The Tyranny of Beards

I sit in the waiting room, calm, relaxing music playing over the speakers. Next to me are racks of various creams that promise to do all sorts of things to my skin. 

“Helen won’t be long,” a passing beautician tells me, “She’s just finishing up with another client.”

The delay doesn’t bother me. I’m not in a particular rush to get started. It will let the numbing cream I smeared all over my face sink in more. My lips are feeling a bit tingly. That’s a good sign. I try to remember not to touch my face, so I don’t lose feeling in my fingertips again. The extra time gives me a chance to try and stabilise myself emotionally. I tell myself it’s just an hour or so. It’ll be over before I know it, and then I won’t have to do it again for a week or two. It'll be fine. Just don’t think about the pain.

So, at this point, you might wonder why I am sitting in a beauty salon with a numb face trying to prepare mentally for some sort of upcoming trauma? Well, because this is the latest salvo in my ongoing war with my beard.

Most other parts of my transition are relatively simple, if frustratingly slow. Hormone therapy just means remembering to take a pill every day or put a patch on once a week, then sit back and wait. Growing your hair out is the same, just takes time. Maybe try some products to thicken up the hair you have and let out the occasional curse that you didn’t start hormones before your hair started receding. Even surgery is done within a few hours, and then recovery times are in the space of weeks or months. Okay, maybe coming out to family and friends can be a real struggle and possibly the most challenging part of transitioning for some. But I have been working on removing this beard for a whole year now, a whole damn year, and it’s still here. And it’s not just taking a pill and waiting. It’s a whole effort.

Back when I was in the closet, I used to spend some of my free time reading trans erotica. You know, the kind of stuff where some guy is being forced to turn into a girl through magic or science or some other bullshit. Of course, the guy had to be forced. No way was I going to admit that I would want to be turned into a girl. No, I was adamant that it was definitely some weird sub fem kink thing and had nothing to do with gender identity. Anyway, the point is in these stories, there was always some special cream they put on the reluctant male that made all their facial hair fall out, or some nanotechnology that removed it, or just straight-up magic, or it was otherwise hand waived away. So, when I was finally ready to deal with my gender identity and transition, I was completely unprepared for how much effort would be involved regarding beards.

The easiest method for this sort of thing is laser hair removal, which sounds cool in theory. It makes me think of the laser scene in Goldfinger, but instead of trying to talk your way out of the rack, you want it to reach your crotch and fix up your bikini line. But no, in reality, it uses invisible infrared lasers to heat hair follicles and kill them and is far less cool. Basically, you put some sunglasses on, and they put a camera-like device on different parts of your face. Each time it goes off, it feels like a rubber band flicking your face, and a bunch of follicles are dead. It can do a large amount of hair per session but still takes months of sessions. However, for me, it is of limited use. I have somehow reached the age of 32, two to the five for you computer science types out there, and still have blonde hair. For most people, blonde hair is the peak of hair colour. Hairdressers tell me how lucky I am, and people will pay good money for what just grows out of my head naturally. But this is, of course, just another one of biology's cruel jokes on me. The blonde hair has infiltrated my beard, making it a mix of black and blonde. The infrared lasers can only heat dark hair, not light hair, so this means the laser hair removal will only remove half-ish of my beard. The other half would have to be done using the process known as electrolysis.

And that is why I’m sitting in this waiting room, forgetting about the numbing cream and running my hands over my face. For electrolysis, you have to grow your hair out for a week beforehand, so I can feel all the little bastards poking through my face.

“Come on through, Jack,” says Helen, popping her head out of one of the treatment rooms. I walk through the salon to the room and lie down on the treatment bed inside as per the usual routine. It’s strange to me lying here in this stylish boutique salon in the Canberra suburbs. With laser therapy, it was always in “clinics”, the staff dressed as if they were medical professionals, and the facility generally had a sterile feeling to it. But here in this salon, painted in neutral and pink hues, indoor plants and vines dotted around the room, lots of stylish furnishings probably bought from Ikea or something, they were clearly going for a warm and relaxing feeling rather than sterile. I think Helen would have been offended if I told her that her salon felt sterile. I was about to get what I would consider to be a far more invasive medical procedure than laser in a room where the last procedure could have been anything from a pedicure to one of those skin-peeling facials. It didn’t seem quite right, but if it was the only way to get rid of the facehugger, then so be it.

We exchange the usual pleasantries. She asks how my recovery went last time. I always feel bad because I don’t say much. I’m too busy mentally preparing myself. She straps the strange visor-like device to her head that gives her two magnifying glasses and some lights to hunt for every last little bastard on my face. I take a deep breath in and out and make sure my hands are somewhere I can clench them as needed while she scans for her first target. 

For those not familiar with electrolysis, it works like this: a probe is inserted into the hair follicle, and an electric current then induces heat, which then kills the follicle permanently. This is a much nicer way of saying they stick a needle deep into your face, which then rapidly begins to feel like it's burning. The probe goes into my face and, as I do every visit, I wish I had plastered on more of the numbing cream as I feel the sharp pain followed by intense localised burning. So we settle into the routine of stabbing and burning that will take up the next hour, or less if the pain makes me crack sooner. Sometimes she gets on a roll: stick, zap, stick, zap, stick, zap. But with each zap, the burning in my skin builds. When she eventually has to stop to pluck some of the freshly killed hair out, it is sweet relief. My face gets a few seconds for the burning to subside. If I close my eyes, it almost feels like putting on an ice pack. 

