What Does a Non-Binary Haircut Look Like? Hairstylists and Queer People Describe What It Means to Them

I’ve been trying to navigate beauty spaces as a non-binary person, because I think that I’m often perceived as a woman, even if it’s more of a masc woman. I got my eyebrows done two months ago, and I was like, “Hey, I just want a very sparse cleanup. I am not a woman, I’m non-binary, please don’t give me an arch shape.” And then they gave me this high arch. And for the first day or so, it was a cute look, but I didn’t want this. It wasn’t me. It felt like I was doing a certain look that you might wear for formal attire or something, which is fun for a night, but you don’t want to wake up and put that on every day. 

I think that’s something I’m still trying to navigate; how do I navigate hair and beauty, especially, because hair and beauty is so binary. It’s so controlled. I have been wanting to get a haircut. I feel more confident in my appearance when it has a distinct point of view. And I think that’s the power for a lot of gender variant folks, and a lot of women and femmes, just being like, “I’m going to dictate how I look, even if you’re going to punish me for it.”

But I still haven’t gotten my hair cut. How can I find someone that I really trust to understand what I’m going for, instead of projecting how they see me, and their relationship to femininity onto my hair?

I also don’t feel like I need to change my hair as a non-binary person, but right before I came out as non-binary, I did a big chop off of my hair. It was really long. and I cut off 10 inches. Initially, it felt really, really good, because it felt like a rebirth in a sense. As a woman, and especially as a biracial person, I was socialized to see my hair as something that was so precious. I would go to my dad’s family house, and they would run their fingers through my hair, and be like “Oh you have such pretty hair,” because it was straight. And when I would date cis straight men, a lot of the time they would compliment my hair, and be like “you have such beautiful hair.” Within the Latinx community, people would tell me I have “good hair,” and that would spark a lot of conversations. I’d say, “No, we have different hair textures. You have great hair, I have great hair. There’s no such thing as that.”