Summer is in full swing here in the Northern Hemisphere. Shorts are shorter, days are longer, and there’s never been a better time to find creative ways to avoid your body completely. Styling your hair in a new way can be a great way to maintain the illusion of control. So here are my top five recommended DIY haircuts for summer, plus drink pairings, to help you put off dealing with your gender dysphoria until next summer!
- Kitchen Scissor Bangs – A classic. Nothing says “I’m delaying a confrontation with myself” like this two second sloppy choppy! My friend Julie calls these “Emotional Problems Bangs.”
Recommended Paring: Straight vodka in a fancy teacup. Whimsical, yet to the point!
- The 4AM Buzzcut – A poetic look that says “I stayed up for no reason and drank all that wine by myself.” This literal fresh start is great practice for contemplating how if you actually looked and lived how you wanted, your parents might talk about you as though you had died!
Recommended Paring: The two-buck chuck from Trader Joe’s, preferably a red so the stains on your teeth and the blanket you wear around the house will stick around through the fall to remind you that there’s still many ways left to spiral.
- Deliberately Ugly – People won’t be able to tell if your mullet or undercut or whatever is going on up there are detached and ironic, or maybe some kind of empowering statement against beauty norms. Either way, it’s a great cover story for not liking how you look in any photograph or mirror!
Recommended Paring: One of the God-tier flavors of La Croix or Polar Seltzer with a shot or two of cough medicine.
- Total Neglect – Tell your friends and family you’re “growing it out.” Only a trained eye can see you haven’t washed, conditioned, brushed, or cared for it in weeks, maybe months!
Recommended Paring: Weed! Just regular old weed. You can also start putting out cigarettes in bottled beer before the bottle is empty and then keep drinking the beer, if you feel like taking it to the next level.
- Unexplained Wigs – You aren’t cosplaying, doing drag, or observing religious head covering rules but you still totally showed up in a wig! Sassy you. Say it’s a social experiment to see how people who know you will react to not recognizing you, because it absolutely is!
Recommended Paring: “Experienced” iced coffees, “adult” milkshakes, and other boozy caffeine classics that get you up, up, up until their mature aspects carry you right back down to earth, the planet on which you are forced to live since your ship crash landed, you tell strangers to see if they’ll believe you.
Remember: nothing could possibly be worse than just admitting that you’re trans and realizing a great many people might be ready to accept and love you for who you are, so have some fun, make some memories, and then promptly black out most of those memories. Woohoo!
Cover illustration by Flynn Nicholls.
The Care and Feeding of Your Sex Change is a guide to eating your way through hormone replacement therapy, plastic surgery, standing in line at state offices, lying to gatekeepers, fielding invasive questions from strangers, concealing panic attacks, and managing eating disorders, all disguised as a recipe column. Cis people can read it too, but are encouraged not to take terminology cues from irreverent intra-community internet essays. Big moods and big foods, taken with a grain of salt.
