Morning Routine
This is a writing exercise from my director. Enjoy!
Materials Needed (generally in order of use)
- Alarm, with remote
- Phone
- Computer
- Robe
- Clothing
- Bathroom scale
- Shower door
- Shampoo
- Mirror
- Shaving cream and razor
- Face wash
- Conditioner
- Loofah and body wash
- Detachable shower head
- Towel and head towel
- Blow dryer
- Tooth brush
- Pills
- Comb
- Hair product
My alarm goes off. It’s a beep that begins quiet, and slowly gets larger. It used to be music, but I became trained to listen for soft music, and so things in the next room our outside were waking me. My alarm is a Bose stereo, undoubtedly overkill for the simple jobs of telling time and waking me, but I like it.
I take the small black remote from the side of my bed, and turn off the alarm.
My phone is on the nightstand, and I grab it while still in bed to check my email.
I roll out of bed and shuffle over to my computer, where I check the news. This almost always takes longer than I say it will, reading the various headlines.
The bathroom is down the hall, and I grab my thick black robe and make my way out of my room. I keep telling myself I’ll buy a new, more comfortable robe, but I never do. I wear slippers when it’s cold, but in the summer I go barefoot through my apartment.
Once in the bathroom, I take off my nightclothes, usually boxers and a t-shirt. The bathroom has red mats, and my roommate and my towels hanging on the wall. I hang my robe behind the door, and step onto the scale. Its white, with a dial that swings past my weight, back the other way, and finally settles. Inevitably, the scale shows me a few pounds heavier than I’d like to be. Sigh.
Our shower has sliding glass, rather than a curtain, and I slide open the right side and turn on the water. The apartment’s water is usually pretty consistent, but every so often I’ll have to let it run for a few minutes to warm up.
Stepping into the shower, I face away from the showerhead to get my hair and back wet. The frosted window has a sill with bathing supplies: razors and soap and shampoo and conditioner and loofahs and foot-scrubbers and shaving cream and bubble bath and so on and on. The color differences between mine and my roommates amuse me: all of my things are light blues, or pinks, or glossy white, or green. All of his – without exception – are stark blue and white.
I soap up my hair, first. I love my hair – it’s one of the few things about my body I liked before transitioning, and the only part of my appearance that I’m unreservedly happy with. I don’t wash my hair every day, but often enough that it’s thick and makes me want to talk about it like I”m in a shampoo commercial.
Soaped hair, I wash my face. I use orange face wash with bursts of refreshing something-or-other. If I’m going to shave the few stubbornly-remaining patches of facial hair I have left, I’ll do it now. I feel my face, and turn to the mirror suction-cupped on the wall of the shower. With years of laser hair removal, I’m down from shaving once a day to once or twice a week. But when I was in the hospital, and unable to shave for days, the facial hair I try so hard to keep hidden showed itself, much to my embarrassment.
I also take this opportunity to check my arms, my chest, my stomach, and my legs. Laser has done its work on all those locations, too, and my once-thick body hair has been thankfully reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. It still sucks to have so much hair to shave, though. Less and less every laser session, but how often have you had to shave your areolas?
When I’m done shaving, I rinse my the shampoo out of my hair and wash all the little shaved hairs down the drain. I slop on some conditioner, and put a plop of body wash onto my loofah. For years, I was anti-loofah, avoiding their girlish connotations, but I’ve come to love the massage-like aspect of its scratchiness, simultaneously relaxing and invigorating.
Usually, I linger for a moment at my breasts. I still marvel at their size, their swell, their very existence. I simultaneously wish that they were bigger, just a little bit.
Done with my soap and shampoo and conditioner, I take the detachable hear and rinse myself down. I wash the conditioner out from my hair, and turn off the water. For a moment, I stand dripping, wringing out my hair and letting the worst of the water sheer off my body.
I grab my towel, red and fluffy, and step onto the mat outside the tub. I start with my hair, and work my way down. When I’m moderately dry, I grab my hair towel from the back of the door, whip my head way forward, and wrap my hair up.
Turning to the mirror, naked except for the towel keeping my hair up, I take my toothbrush from the medicine cabinet. I have a ridiculous, overpriced toothbrush, the kind that vibrates loudly and beeps every 30 seconds to tell you to switch quadrants of your mouth for brushing. My friends poke fun at me: a vibrating toothbrush and a vibrating razor. Vibrating. I laugh along with them, because I acknowledge the ridiculous technology I surround myself with. At the same time, the toothbrush does a good job keeping my teeth clean, and the vibrating razor gives me a closer shave. Unless I’m fooling myself, and just think those things are true.
In any event, I’m pro-vibration.
