To Beard or Not to Beard

It took me a long time to muster up the courage to contact a medical professional regarding my detransition. I stopped taking testosterone on my own accord because I had no doctor or endocrinologist monitoring my hormone treatment. At the beginning, getting off of my testosterone shots was a kind of experiment to see if I could handle my natural body. I still have my uterus and ovaries, so the likely outcome of quitting testosterone injections was the return of my menstrual cycle. This would lead to a gradual change of my figure, muscle mass and body hair. The prospects of looking like a woman scared me. However, I wanted to try and see if I could become independent from the synthetic hormones. Some of the discomfort with my body returned, but to my surprise, I also found a joy and pride in seeing the woman in me reemerge.

I had quit the medical side of transition, and I soon ditched the philosophical side of it as well. I still lived with the social aspect of it, though. In nearly all of my day to day interactions, I was a man.  What finally made me contact the gender clinic was my facial hair. It was – and still is – difficult to confidently say to myself and others that I am a woman, as long as I have a beard to disprove it. At the same time, it felt wrong to let a physical attribute define who I was. The solution to my problem seemed to lie either in some kind of therapy to help me accept that I now had facial hair, or in a medical procedure to remove it. In the Northern European country where I live, gender health care in general consists of medical transition, and it is provided through the public health care services, so I got in touch with one of the regional clinics for transgender health care. 

In our first meeting, the psychologist I was assigned asked me what my preferred pronouns were. I tried to explain to her that I didn’t want to dictate how others view or talk about me anymore, I would rather that people use what comes natural to them. Faced with her furrowed eyebrows, however, I quickly capitulated to “just use gender neutral ones.” We were off to a polarized start. In all of the conversations we have had, I have tried to explain to her my reasons for detransitioning and where I stand now, and I am struck by her lack of curiosity for what led me onto the path of transition in the first place. It became evident after a few sessions that her approach to our therapy was adapted to people in transition. What she wanted to offer was to “support me in my process,” it just so happened that my process was a detransition instead of a transition. When it came to the question of my facial hair, and my qualms in regards to removing it, she brushed it off. She said “out of the physical insecurities you can have, you shouldn’t worry about facial hair, because that you can actually eliminate” and referred me to laser hair removal. 

I’m not sure know what I wanted to get from a therapist, but I know that I didn’t get it in gender affirming healthcare. I tried to follow my therapist’s lead. We had friendly, interesting conversations, but they never really went anywhere. I never had any success talking to a therapist when I was transitioning either.

When I decided to make use of the gender clinic’s laser hair removal services, I found myself in a waiting room among aspiring trans women. The nurse, knowing that I was a woman who was detransitioning, assured me with a big smile on her face that I would be very satisfied at the end of my treatment. I was not so sure myself. No laser can take back my decade of insisting that I am a man. Likely, it won’t even give me the smooth face I had before. With a disarming gesture I suggested to her that I was ambivalent about the procedure, and contrary to her usual clientele, I would not have been there had it not been for my transition in the first place. The nurse looked blankly at me. She just wanted to make me feel at ease. “You know, many people think it’s strange to pay so much money and go through so much pain for something so superficial as hair removal,” she said, “but I believe it’s worth it when it helps you become who you truly are on the inside!” I opened my mouth to answer her, but realised that I didn’t know what to say. After all, I was not there to discuss the trans medical paradigm with a nurse whose main job is to laser off the beards of trans women. I shrugged and lied down on the examination table.

It all feels so paradoxical. I want to stop pathologising my expression, but I have ended up repathologising myself in order to achieve my goal. I wait with excruciating impatience in between each hair removal session, and at the same time I try to talk myself out of going there at all, because I shouldn’t feel the need to hide my beard. I have no idea what I am doing, and as I am doing it, my frustration that anyone ever invented the term transsexual expands like a balloon, and so does my disbelief that the health care services picked it up and ran with it.