Living his best ponytail life
One from the “stupid shit” file – the deep personal importance of The Pony Tail to a trans laydee.
It starts with a photo of an actual pony tail on the head of an actual woman, I guess so that we’ll know what “Charlotte” Clymer is talking about.
When I was in kindergarten—and very much in the closet as transgender—I had begun to crave a ponytail like the ones I saw on many of the girls in my class.
Five-year-old children are not “in the closet.”
I’m well aware that for many girls and women, the ponytail is a “bare minimum” style, often for lazy days, but the girls I saw in my class emulated the women I saw on television who were strong, confident, and successful.
Wut? Five-year-old girls emulated women who were strong, confident, and successful? No they didn’t, any more than little Clymer was deep in the closet. Those are adult terms. Also, the women little Clymer saw on television were strong, confident, and successful? What universe is that? We don’t get to see many strong, confident, and successful women on television now and I don’t recall more of them 25 years ago. The ones we do see tend to be on cable news and the like, which I doubt little Clymer was watching. His own story about himself sounds like complete bullshit, so how good can his understanding of women and sex and sex roles and stereotypes be?
Even at six, I knew better. I was raised in deeply conservative Texas, in a world with firmly cemented gender roles. I was a boy and I had better keep to “boy things.” The bouncy ponytail of my dreams? Not a boy thing.
Yes but here’s another aspect of that bouncy ponytail: it’s not enough to shape your life around.
But it seems Clymer is just too dim to grasp that fact.
In 1999, when I was 12, the U.S. Women’s National Team won their second World Cup, and Mia Hamm became a personal icon. For weeks I dreamed of what it would be like to have the freedom to sport a ponytail like Hamm’s. By then I was fully aware of a desire within me to be a girl, but I kept it buried in the back of my brain, suppressed whenever possible. Still, it sometimes crept up, summoned by the most mundane signifiers of femaleness. Mia Hamm was confident and beautiful and successful, and although I had no sense of what womanhood meant to me, I couldn’t help but feel that her hair represented all the things I was missing. I wanted an authentic life. I wanted to feel confident. I wanted a ponytail.
Confirmed. He has no clue. He confuses the trivia of personal grooming for “an authentic life.” Dude, a ponytail does not an authentic life make.
Then we get his journey, his struggles, his therapy, his coming out. Then we return to his hair. It was short. It took a long time to grow out. He kept fiddling with it, wishing it would hurry up.
I hadn’t tried putting my hair up in months when one evening in late July, I absentmindedly grabbed a hair tie off my shelf and made a go of it. After some awkward handling and smoothing of rogue strands, I adjusted the band high on the back of my head and turned toward the mirror. I don’t know how to adequately articulate the combination of happiness and relief I felt in that moment. It’s just hair, I thought. But then I glimpsed the waves, how the strands bundled together so beautifully. I couldn’t help it. I got emotional.
Maybe he couldn’t help getting emotional, but I tell you what he could help, and that’s writing about it in Glamour.
Imagine a white guy writing this kind of shit about getting corn rows. Nobody would publish it and if he did a blog post about it anyone who read it would heap scorn on him. But burbling about his journey to Womanhood and A Ponytail? Oh that’s brave and stunning and gets space in Glamour.
I’m sorry to rain on Charlotte’s parade, but speaking as a 64-year-old guy with a ponytail, I have three ominous words to share: male pattern baldness.
“…reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
— Richard Feynman, Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident
“There, on the beach at Punta Cana, two barefoot urchins and a pregnant prostitute transformed my hair into a festival of braids and beads. I finally felt complete…”
But seriously, how can this not be a parody? Want a ponytail? Grow a freakin’ ponytail. What is this, 1943?
Just no man buns. Please. They’re horrifying.
Well you see it’s like this, he doesn’t want the Willy Nelson kind of pony tail, he wants the Betty kind like in the cartoon. Men are permitted to have the Willy Nelson kind but not the Betty kind. THEREFORE a man who wants the Betty kind has to declare himself a woman before he can have the pony tail high on the head.
