It’s been over a year since my last haircut. Before the pandemic, I’ve always had at least one every 3 months, but come to think of it, this has always been because of pressure from family members; I personally was never in a hurry to get haircuts. Their old favorite way to goad me into cutting my hair was to taunt me for almost having enough hair for a ponytail (and therefore look too feminine). Our Chinese culture is rather hostile to any and all deviation from strict gender conformity, and I had subscribed to that conformity for a while, before deciding it was bollocks. Now that I’ve learned to ignore the taunting, I’ve been regularly putting my hair in a ponytail. Members of my family have therefore changed their tactics from light taunting to less subtle attacks.

My mother, whom I live with, has been the strongest voice of criticism. She constantly grills me about why I’m keeping my hair long, but was never satisfied with any of my numerous reasons. Her stance is that her strong opposition to it and the opposition from my other family members should take precedence unless I absolutely love my long hair. My stance is that I should be allowed to keep the hair growing on my head even if I like it just a little. I anticipate that if I said I liked it a lot, she wouldn’t be satisfied, but instead demand to know why. At some level, it’s because I like the subtle femininity associated with it, and that’s the answer that I’ve tried to dance around, because I know how much it would confuse and upset her to learn that I’m anything other than 100% masculine.

We get along fine for the most part, but this issue kept coming up recently because I’ve been interviewing for jobs and because it happens to be a Chinese holiday (Lunar Feb 2) when people typically get haircuts. She expects me to make the sacrifice of cutting my hair for the sake of following tradition to appease my family members and for the sake of looking more “appropriate” to employers, but I don’t know if I can make it clear to her how awful that would feel to give up a year’s worth of hair for reasons that I completely disagree with. I want to make it clear to her that making her happy by cutting my hair would make me rather miserable, but I’m not prepared to explain exactly why. I still care about her though; it’s just that I can’t see myself being in a good mood for the next few months if I were to get the haircut for her.