There Is History In My Hair
Memoir by Jaye Simpson
I have never been able to love my short hair. I have always wished it length and curls, like my sister, whose curls were unruly and ferocious. As a young child, my foster parents would pull a razor from under the bathroom sink and hack away at my hair. My hair was thick and always choked the clippers into shutting down. My hair was resistance and rebellion. I was doomed to short hair cuts at home, until I grew too hard to handle, screaming and crying, kicking. Seeing my hair fall lazily to the floor was an act of violence against me.
When I got older, we were taken to a hair school near North Surrey Secondary School. It was tucked away in the back of an industrial lot, attached to a salon where my foster mom and her daughter would get their eyebrows threaded. These students were ever-shifting, much like my social workers. It became a game, if I would see the same social worker or hairdresser. A game I would always lose.
The summer of 2007 was a different time. Boys hair got longer and shaggier, the style was swooping. I so desperately wanted that. If I was to be a boy, I would have the latest hair. I begged and pleaded, said everyone had the style and it was in. This hairstyle would later be described as the “Bieber” cut. 2007 wasn’t exactly the year of fashion for common folks, crocs were all the rage and I wanted a pair badly. My foster parent entertained this look so long as I kept my heavy Indigenous hair neat and kept it from sticking out from all sides. Typically, summers meant my hair was buzz-cut short.
That summer, I was sent to Camp Potlatch for the third year in a row on a Boys & Girls Club scholarship. Being Indigenous foster kids, we were told we wouldn’t get the normal camping experience. My foster mother and her daughter wanted to go to Europe, so they paid for an extra week of camp, so they could spend six weeks travelling. It was a nice compromise, usually we would be left with one of her sisters or brothers for weeks at a time or put into respite care.
That year, all the boys in my cabin had the swooshed hair, blond tips and made a plentitude of “Your Momma” jokes. I cried and cried, got labeled the camp spaz, and held that nickname fully. But I was falling in love with my bullies and their long hair. They would joke around in the cabin and tell scary stories. One night I was so scared I fell off the top bunk and landed on my head. My blood stained the plywood floor for years to come. I didn’t care because the others began to be nicer to me, kind, and helped me about the camp during my concussion.
I think I wanted their hairstyle that year less because I wanted long hair, but more because I wanted to be with them or, more perversely, be them. They all seemed like your typically assigned cis boys and maybe I wanted that? Instead of longing after my many sisters’ long hair and their girlhoods, I was chasing myself, running from my queerness while also running directly at it. I had always wanted my sister’s childhood, the rituals and rites of passage. I wanted painted nails, clothes that hung off the fat on my body. I would wear their clothes when I could, sneak off to place pink upon undeveloped chest, and pray for girlhood. At least with longer hair, maybe someone would mistake me for one of my sisters. As an adult, I recognize I was a transgender child, forced into boyhood, and was constantly trying to perform my gender just right to get by. I realize I failed, my desire to exist as me persisted, and evidently, I was persecuted.
After camp, our social worker and the ministry’s cultural worker picked up my biological sister and I at the docks at False Creek and drove us to Tsawwassen to go to our aunt and uncle’s place for the two weeks remaining of our foster mother’s trip. I remember Fergie’s Big Girls Don’t Cry coming on the radio and the cultural worker turning and saying to my sister, “Now, we know that’s not true,” while it felt like all the air in the car disappeared. We sat in the backseat, and felt the increasing anticipation for the news that would devastate us. I knew what it was, having heard my mother’s voice days ago. I couldn’t even attach any words to my feelings; high school was starting in two weeks and I knew my shaggy hair would be sheared for our biological mother’s funeral.
When we arrived at our auntie and uncle’s, our cousins were away, but Grandma Flo and Grandma Dar were sitting in the living room, looking over photo albums. I remember how sound felt dull and empty, like careless litter tossed out of a moving vehicle. My brother began to wail, and I felt rage. He had never met her, barely knew her, but I remember what she looked like, what she sounded like and how her body felt while she was holding me. I remember going to parks with her and my aunties, laughing and screaming. I remember her. My sister, on the other hand, sat in silence. Did not go through the photos and eventually got up and left. I held my little brother and cried. I wanted to scream, my social worker had promised a visit before I went to high school. I hadn’t seen her in several years and yearned to hold her now. I reached for Grandma Flo, her soft papery hands enveloping me, stroking my hair and calling me “her dear boy” as I wet her blouse with tears and snot.
After we cried, we emailed our foster sister in Spain, telling her we would be going to a funeral and were mourning. She told us she would get us maps of Barcelona and souvenirs and sent condolences. I didn’t believe her on the souvenirs part, three years prior while on a trip to Disneyland without us, they had given me the Do Not Disturb sign from the hotel. I had dreamt of a realistic green Hadrosaur toy. How could I believe someone when all they could give their foster child was a Do Not Disturb sign and their biological child a trip to Disneyland?