Lying there as the needle continues to puncture my skin over and over, the hardest thing is to know where to look. What part of the ceiling should I stare at? I wish she would reangle my head so that I wasn’t staring at that light. Or should I stare at her as she does her work so she can see the tears forming in my eyes as she goes over a sensitive part of my neck?

It helps to have something to think about. If you can drift off in your head, sometimes you forget about the pain. I often do the maths again. I’ve read that there are roughly 30,000 hairs in a beard. If my beard was half black hair, then maybe I’ve killed, say, 10,000 hairs through laser. Some black hairs survived, so I don’t think it would be the whole 15,000. That means we have 20,000 to go. My train of thought is briefly interrupted as she goes over a patch where the cream doesn’t seem to have worked. The burning subsides, and I can think again. How many hairs do we get done in an hour? If we do an average of a hair a second, that would be 3600. But I think the actual figure may be closer to a hair every five seconds. So, an optimistic estimate would be a couple hundred hairs a session, give or take. So that’s something like 40 sessions, which, from what I’ve read online, is around what others have experienced. I’ve done maybe a dozen or so. Things are starting to thin out a bit, but there are still horrible golden fields of the stuff on my face. I keep reminding myself that every hair she burns out, every stabbing burning spot of pain I feel, every hair is one less hair I have to worry about, one tiny little piece of progress.

At this point, people may be asking: is it really worth all of this effort to get rid of a beard? Can’t you just shave or wax regularly? No, there is no other option than total annihilation. For trans people, the hardest thing to deal with is the face. Humans are good at facial recognition, really good. It means trying to change what gender people perceive you as can be very difficult. Breasts can be enhanced through hormones or breast forms, or you can do things like wearing padded bras. Further padding can be added to the hips and buttocks. Unwanted genitalia can be tucked away. But you can’t hide your face, well, except during a pandemic. This is why rates of facial feminisation surgery have skyrocketed in the past few years. And nothing makes your face look more masculine than a beard. Often even if you shave, you’ll still have the shadow of your beard left, which means layers of concealer and foundation to try and cover it up. And the insidious bastards grow fast. After a morning shave, they’ll be starting to make themselves known again before the end of the day. 

Helen stops the onslaught on my face to wipe off the dead loose hairs from my cheek, searching for any signs of living hair. All I can do is sit and hope that she’s actually got them all; an entire section of my face cleared. She declares the area hair-free, well, until more of the little buggers spring forth once the coast is clear. We have another ten minutes left, but I call it early. I’ve had enough torture for the afternoon.

The most insulting part of all of it is that there is absolutely no reason for beards to exist. Biologists have studied them, and there is no functional reason for our facial hair. Every other piece of hair on our bodies has a use. Eyelashes and eyebrows protect our eyes by scooping up loose debris. The hair on top of your head helps protect you from the sun and keeps your brain warm in winter. Even your armpit hair, one of the most hated hair regions, is used to transmit pheromones. But beards are just these useless leech-like things that serve no function except to suck the happiness out of whatever poor trans femme they attach themselves to.

Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. Some people have speculated that beards might be a way of attracting mates and showing off your amazing testosterone levels. But I read about some research lately that I think is a better theory. Researchers showed groups of women pictures of men with various levels of facial hair and asked them to rate their attractiveness and how dominating they looked. The result was that women didn’t find beards attractive but did rate the men with thicker beards as more dominant. So, they reasoned that the man with the best beard dominates the other men and gets to mate. I believe this theory because it confirms something that I have long suspected: beards are about subjugation. Even if you’re not trans, the system of beard superiority means you’re most likely going to suffer because of them. Whether you’re a man with a lacklustre threadbare beard being bullied by their compatriots with their fully formed beards, or you’re the woman who has to mate with a man with a giant horrible soup-encrusted beard because the nice hairless guys have all had their confidence bullied out of them. No one benefits.

Even worse, society has latched onto beards, just as beards have latched onto us, as the new trend for men. It’s bad enough I already have this hairy man badge displayed on my chin, but now everybody thinks they're great. Men show their expertly sculpted facial hair everywhere you look, constantly reminding us that beards currently rule modern style. I saw one man with an overgroomed beard in the mall the other day. I wanted to yell at him to cast down his beard and free himself from its oppression, but I stayed quiet and could only watch in disappointment as he walked into a Shaver Shop. The crafty buggers have attached themselves to the underbelly, okay under chin, of society and don’t look ready to let go.

And so this is not just about my own dysphoria, which is obviously quite crippling when it comes to beards, but about fighting systemic oppression. Every face we clear is one less foothold they have in society. Every follicle we burn is one less source of tyranny. Every newly smooth face is one that we have freed from the beardocracy.

As I get off the treatment bed and walk back to the salon’s front, I get a brief look at myself in a mirror. My face is swollen, bloody, and bruised. War wounds. I can feel the pain radiating off of it. But it’s okay. No rebellion has ever been without pain.

While I’m getting my wallet out to pay, Helen says that the demand for electrolysis has been increasing. She’s been doing so much recently she thinks it’s ruining her vision, another casualty in the war on beards, and will have to hire more staff. This is good. We are slowly winning the war on beards as more people realise their insidious nature. One day soon, we will turn the tide, and all that will be left on my face, and everyone else's, will be smooth, flawless skin.