The toothbrush finishes its cycle, and I spit into the sink. A month or so ago I dropped the cap from my toothpaste down the drain, so now the sink drains very slowly. I can still see the cap, but it’s too far down to reach. And, truth be told, I don’t really care – the water still drains, even if it’s a little disgusting to see it go down so slowly.
Filling my cup – blue with fish, a joke gift for a teenage birthday – I swish and spit, opening my medicine cabinet again to grab my pills. Spironolactone and esdtrodial in the morning, along with an assortment of multi-vitamins.
Brushing and pills completed, I unwrap the towel around my head and let my hair fall. A little splotch of curling agent, and I start to blow-dry my hair. I’m not convinced having a diffuser on the blow-dryer does anything, although apparently I’ve been using it incorrectly. I’ll have to try the “proper” diffuser technique…
With my hair (mostly) dry, I put my robe back on (telling myself again that I need to get a lighter robe, at least for the summer months) and go back to my room.
Themocracy
Can I ask what the point of this is? I’m not trying to be mean, but it seems self-indulgent and frankly, kinda boring, to give an exhaustively detailed play-by-play of you showering. And what is with the accusatory “do YOU shave your areolas?” It is your choice to shave your areolas, and there are plenty of cis women with hairy nipples, like myself. I don’t shave them because I don’t care and my lovers don’t care. I understand your facial hair bothering you, but removing all your other body hair is a choice you are making, because you have bought into the idea that body hair on a woman is unsightly. You do not have to be hairless to be a woman.
Oh, absolutely self-indulgent. For my upcoming performance, I’m thinking a lot about ritual, both mundane and holy. As a writing exercise, and to think about ‘ritual’ in my on life, my director is having me do some writing exercises like this one.
And you’re right – I’m making a choice by removing my body hair, one that buys into the cultural expectations of what it means to be a woman. (And removing my facial hair is part of that cultural expectation.) And I’m sorry I took an accusatory tone. I shouldn’t have done so. That line was coming from my own internal thought process that constantly compares me to what a woman “should” be, and feels like I’m falling short. But there is no yardstick for womanhood, and I shouldn’t have implied that there was.
Removing your facial hair *is* part of a cultural expectation, but it’s one where you don’t have loads of choice. Beyond any dysphoria issues, not having facial hair – or rather, not having facial hair whose coarseness reads as “stubble” and hence male – is kind of important in terms of being accepted as a woman, and in terms of personal safety.
So I mean, I tend to think that it’s money well spent, really.
I agree, which is why I said I understand removing facial hair, as that is a gender marker automatically interpreted as male.
Rebecca, I hope you can reach a place where you don’t feel like you have to constantly measure yourself against what a woman “should” be. From the pictures you’ve posted here you are obviously a beautiful woman, and your intelligence and humor shines through your writing. I know the transmisogyny in our fucked-up patriarchal society can be draining and I admire your strength.
Thanks, Margaret. I hope I get there, too. I’m working on it, and am closer than I was a year ago, but it’s a journey…
I see Margaret got here before me, but I was also coming down to comment on the areola shaving bit. I don’t shave mine – but I do trim them with nail scissors (when I remember!), and the only other (cis)woman I’ve ever discussed it with shaves hers. In fact, we talked about how annoyingly quickly the hairs grow, and that when showering with her boyfriend, she often felt the need to quickly shave them before he noticed the dark, coarse hairs. I always assumed all women had hair growing there.
I notice an assumption among those who grew up with testosterone that bodies absent male quantities of that hormone will be practically hairless. We may not have to shave our faces, but we spend much, much longer shaving the rest of our bodies so that men will never know how much hair we’re really growing. Sometimes I get a little irritated with my trans friends who complain about how much work it is to get their skin looking feminine. I accept that the amount of work is variable, but every woman has to spend time and effort getting that “silky smooth” feel that society dictates is necessary for her to present to the world.
Call me out on my cis-privilege if you will, but put a ciswoman on a desert island with no razors, abrasives, creams, lotions or epilators, and you’ll end up with someone who’s a lot more hirsute and rough-textured than you might imagine.
I think that’s an excellent point, and I really appreciate you bringing that up. You’re absolutely right that these issues of self confidence and attempting (or not) to live up to society’s expectations of what it means to be aa women’s issue not a trans issue. I’m sorry I suggested otherwise. I need to stop looking for the excuse of, “This is hard because I’m trans,” and instead try to focus on the more true and more reassuring fact that everyone worries about those unrealistic standards.
“I notice an assumption among those who grew up with testosterone that bodies absent male quantities of that hormone will be practically hairless. We may not have to shave our faces, but we spend much, much longer shaving the rest of our bodies so that men will never know how much hair we’re really growing.”
