Witchy Diary: is the hair of the women I have added to my head filled with memory?

I got hair extensions the other day.  It’s not my first time doing it.  When I went through that really awful phase of growing out my hair for the first time in my life, it was really scruffy and awful.  I felt great, but when I look back at the photos, those early moments of transition are really quite rough.

And to think in order for us to have access to health care in most parts of the world, we trans people are required to go through this phase, for a year even before hormones, living out, looking more a freak than ever, in societies characterised by hate, before we can even start on the chemical cocktail which is so life affirming, so delicious.

I mark the first time that I really, really felt like a woman when I looked in the mirror was after my hair down with extensions for the first time.  There were others, before and after, and there always will be, but this was a freakish jump.  In that tingling moment when I took in my reflection and felt this surge of something which I can only describe as juice, a delicious pleasure which flooded me.  There is a French word which almost describes it.  Jouissance.

From the internet: In Lacanian psychoanalysis, “jouissance” is a concept that describes a paradoxical and intense form of enjoyment or pleasure that goes beyond the traditional “pleasure principle.” It’s a state where pleasure and pain are intertwined, and the experience can be both exhilarating and terrifying, often bordering on the erotic. 

In my case, the pain is everything it took to get here.

Suddenly my hair was not ratty hair, but long, golden-red-blonde locks.  Kinda like my pictures always show. I know what I am becoming.  I know how she looks.

Well, last year, about 6 months ago, I had the first of what may be two hair transplants combined with facial surgery, the expense of which has not yet been fully considered, or just a second hair transplant to echo the first.  The outcome of this transplant has been life-changing, as they said it would be, for I have hair in my widow’s peaks that I have never had before, and my face as a result has changed utterly and completely.

But in order to do this I had a punk-dyke buzz cut on the back of my head, which is now growing out.  My own hair had finally outgrown the extensions, so it was a bit of an existential moment to cut so much off.  But the number of compliments I received, even when still wearing a blue hospital bonnet through the streets of San Francisco, yes, I did that, along with my punk leather jacket and leather leggings and heels.  Irrepressible.  My kids are always in awe of my out-thereness.  And I love that strangers at such moments rise to the challenge and affirm me.

My dream is to look like Welsh Goddess Rhiannon, known for her beauty, grace, and love of horses.  This fits my friends in ways beyond the scope of disclosure.  Her hair was to her waist.  And so too shall mine.

I passed a technical hurdle in that the hair on the back of my head has grown out and is now long enough to hold extensions.  So that’s what I did.  My old ones were too short and no longer useable.  Sad, but true.  But I found some which look just like mine and are longer.  So, suddenly, I have hair past my shoulders.  It is now so thick that my hair clips can’t hold it.  I have a golden mane.

Just in time for summer.

But I wondered of the lives of the women whose hair was now on my head.  For their hair colour to be such a perfect match to mine.  And I know the rarity of my hair colour.  Do you know that there are more intersex people in this world than there are red heads?  Did you know that intersex people outnumber transgender people by a ratio of 3 to 1.  It beggars belief that where I pee is of such consequence that it has become a global debate.

And I will say this, if you are against trans people having free passage and all the rights of dignity and everything else that are afforded everyone else, no, afforded privileged white men and women (and yes, it is overwhelmingly white women who seek to block trans women from using the toilet), then there is something seriously the matter with you.

Well, anyway, just let’s say that the women who gave me their hair are just as rare as I am.  And somehow rarity emphasis difference.  And difference is only superficially about how we look.  These women have had rich, full, and different lives.  And I wonder about these lives.

Hair is dead, of course, but every strand carries a shred of genuine memory.  What our bodies were going through as it grew.  Whether we were stressed, on drugs, filled with joy, out in the sun.  All of this can be seen in a strand of hair.  A shorthand for the life we lived.  Like a scroll of past history.

Hair as Memory, Energy, and Identity

Hair may be made of keratin, (dead matter, but it emerges from the living body, shaped by hormones, nourished by blood.  It contains DNA, traces of emotional states (stress hormones), and even chemical history (drugs, toxins, illness).  If you are interested in exploring the science behind this veil of frivolity, here you go:

• “Hair stores long-term records of physiological life.”  LeBeau, M. A., & Montgomery, M. A. (2010). Hair Analysis in Forensic Toxicology.
• “Hair is a social language, a bearer of identity, status, gender, and belief.”  Synnott, Anthony (1987). “Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair.” The British Journal of Sociology.

