Reaching into his back pocket, he pulled out his slim billfold and removed a magazine page from within. The edges were creased, and the fold lines had become soft and fuzzy with age. He opened it and smoothed it over his knee, shielding it from the wind. The heaviness in his heart grew as he stared at the spread. A model stood casually, his gaze on something in the distance, like the fact that he had the world’s squarest jaw and a thousand-dollar outfit weren’t worth his time to consider.
When I was a teen, before I had any vocabulary or understanding of what my gender dysphoria was, I was fixated on the idea of shaving my head. I'd seen a commercial on MTV with a woman with a shaved head, and it felt like a public display of permission. If someone else could do that, why not me? But my mother had other ideas and refused to let me shave my head.
So I started collecting magazine pages. Models with shaved heads, with undercuts, people who looked androgynous or gender non-conforming. I kept those magazine pages for a long time, but it would be another 20 years and a revisit to that habit of collecting androgynous pictures (this time on Pinterest) until I finally started to realize what it meant about me.
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