I knew a guy who, every morning, looked at himself in the mirror but couldn’t recognize himself.
He suffered.
Today, we would talk about dysphoria; we would say that his genetic identity didn’t exactly match the perception he had of himself. But back then, no one talked about these things at all.
That guy imagined everything would be easier if he could accept himself, but he didn’t feel capable of doing so.
For years he felt uncomfortable, a prisoner in a body he didn’t perceive as his own, so much so that he began to hide, to mask himself. He even went as far as wearing a wig.
He felt mocked, misunderstood.
There were jokes and labels for people like him, but he didn’t hate others: he hated himself.
There is nothing wrong with having an ideal. It is even understandable to have a personal taste—although it is becoming increasingly inappropriate to speak of it aloud—about what we mean by normality. Provided that one does not glorify the questionable merit of those who embody it, even if only for a fleeting moment, sacrificing, at its altar, the equally debatable demerit of those who deviate from it.
That guy couldn’t find peace because inside he didn’t feel abnormal.
Simply, educated not to like himself, he felt wrong.
So, after a lifetime spent hoping to correct that error, a few months ago, helped by technology that has made giant leaps in recent years, he underwent surgery. In Turkey.
He was bald.
So what?
Androgenetic alopecia is certainly not among the most cited physical problems related to dysphoria, perhaps because it is a common experience for many people, but it can generate it.
It certainly does, even if few—among those with a full head of hair, and perhaps even among those without—would believe that a sane person could really fail to live with it.
I, for my part, know nothing about anorexia; much less about transgender issues.
Yet, if I think of some famous men, heads of state, geniuses of art and music, movie stars—people who would have good reasons to be proud of themselves, without the slightest shame about being bald—well, I am surprised at how many prefer to wear a wig.
It seems inexplicable: how fragile and hopeless must one feel to resort to solutions that, in most cases, do not at all reduce the contempt of those who look?
Who doesn’t smile when they realize that a passerby, a neighbor, or a colleague is wearing a toupee, pleased to have uncovered the deception?
Of course, not everyone thinks baldness is a problem.
But some—perhaps not many—really believe that bald men are funny, ugly, less credible, less suitable to become spokesmen or even presidents.
Those people, if they ever lost their hair, would be willing to believe even fairy tales just to get it back.
It is the same mechanism that leads some—perhaps not particularly imaginative—to think that women with small breasts would be less beautiful, less feminine, less suitable to be mothers than others.
And so, when it comes to them having small breasts, adding a prosthesis no longer seems like a deception, a distortion, but a cure.
Perhaps because—sharing with the majority the idea that a man with Samson’s hair or a woman with Juno’s breasts is more beautiful—they come to believe that an ideal measure really exists.
After all, having certain physical features today is not yet a crime. Nor is having preferences about them, but expressing a preference, even in good faith, can feed tendencies that once led to far worse degenerations.
The dividing line between personal taste and the cult of Aryanism is perhaps not as impassable as we like to believe.
That is why not encouraging certain tendencies lightly, even when they seem harmless, could be important.
Certainly, some appreciate a dyed man more than one with white hair, some prefer a comb-over to baldness, prosthetics to small size, fake lips to real but thin ones.
Tightened skin, reshaped noses, swollen cheekbones seem to some more “presentable” than wrinkles.
Just as one might think it necessary to tan even in winter, to remove hair from every part of the body, tattoo eyebrows, bleach the anus.
And yet—and I say this quietly—we should be wary of the solutions offered to cure ailments we didn’t even think we had.
Or to hide what, willingly or not, we are.
Especially when we still don’t quite know what we are.
There is always the risk that, tomorrow, we might come to believe that we were not wrong at all.
A perfect world should protect us for as long as it takes to discover this.
It should give us the time to understand that we are what we are, that perhaps, even if many wouldn’t envy us, we are not so bad after all, and that it is up to us to find the courage to assert it.
Sometimes we are not strong enough even to like ourselves.
Let alone to impose our way of being on others.
We fear that, seeing us, they won’t recognize us. So we prefer to confuse them, to disorient them.
That is why we wear the mask with which we would like to be mistaken:
because it is easier for us to lie—even to ourselves—than to convince others.
We should trust more in the possibility that the endowment nature gave us is suited to the happiness we feel we deserve.
Because by denying it, perhaps, we also compromise that happiness.
If only we knew from the start what we are destined to become, it would be clearer to us that the body is not the real obstacle.
Loving oneself does not mean accepting oneself, but building oneself.
It means proudly walking the path that leads to the perfection of what we could achieve.
Then, perhaps, we would love that uniqueness we now fear.
We would love it as the only chance we have—because it is—to shape tomorrow’s horizon in our own image.
Just as our models once shaped yesterday’s.
It is partly up to us, too, to build that future.