A small act which reverberates through my life: getting my ears pierced for the first time

In chaos theory, a random small occurrence, such as a frog leaping into a pond, might create a chain of events that result in some major event, far away, and seemingly, genuinely unrelated.  On the face of it, getting your ears pierced is so commonplace for women, that it feels hardly worth fussing over.  But some cultures will pierce the ears of even a baby girl to ensure people don’t misgender their child.

Why is it that misgendering a girl is worse than misgendering a boy?  So much that the parents go this far to avoid the humiliation of being told their daughter looks ambiguous at best or is ugly at worst.  

I grew up being misgendered.  My parents sure didn’t care.  I don’t think they even noticed it.  My mother was not-so-secretly pleased about it.  Up until she discovered that I was too.

The gender transition process is just that, a process.  There are so many steps, some big, but most quite small, that every passing day brings something new.

I’d been thinking about, wanting to get my ears pierced for a while now…acutely so for the past few months.  But I put it off because of what it might look like in a professional context.  Friends often remarked, “guys get their ears pierced all the time.”  Well, not really, certainly not in my circles.  And not in my industry or profession.  In fact, I would think it would be worse in my world to be a man with ears pierced than it would to be a trans woman with pierced ears—in fact, I don’t think the piercings would at all be relevant.  There would, however, be several elephants in the room.

I asked the woman who was about to pierce mine, “at what age did you get your ears pierced?”

“I was 12,” she said.

“You remember.”

“Of course.”

“It’s a big deal,” I said.  There were two women there, each already had many, but seeing me there, about to mine pierced for the first time, decided to get pierced too.

They both smiled at me.  Do you know what smiles are different?  That they are like hugs.  That they can say so much…”we know what this means…we welcome you to the tribe…it’s beautiful what you are doing.”  Women have such incredible power to give.

The shopkeeper and I discussed at length different cultures, and that it was no longer legal to pierce a child’s ears if they were below 4. How about below the age of consent?

I thought about how I am also basically 12.  My chemistry is pubescent right now.  That’s what my high doses of hormones are doing to me, mimicking female puberty.  When I read about this aspect of transition, ‘second puberty’ I just skated over the words.  ‘Whatevs’.  Amiright?  But reality is different than reading.  I love second puberty so much that I never want it to stop.

I shared these thoughts with my serious therapist.  She’s always been great, but she is really growing on me now.  We seem to be accelerating in our work together.  God bless therapists and the good work that they do.  I might even have to place them higher up my gratitude ranking sheet than Sex Workers!  Well…

“I always associated puberty with awkwardness, being shy, self-conscious.  Breaking out.  That’s what I expected, even as a trans adult, but none of that is happening.  I’m just having fun.  I was never gregarious and now I talk to everyone and everyone talks to me.  I am feeling Spring Fever all the time, but it isn’t inappropriate like it would be if I were still a man.  I just want to connect and have fun, and dance, and sing, and dance, and dance, and dance,” I gushed.  That’s a glimpse inside one of my therapy sessions if there ever was one.

“Well, you’re getting the best of both worlds.  Teenagers hate puberty because they have all this wonderful stuff going on in their bodies, and are feeling all these strong emotions, are becoming independent thinkers for the first time, but they don’t have money, they still have parents and teachers and whatever telling them what to do.  You have freedom, wisdom, confidence, and you get to experience all these changes in your body.”

“I hope it never stops.”

I kept putting off and putting off getting my ears pierced.  There was never a good time.  Finding a two month’s window where I would have no client or colleague contact was too hard to predict (two months of healing time before you can take them out at all).  As it happened, and rather unexpectedly, I had a meeting a few hours after I did it.  And since I got the biggest diamond studs they had, there was no way they didn’t see them.  Not a word.  Maybe zoom background blurred it out.  Maybe nobody cares.

But I have all these beautiful earrings.  The first pairs I bought were when I was 12, just before puberty.  They’re still beautiful.  Sterling silver with turquoise.  A bit hippy.  I still like them.  My style hasn’t changed.  And all these years I kept buying them every now and again just waiting.  Well, here I am.  I walked in, they didn’t have the studs I wanted, but she took my number and said she would call me if she could find another shop that did.  Thirty minutes later she asked if I could come back, that someone was driving them to her.  There’s a reason to love Italy right there.