My aunt, a tall sweet woman, helped plan the funeral for the woman who was our life giver. My mom was my Aunt’s stepbrother’s lover and I remember seeing photos of them together during the holidays, back when Grandma Dar and Flo lived on the fourth floor of an apartment building. I don’t know what kind of relationship my Aunt had with my mother, but they knew each other, smiled in the photos.
There was even a photo of me crying on the floor under a side table in the foyer, with my aunt lying on the floor beside me, her red hair spilling across the red ornamental rug, her hand reached out to me. I always remembered wanting her hair, the long flowing locks, spread out on the floor like roots. Later I would find out that my people once had long hair that symbolized our roots to the land and the creator.
My maternal grandmother arrived from the prairies a few days before the funeral, after my aunt had taken us shopping for funeral clothes since all we had was our summer camp clothing. My aunt had taken us to a mall that was considerably different than Guildford Mall, which I was quite accustomed to. I wanted to go to the book-store, but my aunt pulled me into an Old Navy and told me to try on clothes. I was nervous after all, my sister and I were used to Value Village and, on the rare occasion, Walmart. We ended up in a few shops, my aunt rapidly rifling through clothes, not understanding that my anxiety was less about my mother’s funeral and more about the cost of the clothing.
When I asked her how we could afford these, I think she realized my growing anxiety because she stopped and straightened up. Looking at me to assess the full situation. She slowed down and we settled on a turtle-neck and black pants, dress socks and new shoes. She said it was a gift for me, so I could feel comfortable. When my uncle saw me in the funeral garb, he placed his arms on my shoulders and told me I was the strongest person he knew. The clothes felt weird, too nice, too well-fitted, too good for me.
I recall the buzzing sound in the hairdressers in Boundary Bay after my kookum asked me to cut my hair before the funeral. She told me to be a good boy and wear it short. I think I stared at the mirror the entire time, steely eyed and refusing to look away as my childhood fluttered lazily down to the ground in clumps of dusty brown. The hair-dresser asked if I was angry, her small fingers moving through my hair, snipping away. My aunt interjected, saying this hair was for a funeral. The hairdresser apologized, calling me “little guy,” to which I responded by saying “I am twelve” with a slight sneer and a tear running down my face. Her hand gentle, resting on my arm before she mouthed a “sorry” while my aunt looked mournfully at me through the mirror from the waiting area.
Little did I realize, she was performing an old tradition and shedding hair during loss, but her ritual was more about performing gender to its prescribed roles and duties and less about the knowledge and experience given in respect to loss. The day of the funeral, my hair was short, and a black turtleneck and black pants were roasting me alive in the late August sun.
The funeral was at Glenhaven Memorial Chapel, a mere three blocks east of where I work today in Vancouver, and the priest played a children’s choir CD while I dissociated most of the funeral. I met cousins I had never seen before, or knew about, aunties aplenty, and my brother put on the biggest show of his life, sobbing inconsolably and taking the flowers and the large photo of my mother with him. He was living in a group home at the time and my jealousy was strong. I wanted something from the funeral, something more than a haircut and some new clothes. I remember my foster mother commenting on how fancy I must feel with new clothing, since everything I owned was second-hand or thrifted, even the shoes on my feet. I wanted the flowers, the cheap drug store roses, the dyed carnations, and already wilting tulips. I wanted the flashes of colour to bring me back while I was floating high above my body that summer.
I felt rage, intolerable rage, and I felt everyone walking on eggshells around me while I wept silently at night. During this time with my aunt and uncle, I got sick, spent the night in the ER throwing up. I was feverish and weak, my hair tiny spikes with sweat. I was still small enough and wearing my aunt’s pyjama shirt while crying in the car and hospital. The nurse checking us in asked if I still lived in an apartment in East Vancouver, which I would later find was a place I lived in with my brown aunties, cousins, and mother. I remember being in just the shirt and my shorts, sweating and crying, the pain in my abdomen tearing through me. But my aunt, a nurse, moved me around expertly and laid me down, my head on her lap, fingers grazing my freshly cut hair. I realize now, I have always loved these people. I loved them so much that I wanted so desperately for them to adopt me or maybe let me live with them.
