen kind of smile on my face,
and I remember in that moment feeling like the ugliest thing that had ever lived,
all of the kind of femininity I felt I had built up through growing my hair
had been annihilated, and I felt vulnerable, and exposed, and destroyed.
I wanted to revisit this experience for this performance
with the same attitude that Yoko Ono brought to her performance, Cut Piece,
in which she wore her nicest clothes
for the audience to cut into pieces.
I wanted to approach this performance with the attitude
that something precious was about to be modified, or destroyed.
Thank you for watching.