Right on

I can't understand how anyone is confused---it's obvious to me that she's a woman. Then again, I live on a campus where I swear half the girls have short hair and a good number of them don't bother to femme up their clothes. It doesn't read as unfeminine to me; it's quite common.

I love that, by the way. I could tell, when we were at the ICCA afterparty at U of I, that a lot of people were taken aback by my lack of luxuriant tresses. I could see it in the boys' eyes--"I think you might be cute, but I'm really confused by the two feet of hair you don't have." I could see it in the girls' faces--"What does she think she's doing? Is she gay?" Even the way the guys who were interested in me were acting just seemed a little bit halting, a little odd; I was a strange creature, and they weren't sure how to approach me. In every way, my haircut marked me off from their ideas of normalcy, of attractiveness. I was Not Like Them, because for them it was important to look like everyone else. They succeeded--they all really did look the same. I encounter that odd sameness every time I visit another school, and I always find it bizarre. It always reinforces how glad I am to be where I am.

All the Voices girls talked about this the next morning, and we all felt the same way. Even though we don't all have short hair, we all have strong personalities that show in our appearances, and all of us stood out in the sea of long hair, eyeliner, babydoll tops and black stilettos as different. We were all happy to have it that way, even if those girls got more action than we did at that party. We know who we are and we love who we are, and we are all happy to have chosen an institution and a community that supports that and sees that as "normal." I was at a frat party on Friday where I had a long conversation about Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and international aid to Israel, and where a total stranger informed me that he liked that I had short hair because it was "different". That wasn't happening at any of the U of I frats that night.

I wouldn't have it any other way.