Yeah, I do call cissexist privilege for the *way* you’ve expressed this – implicitly call us men for our apparent unawareness of the hirsute female body, and the backdoor biological essentialism about hormone levels. As if that necessarily equals consciousness and experience… and as though cis women learning to live with their bodies are always immediately and innately able to separate harmful media messages from bodily reality?
And yeah, personally, my family’s Greek so I was Well Aware of that particular aspect of the female experience. I got my IPL recommendation from two of my cis cousins, who had been there and seen other trans women and thought it might be friendly. Bitching about hair removal is like a sport with the women of my family. So I mean, there’s another flawed assumption there, it’s not like sexed norms always appear the same everywhere and are responded to the same way…
In fact, few of the queer trans women I know IRL have seemed particularly interested in much hair removal when I’ve mentioned it. I mean, if we’re doing half-arsed generalisations here…
trans women you know /= trans women in general
I don’t think you’re being fair. I do not think she was calling trans women men, implicitly or explicitly. Acknowledging that trans women grew up with male amounts of testosterone is not accusing trans women of being male but stating a reality that they grew up with more testosterone than cis women. While no, not all folks’ hormone levels are created equal and everyone has both estrogen and testosterone, it is true that people assigned male at birth generally have more testosterone.
And I don’t think she ever said anything even close to what you are saying about cis women being better able to separate media messages from reality, which simply isn’t true of course. Can you point to where she implied this?
I was a bit bothered by this post as well, because Rebecca seemed to be making an unfair assumption about the lengths cis women go to to remove body hair. I resent women (trans or cis) complaining about removing body hair because no matter what the social norms are, in the end removing your hair is your choice. Societal pressure does not equal forcing women to shave. If you choose to shave, I fully support you, but I find complaining about it irritating. If it’s such a hassle to remove all your body hair, why don’t you stop removing it?
I am a queer high-femme cis woman and I do not shave my legs, armpits or anything else for that matter. Sure sometimes people make rude comments but I shrug it off because in the end it saves me a ton of time and I am proud of fucking with social norms by flaunting my armpits. Again, this is my choice, not society’s, and not yours if you don’t want it to be.
Hmm. I have two responses to this.
First, you’re right that shaving whatever is a choice. However, it’s a choice between shaving your body parts (whatever they may be) and suffering the societal flack — and that choice sucks. It shouldn’t have to be that way. And that fact is a legitimate thing to complain about, even if you personally don’t find that social flack to be too burdensome.
Second thing is, (out) trans folks tend to suffer more social consequences than cis folks from stupid things like deciding not to shave. When you don’t shave, you might get some rude comments about your choice not to shave. When a trans person makes any decision that doesn’t fit with gendered social norms, they get people calling in to question how much they deserve their gender.
And that’s a fuckton of pressure. And it’s totally legit to have a problem with that pressure, whether you decide to shave (or participate in any of the other body rituals of the Nacirema or not.
>>>Acknowledging that trans women grew up with male amounts of testosterone is not accusing trans women of being male but stating a reality that they grew up with more testosterone than cis women. While no, not all folks’ hormone levels are created equal and everyone has both estrogen and testosterone, it is true that people assigned male at birth generally have more testosterone.
Yesss, but it was the slippage from that to consciousness that I objected to. I don’t see what one has to do with the other, and like I said I object to the biological essentialism of that slippage.
I think the lack of awareness that Khyri talked about has got *everything* to do with the kinds of access to knowledge sharing among women (both cis and trans). If you’re excluded from female sociality then sometimes you don’t get all the facts. So it seems to me that none of that is particularly or necessarily inherent to transness let alone testosterone levels, but rather to the kinds of social processes any particular person is embedded in.
I think all what B was showing was a slice of her life.
I think it showed how we are all the same in some ways
I for one enjoyed it.
I also think you are a beautiful women
I too, quite enjoyed this post. The first hour or two of her day is significantly more interesting than mine. I loved all the descriptions of colors.
Wow, this post generated a lot more discussion than I expected. Thank you, everyone, for weighing in.
I’m going to respond to a few points in a single comment…
First, as I said earlier, I think those of you who were calling me out for assumptions about cis womens’ bodies were right to do so. I got my hair removal referral from my mom, who is definitely cis and still working hard to remove unwanted body hair.
Stemming out of that, I need to work on remembering my body issues are universal. Hiding behind “it’s hard because I’m trans” doesn’t really help me deal with my confidence issues. I try not to indulge in that line of thinking too often, but sometimes it slips out.
That said, I would agree with Queen Emily and Violet that trans women often feel they have a higher bar to hit when it comes to ‘being a woman.’ This higher bar probably isn’t purely internal or purely external, but a solid mix of body issues and cultural expectations. That’s not a good thing, and is something we should fight, but I do think the higher bar exists.