To echo what others have said here, my husband has a lovely head of long, curly hair that he keeps in a ponytail. Lucky for him, no sign of the dreaded male-pattern baldness either. But he ain’t a woman, nor does he think he is one because he has a ponytail.
Look, I get the power of symbolism. Women fighting for equal rights used symbols such as wearing pants and other “men’s” clothing. I see that wearing a dress or makeup, or painting your nails takes on more significance when society has discouraged, nay practically forbidden men from doing these things. But it’s a long stretch between “I want to wear a skirt” and “I want to become a woman performatively, perhaps even medically or surgically.” We need to tear down those strictures that are… ding ding ding… the societal norms of gender roles, not abolish the entire concept of male and female.
Oooh, burn.
(Speaking as a balding, 57 year old man with a ponytail.)
I guess he missed that whole late 70’s punk scene, poor tot. After that, nobody really gave a fuck what anybody did with their hair, and you no longer had to be Native American to sport a Mohawk. And I don’t think many people mistook Sinead O’Connor for a man with her stubbled pate and army boots. But I can see that someone might mistake him for a man, BECAUSE HE’S A MAN.
If transgender ideology is tantamount to religion, maybe the ponytail is like the side locks worn by Hassidim.
Hey, I can relate. I wanted a ponytail too when I was a kid. So… I…. grew one. And it was the 70s and I had lots of stoned art student friends so it was often braided in pinks and purples.
But it turns out I was still a chap, somehow. And I was still a chap a few years later when I got sick of it and shaved it all off.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but now I’m proud to finally come out of the closet as someone who wants MAGIC FUCKING HAIR.
Wait….why aren’t you all praising me and offering me writing gigs?
I certainly knew, even at age 3, that I hated being a girl. There’s an Easter photo of me, in a new dress, carrying a tiny crocheted purse, scowling at the camera because I hated the scratchy lace slip, the sliding-into-your-shoes cuffed anklets, the dress that any boy could flip up and see my underwear, the whole nine yards of personal discomfort and vulnerability that went along with the status of “girl.” I wanted to be a boy, I wished I was a boy instead, but — even at three — I knew I was not a boy.
So there, “in the closet, transgender girl, 5 y.o. male kindergartner who wanted a pony tail.” Children other than you know the difference between reality and fantasy.
Latsot, I think it’s very brave of you to come out as autocapillophilic.
:)
So about that writing gig…
I looked up “pony tails for men”. There are tons of fashion articles featuring a multitude of styles, some of which are definitely “bouncy”. (Some are more like a man bun, I’m not into disputanding the gustibus.)
Where I come from you’re either a gadgie or a lass. If you’re a gadgie, you go to the barbers and there’s basically only two haircuts:
1. The barber makes all your hairs shorter.
2. The barber makes all your hairs shorter then wafts a lighter around your head to “seal the ends”.
It costs about four quid. Or four fifty if he has to use the lighter.
Lasses seem to have their own rules.
Actually, when I was a kid we had a traveling barber who would come to the village several times a year. He used to put a couple of bales of straw on the village green and we had to sit on the bales while he cut our hair (and he did the lighter thing, you’ve got to seal the ends or… I guess, anything could get in). And this was only in the 70s, which shows what sort of a banjo-duelling area of an already backward part of the north east, which was and is already the most neglected and wayward part of the country, I come from.
Both my parents worked so after school I had to go to a babysitter. Who was the village butcher. Who slaughtered his own meat. With a horrified 4 year old sitting in the corner.
And I wonder why so many people ask me, in morbid fascination, “latsot, why are you like that?”
I, too, was ‘assigned male at birth’ who decided I wanted a ponytail. So I grew a goddamned ponytail because I’m an adult who can wear my hair any way I want. I even braided it occasionally – at the same time as I had a full beard. Ah but no, I’m ordinary and non-special, unlike the revolutionary hero who thinks you need to become a woman to have long hair.
When I met mrs latsot I had hair down to my arse and she had hair barely down to her hair. Does that make us a (once) exciting non-binary couple? What about when she had no hair at all due to chemo and I didn’t have a haircut for months because I had slightly more important things to worry about? How about now, when we both have short hair? Is either or both of us non-binary? Are we both binary males? SOB what are the roooollllzzzz?