One year, their dog, Ruby, a chocolate lab had puppies. We would visit with Grandma Dar and Flo, play with the gorgeous brown puppies, and Grandma Dar asked our foster family if we could take one home as my aunt and uncle wanted us desperately to. I was enamoured with them. They were small, warm and full of love and life. They would sleep in the sun, their tummies full of milk. I cried when my foster mom said no. Ruby was sweet, loving mother and the nicest dog I had ever met. I loved her, I loved my family. My grandmas, Dar and Flo didn’t have to keep me in their life, nor did my aunt and uncle, I was only related to them via my sister and brother. Florence’s son was my sibling’s father. He was my father too. I called him dad, and he raised me when my mother was on benders. He was gentle and loving, soft and playful. He taught me to laugh. He wanted me for me, I was one of his, and I never thought I wasn’t anything but his child. Grandma Flo loved her son, and her partner, Grandma Dar, loved him too. My aunt was Grandma Dar’s daughter, they shared the same fiery hair and also a softness I wish I had to this day. It was a complicated tree, full of queerness and kept secrets, but these folks remained with me through many homes. I truly thought of them as my family.
The last time I saw them was many years after Grandma Flo had passed. I was newly sixteen and it was few months before I moved away from my brother and sister and lived in a home for high risk youth. It was the holidays and my uncle took me for a drive to get gas. He asked why I was giving my foster mother at the time a hard go of it, why I wasn’t listening. What he didn’t realize was the fact that I was locked away, abused. I silently cried, realizing that this family, my means to escape into normalcy was compromised. This was the way it would end. This would be my last Christmas Eve with them.
This tradition was the only one I ever knew, the only consistent and ongoing guarantee I knew. In the van, I saw it melt away, my mouth filled with the taste of copper as I bit down hard on my tongue.
It was the first time being invited to the adult’s table for dinner. My hair was short, and my aunt offered me a glass of red wine with a wink. My sister glared from the children’s table as I declined politely and smiled with tears in my eyes. Later I would cry in the nautical themed bathroom in my grandma’s trailer.
My hair was short, recently cut for my high school graduation photos, and I was mourning the fact that I was right. When I moved, communication ceased. I was alone and the first Christmas Eve without them proved to be too much. I remember walking to a nearby 7-Eleven and crying, listening to Florence + the Machine’s Cosmic Love on repeat. The air was cold on my nearly shaved head, my foster mom telling me she wanted to crochet me a toque to keep my head warm.
My staple suicide attempts were always to teeter at the edge of intersections, wait for a truck to approach and pray I could step out fast enough that the brakes wouldn’t work in time. I got used to the sound of blaring horns and screaming. One time, a trucker stopped, got out of his vehicle and told me I was being unfair, that my end would traumatize someone just trying to do their job. I was not one to wish to inconvenience anyone, so I stopped.
I wanted their love. They were all I had left of Grandma Flo, who would go to my childhood school concerts, came to my grade 7 graduation, came to family nights, and nurtured my love for dinosaurs. She was the sweetest woman I had ever known, and she loved me with all her heart, and let me love her back. She told me when I was a baby, that I was obsessed with her hair. I couldn’t stop playing with her white hair, ran my hands through it and would touch her cheek so softly. I still love her. I still love her memory and I think about her all of the time. Her love for her son was her love for me. She would play with my hair, twirl it around her fingers, laugh and make a joke. I remember her voice still, calling out my middle name in the morning of my sleep-overs with her. She went to court for us, fought the system for her right to visit us, and won. She fought for us, for me. She was the first, when I was barely three years old, and she wouldn’t be the last. But she would be the only one to win.
Now, my hair is long. I have on multiple occasions tried to dye it red, have it flowing from my scalp, and represent my woman-hood. I recognize I have tried to emulate my aunt, her hair sprawling across the floor in that photograph of me during Christmas.
It is proof of survival. After everything, after years of being forced into boyhood and a gender that was never mine, I reflect on how I never once felt comfortable in the body I was forced to have. I remember the forced cutting of my hair, me fighting because none of my foster parents could handle the unruly wild thickness my Ojibwe hair held. They couldn’t get over the awkward length where it would stick out from every angle, no hair brush could smooth it down. I relished in how it would choke machines and dull scissors. Never was there a softness in its removal.
When I aged out of care, I cut my hair when my theatre professors wanted me to. When I left the theatre due to transphobia,
I kept my blue hair long, grew it out and put it in tight double buns, sleeked it up and began my transition. I loved my hair, but hated how fried and damaged it was. Still, it felt beautiful how long it was getting. I remember moving from Kamloops to Burnaby, my hair in a messy bun. My foster brother laughing at me, calling my bun a “gender neutral bun.” For a cishet white man, he did the work for me to feel safe in coming out to him. Eventually he would educate our parents on my pronouns, my transition, and my process. He would even help me move again, save me from several situations, and protect me time and time again from the cruel public attention I would get in Kamloops during the holidays.