I went back and did it, and it was something powerful.  And I sat there and felt myself take one further step into femininity.  An important one.  I will save FFS for last, so that the less visible things which happen to me, all related to my body, will have had time to heal, and I will be much further along my full journey.  Plus my face is kinda pretty, and sometimes facial surgery makes you look weird.  I don’t want my children to think I look different to them.  Of course, I will.  They have already gotten used to me in a string bikini and with breasts.  I love them so much.

I am their father.  I am a brother to my siblings.  I am okay with that.  I was born into that.  But their brother is becoming a girl.  The girl that she always wanted to be.  And that’s what I am.  My shell, this body, will age and die.  But inside, I am a baby, and a little boy, but most of all, I am my own mommy…a very gentle, loving, healing mommy, but a mommy nonetheless.  I can be all these things.  That’s why I feel so great.  Wouldn’t you?

One of my children really wants me to start designing clothes again.  This is something I have done for a very long time, since college.  I took some extra courses during my University years with an affiliated art school.  They had a fabulous fashion program.  My only bad grades in my university years, apart from failing maths and chemistry and bombing out of the medical program, were in fashion design.  Consistent C’s.  Consistency is the key, right?

“But teacher, I never get C’s.”

“Well, you did this time.”

“I worked so hard.”

“All of my students who actually go here are just better than you.”

She was brutal, but it was true, so I loved her anyway.  I sucked at drawing.  Here are some of my drawings…if you think these are good you should see what my classmates were doing. This was from a fashion illustration class, and they are each about 3 weeks apart from L-R and down. You can tell how I loved to draw hair, but my clothes “were just not good enough.” And after all, the class was about clothes. Hence my C.

The child in question has received some great clothes from me and sees the potential of getting me back into it.  I see the potential of dresses for me.  I have been out dismantling things I have bought and redesigning them to suit…and I have a long silk number in sage which goes from halter neck to ankle, with a completely open back and a bib front that I have just had slit up to the waist and brought in tight so it clings to me.  That has taken 2 fittings.  I went to pick it up today.  Bam.  I need a party.

A few months ago, when I first started to grow my hair, I was in a salon getting my nails done and asked the owner if she had someone who could teach me how to do my hair.

“I can,” she said, “come with me.”

Two hairs later and she had transformed me from a tomboy into a lady with the application of beautiful long tresses which matched my own.

“You do this while you let it grow out.”  Each time, they need to be changed every 6 weeks or so, as your own hair grows.  So, I have done that 3 times thus far, really more at 2-month intervals.  Now my own hair is longer than the extensions, and I just wanted to touch my own head with nothing there.

Walking through town today to pick up my dress, I passed by the sister salon of the place I had them adjusted most recently and asked if they could take them out.  Italy is dead right now, summer holidays, everything is closed, and it is hot, hot, hot.  I was the only one there, so they took me immediately.  Sublime head massage, extensions out, and then she did my hair.  And I had this feeling of never having looked so gorgeous in my life.  I couldn’t believe it.  I was high.  This is what euphoria feels like.

And I had been wandering around town in some very short shorts and a long linen tunic which barely covered them.  Boy (ish).  They were right on my pronouns.  And then after, I saw something I had to have in a shop window, and the shopkeeper, a man, said, “I’m dying to see it on you.”  I got it.  It was a belt made of feathers.  It’s rather stunning.  I’ll post pictures of it one day.

But the other things I tried on were glorious too, and someday soon, when I am divorced or have something financially good to celebrate, I will go and celebrate with those clothes.  They were made for me.

How is it that getting your air done can make you feel so great?  How is that something as small as getting your ears pierced can have such a profound influence on your state of mind?

My reflexologist friend said to me, “you shouldn’t get your ears pierced.  That spot on the ear lobe is the seat of aggression.  You don’t need to become more submissive.”  And she knows.  Well, could you provoke a submissive even more by telling me not to do something because it will make me even more submissive?  It’s a miracle I didn’t do it myself at home right after she told me.