Wait… it turns out that I don’t give the slightest fuck what the rules are when they are actual, real, coherent, sensible rules, have spent half a lifetime acting as though the actual real rules don’t apply to me and am unlikely to react well when people make up new rules on the spur of the moment and expect me to respect them.
I don’t watch TV these days but aren’t reality TV shows the only places where there are actual binary people? The hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine and anyone else gets voted off or whatever happens in these things?
Ditto what latsot et al. have been saying. I’m OLDER than Clymer and I come from Texas, too, and I had long hair (often in a ponytail) growing up. It could have only been easier for kids his age, who came after me, to adopt that kind of fashion. My long hair sure didn’t make me female, though. Clymer is FOS, as usual.
Another thing that strikes me about this binary business is that there’s a lot of motherfucking leeway, isn’t there? If you’re male, at least.
I don’t like watching sport. I don’t like mending cars. I’m a cat person rather than a dog person. I do all the cooking and most of the cleaning in our household. I’ve been pretty successful career-wise, but my wife owns a successful law firm which prospered throughout the recession, largely because of her leadership, and she currently earns a lot more than I do.
Not very manly, right?
And yet… I’m a geek. I likes me some computers. That’s enough, apparently, to make me stereotypically male despite my shortcomings in virtually every other category.
I don’t think women get the same get-out-of-stereotype-free card. Lo and behold, being ‘non-binary’ is automatically easier for men than it is for women. Who could possibly have predicted that?
Count me as another had-long-hair-and-occasionally-a-pony-tail-in-his-youth gentleman. I had long hair and a beard in college. And I wore lots of jewelry. But this was in the unenlightened 80s, when we hadn’t yet learned that this made me non-binary. Or a woman. Or whatever.
James Garnett, same here. I am older than Clymer (by about 2 decades, apparently), and in Oklahoma, a lot of the boys had long hair. A lot had ponytails. Some wore them high on the head. Some were bouncy, if they had the right kind of hair to make it bouncy.
maddog1129 #8: I hated the patent leather shoes. Despised them. They pinched. And you can’t do fun things in patent leather shoes and a pink easter dress. My mom wouldn’t let us wear jeans until I was in high school, and working, so I could buy my own. It was dresses, or occasionally matching pantsuits (which, I suppose, is why I never ran for president. Apparently pantsuits are unacceptable).
@ iknklast #18
And not merely dresses, but dresses that fastened down the back. The few times you could get pants, pedal pushers, or capris, they fastened in the back or on the side. Flimsy fabrics, vulnerable seams with no seam allowances, and most certainly no pockets. Clothes meant to limit, to constrict, to confine, and to minimize movement, comfort, activity, usefulness, or freedom.
So this is the thread for coming out as a balding 57-year old ponytail wearer. Dammit, missed it by a month! Seriously, this guy wishes gender didn’t exist but since it does so he’s going to embrace it to the max. If you’re not part of the solution. . . shit on those who are and call them terfs.
Oh, really? He just happened to have a hair tie within arm’s reach?
The ‘balding guy’ pony tail is called a Dork Knob.
latsot@16:
To be fair, who wouldn’t be a cat person around a creature as hilarious as your Fortran?
James:
Well it’s fun until she has someone’s eye out. My arms and feet all the time look like streetmaps of Dieppe. I’m more scar than human now. And I’m the only human she likes. Other people’s cats sit meekly on their laps, purring. Fortran isn’t other people’s cats. She headbutted me awake slightly earlier than usual this morning because she was soaking wet and wanted me to know about it. It didn’t rain last night. There wasn’t even a particularly heavy dew. But she was wet to the bone, I’ve learned not to ask questions.
I seem to have a ‘talent’ for attracting entertainingly damaged animals.
My experience with cats suggests that may be one of those things like June Cleaver – promoted on TV and in movies, but rarely seen in the wild.
My cat mostly uses me as a speed bump. She only settles in my lap if she is able to block the book I am reading. But she’s soft and purrs and so I recognize her as a cat, in spite of the offensive stereotypes of movie cats (or so she tells me – she says she’s a wild cat, not a pussycat).