He was one of the only ones to recognize me at his brother’s funeral this spring, other than our parents, who I had been staying with for a week before the funeral. He pulled me into a deep hug and thanked me for coming, while his sister nodded at me from across the room, even though she had been the one to ask that I come.
I decided to wear a black dress and have my hair down, parted the middle and styled. It was the first time I was me fully — usually I “butched” it up with this new family — and I still had my nails done. Usually I would painfully pry them off before seeing them.
A few days before the funeral, my parents and I got drunk. I told them I was a trans woman and I wanted sex reassignment surgery. My dad read some of my poetry and my mother told me she wished she held more space for my gender while I was in her care. I told them I was so tired, and how I had hidden for so long. Her biggest regret with me fit.
My dad told me I was beautiful, bright, and shining. He even cried, told me he loved me, and my mother did the same. They told me to be careful with love, begged me to be “safe,” that they couldn’t bear to lose me either. I know what they mean. This world would rather me see me dead, that a man’s hands could wrap around my throat or his blade could be buried into my breast.
They ask if I am seeing anyone, ask why I don’t bring any lovers back, that they want to know who I am loving, that they want to see me as me. They tell me they love my hair, how beautiful I look, how they see the happiness behind my eyes, but also the turmoil of hiding for so long. I remember sobbing, a little mad at their guilt, but also full of love for them. They saved me from my abusers, went to bat and fought like hell for me. My dad, enraged that my old school’s Aboriginal Worker called me “ just a foster kid” during a meeting. I recall the times I nearly told them I was queer. I would stand at the bottom of the stairs while they cooked in the kitchen. I was always crying, torn into a million pieces. What if they kicked me out, what if I was sent to another Christian “camp” in response to this?
My fears were legitimate, given everything, but what if I took that first step up the stairs? Removed my hand from the wood panelling, ignored the wet hand mark from sweat left behind and pressed my heels into each of the hardwood steps and told them? Maybe having these conversations earlier, maybe they would’ve sent me to the province’s only queer camp. Maybe I would’ve been the littlest bit happier. Maybe I should’ve been more vulnerable. Maybe I should’ve let them love me sooner.
I put my hair up. Let the salt burn against my skin, swallow the last of my Pinot Grigio, and head to the room that I used to reside in while living in the cabin on the lake. I recall the last time I cut off all of my hair, two and a half years ago in response to a Metis man’s actions against me. He had used my hair as a tool to invalidate me and I refused to allow his grip to remain months after. I remember in bed, how he twirled my lemon-yellow hair around his fingers, told me he thought I was a real woman, before kissing me deeply. I cried, and he asked why. I told him I was saddened to leave my strawberries behind now that I was moving to the coast. He told me about his white ex-girlfriend up north and her daughter whom he had to leave behind. I remember chopping my hair off when I found out he had returned to her months later. One of my roommates helped me cut off my now firetruck red hair. I had hacked it off with kitchen scissors and let them tidy it up with the buzzers from under the bathroom sink. I remember looking at the red of the floor, thinking it looked like blood I would never bleed.
Everyone was shocked. But I kept going, painted pretty and let my hair grow back wilder and messier, let it be salt stiff from ocean swimming, let my skin be salty and browning. I began hormones that summer, felt my breasts blossom at the same time that my hair grew longer, curlier, and fuller. My body was shifting, fat moving, hips pushing out, breasts aching, and skin growing softer.
The more I looked at myself, the more I saw my mother, my kookum who cut my hair off many years prior and now disowns me for my queerness. It’s a complicated feeling, seeing the matriarchs of my past in my face, but also their future within me. My hair is their legacy, just as much as it is mine. My hair is my memory, my way of telling stories and weaving the past into the present. It is a way for me to map time, experience, and history.
I recognize that I will chop it off again one day, but for mourning. I will burn its length in a ceremonial fire and allow myself to grow because my hair has always represented my potential to grow and cope and cutting it shouldn’t have to be traumatic anymore.
I have done so much learning and unlearning, healing and letting go to allow my ancestors to flow from my scalp, to laugh so freely again, to feel my heart bloom when my hair moves in the wind, to feel it bounce when I am crying with laughter around my indigi-queer kin. I love it when they braid it, when they move it from my face, tuck it behind my ear and smile at me. I feel our love through my hair at times, we speak it back into existence, so many of us had our entirety of our being targeted via our hair. So many of us hold memory, song, and love in our hair; so many of us hold dualities within it, so many fight with their hair.
I love my hair. I love having it perfectly parted down the middle, my loose curls framing my round Ojibwe face. My hair bounces when I laugh, shakes when the laugh is a deep bellied display. I love my hair and I love the woman I was meant to become. I am. Finally. »