A Hairpin Helped Me Cope With Gender Dysphoria
During my teens and more
One morning, in the 1980s, when I was walking to school, I saw a hairpin on the road. It must have dropped out of someone’s purse. I instinctively picked it up and examined it. It wasn’t broken or rusted. In fact, it was new and shiny and small and simple and beautiful (although it didn’t have pearls like the one in the image ). I wiped it on my shirt because it had been on the road, and put it carefully in my school bag. Thirteen-year-old was delighted to have a hairpin in my bag.
The bobby pin — a name I learnt much later — stayed in my bag for the rest of the school day. I didn’t remove it, but I did peek in a few times to make sure it was still there, and everytime I looked at the pin, I marvelled as if I was looking at magical object. It made me feel good. That day, I didn’t even remove it from my bag even after returning home in the evening. It was too precious to be careless with. If I had seen a gold coin and the hairpin side by side on the road, I still would have picked up just the hairpin.
It came out of my bag for the first time at night just before I was going to sleep. I held it in my hand for sometime, feeling it’s magic.
My hair naturally parted on the side, so I pressed the long side on the scalp, taking all the strands off the…
