Well, coming from the cis world, yeah, that’s essentially what matching with your gender feels like. To me, anyway.

What’s kinda funny is that I’m a guy with long hair, and that’s part of my gender identity. I’ve always had this image in my head of the various ranges of masculinity, and long hair was part of most of them. I’ve had short hair, and it just felt like nothing at all. It was just something on my head, if you get my meaning.

Even after I started balding, the freedom to grow my hair was still part of my external map of my masculinity.

Mind you it is about my view of my masculinity, not something I think anyone else has to have to be masculine. I feel the most myself with all my hair left as close to natural as I can get it and it be both healthy and reasonably neat. Part of my sense of self is my sense of masculinity, and the fact that growing all this hair all over was part of my puberty and becoming a man, it meshed into my gender identity. Back when I was working, and had to adhere to external paradigms of facial hair, I always felt a little “wrong”.

That’s been one of the greatest boons of disability. No longer having to please anyone else’s societal bullshit means that my outside matches my inside in a way it hadn’t since I became an adult and had to compromise my body autonomy in the realm of hair. Which is a major privilege, that that’s the worst compromise I had to make. But being free of that majorly helped me rebuild my sense of self post-disabilty.

It may seem frivolous to some, I guess, but the kind of freedom you’re talking about, where you can just be, just by changing your hair, that’s a cool fucking thing, and I’m glad you have it.