And as all of these strands settle into my head, mingling with those of my own life, I imagine that they are together like old friends, nattering away, chatting, sharing their lives with each other, a kind of meeting room of past life.

I kind of love this flight of fancy, and the ritual importance of hair in culture is not coincidental.

The Power and Symbolism of Hair Across Cultures and Myths

Hair is never just hair. It has always been a site of power, identity, ritual, rebellion, and control.

Spiritual and Mythic Symbolism of Hair

1. Samson and Delilah (Judaism & Christianity)

• In the Book of Judges, Samson’s immense strength is bound in his uncut hair. When Delilah betrays him and has it cut, he loses his power.
• Hair here is a covenant, a container of divine energy and masculine potency.

2. Rapunzel (German Folklore, Grimm Brothers)

• Her hair is a bridge—literal and symbolic—between worlds. A ladder for love, a prison for longing.
• Hair becomes a conduit, a lifeline, a tool of escape and connection.

3. Buddhist Monks (Across Asia)

• Shaving the head marks renunciation, humility, and the rejection of ego and attachment.
• Here, hair symbolizes worldliness—to cut it is to step into the sacred.

4. Hinduism

• Long, uncut hair (especially for sadhus or ascetics) is a mark of spiritual discipline.
• Tonsuring (cutting one’s hair in temples) is an offering of ego and a rite of purification.

5. Native American Traditions

• Hair is seen as an extension of the self, sometimes believed to hold spiritual energy or memory.
• Cutting hair after death or trauma signifies grief, loss, transformation.

6. African Diaspora (Black Hair Politics)

• Hair styles hold cultural memory—braids, locs, and cornrows as maps, codes, resistance.
• Enslaved African women used their hair to hide seeds for future planting, and braid escape routes into their daughters’ scalps.

7. Victorian Mourning Jewellery

• Locks of hair from the dead were kept in pendants and rings—literal vessels of memory.
• Hair outlives the body, a relic of intimacy and mourning.

I’m just saying, you know.  But with this kind of precedent, I am not the only one who lives this, even if I am the only one who brought it up.  And yes, my dear, that is why you are here.

The Women in my hair

I am curious about them.  Where they lived, what they did.  I am thinking that if I sat with Ayahuasca or some other trippy drug, I could find out.  Don’t worry, I won’t waste an experience of that magnitude on something which is just a flight of fancy, I’ve got bigger plans for that.

As a practising witch, however, I can summon these women, I can invest their power in mine.  This is not a taking, but a mingling, and what they give to me, I also give to them.  Such is the way of my energy.

I invited a stranger’s living history onto my head.  I wear it at every moment.  Each strand of hair is a whisper of one woman’s life: her stress, her joy, her diet, her dreams, her traumas, her desires, her existential longing.  This is my gift to her for her gift to me, that her longing be satisfied.  I carry her in public.  Her voice mingles with mine.  I brush her in the morning, weaving her deeper into my life.  I braid her, plait her, feel her with me.  She becomes part of my plans, her conviction, her voice, her sense of self.  It is an intimate possession.  And it is real.  I know it; I feel it.  She’s mine now.  Her past is part of my present, my future.

As a witch I am conscious of energy, conscious of the need to exorcise any unwanted elements from the past.  So, I do so.

The memories carried in her, their, hair are like time capsules.  But they also carry an energetic imprint.  Would she know me if she met me.  Recognise her locks?  Her past?  Would I?  It is inevitable.

When you pay enough attention, you pick up on what has changed.  Metaphysically, she has lent me her power, imbued it into my own.  Not consciously, that part was up to me.  But with her comes more than just a flight of fantasy, but ritual, ancestral understanding, and energetic intuition.  I am not so much a hybrid, as an upgrade, for I wear her crown.  She penetrates my scalp, enters the flow of me, and together we rewrite my present.  She is refracted through me, my movement, my speech, my grace.