Hair: A Lament

"Give me down to there.  Hair    Shoulder-length or longer".   MacDermot, Rado, and Ragni.


I have had a  happy seven year relationship with estrogen.  Long undecided about the seriousness of my  gender quirk,  I have over and over been surprised by my need to acknowledge my feminine side.  Hormones were perhaps the greatest surprise to my addled psyche.   First trying herbal stuff and then turning to the internet for the real thing in the form of patches that you slapped on your butt, and let them do their magic.  I didn't notice many emotional changes in my estrogen soaked brain, but i sure noticed changes to my estrogen soaked chest, breasts!   Well golly. I guess that I was rather more serious about my femininity than I sometimes imagined.
That was 2007, and within months I began dressing in public and socializing with other open mined and like minded persons as Belinda.  I was still a closeted cross-dresser i suppose, but i had opened the closet and taken a nice stroll around the house.  There were people who knew me as Belinda, and only knew me as Belinda.  And of course with shaved legs, chest, and breasts,  breasts so sensitive I was amazed,  I began to believe that I was truly trans.  In the years that followed, i grew to believe more in the importance of my Belinda-ness to my future happiness.  When i retired, i pierced my ears and began to grow my hair long, finally coloring my old lady hair at the salon,  among the other ladies old and young.   In recent months I had begun to see a gender therapist, began to see a clinic to get legal hormones, and revealed my transgender proclivities to my siblings and children.    All the signs of late onset transition.
Then whammo!  One week I was contemplating my future, and  then the next I was seriously contemplating the concept of no future.  After a few weeks,    I had a brain operation to remove a meningioma,  and took many weeks to recover, but recover I did and when I finally realized that this was not my final chapter, I once again began to think about the future, but the future wasn't like it had been.   I looked into meningiomas, and realized that prudence dictated that i accept the possibility that HRT had possibly contributed to my illness and I stopped taking estrogen.  When I thought my life might be very short, I felt that gender issues were not necessarily the most important issues.   But things have changed now.
Two months without estrogen have left me with a lot of anxiety.   It has made my beard more hairy, my mind more horny,  just feeling in general more mannish and the hair on my head....
Well brain surgery is not ever the best thing for your hairdo.   And then I began to worry about male pattern baldness, and started noticing that perhaps my hair was indeed falling out.  You can just put on a wig,  right?  like so many of the other girls.  I must have 4 of them in the back of my closet.  Each of us is unique in our history, and our relationship to gender.  I have never felt that my male self was a mask or a shell, hiding my female self.   Rather I felt like I had to create my feminine self, and part of that creation was physical,  breasts, hair, hairless skin which remind me when I look in a mirror at any time that I am of two genders or none depending on your point of view.   I can live perfectly contentedly with old lady hair dyed or not, but I fear that old man hair will make me cry.

But yesterday I think I came upon a solution.   Avodart,  dutasteride.   The anti-androgen that is used as a treatment for hair loss.   I know it is shallow to worry about what is on top of my head rather than what is in it,  but I never claimed to be that deep.   My poor hair may not be what it once was, but I am not going to give it up without a fight.  My order is being shipped as I write this.  Most transsexuals take estrogen and anti-androgens at the same time.    I have decided to practice serial hormonics.