Chapter 4
Gender Dysphoria at the Intergalactic Beauty Salon

“A man's face is his autobiography.
A woman's face is her work of fiction.” — Oscar Wilde

My mother was an actress before she married my father. She was a brunette beauty, with a young-Elizabeth-Taylor kind of look. She was always coiffed, manicured, and made-up – the height of Old World charm and grace. A real lady. I was raised with impeccable manners, and a real sense of art and beauty. Heck, I’m an artist today probably because of my mother’s influence. Thanks mom, by the way.

Given my mother’s generation, her English upbringing, and her former profession, remaining well-groomed was a high-maintenance deal. So, needless to say, I spent a lot of my younger years toddling around beauty shops. My Mom’s favorite beauty squat was this monstrous establishment, or at least it seemed big, to a kid of my age and diminutive size.

The thing that stuck in my mind overall was the smell: perfumes and chemicals hung thick in the air, warring in the nose for olfactory dominance. This was back at a time when perms and waves were still big. It could give one a definite headrush. All those ladies cooking under those hair dryers, getting high off the fumes coming from their own scalps. It gave me a buzz in the rarified atmosphere and the heat, but I didn’t really care. I was playing spaceman. In one of the dryer chairs.

The old-style, Elizabeth Arden chrome steel bullet dryer hood was pulled down over my eyes, as protection against micro meteors, and the dials on the back of the seat operated the controls on my mighty starship. I battled the strange alien Wig Women, who passed by in their pink plastic smocks. I was firing my blasters and barking orders into my com, when two of the hairdressers came by, and saw me sitting there. One was a tall, skinny, rather effeminate man, and the other an older lady with dark hair. They saw me sitting under the dryer, wearing one of the pink plastic capes, and stopped. They didn’t realize the cape was a space suit I had donned because my starship had taken a hit and had lost all atmosphere. They saw a little boy playing dress up and wrongly thought perhaps I was playing at being a customer in a beauty parlor.

“Ooooh, what do we have here?” The man cooed to his coworker. “How can we help you today, Miss?”

I looked up at the man and corrected him politely, though my eyes should have told him clearly I was frying his brain in his skull with my laser vision. “I am not a girl. I’m a boy.”

“You don’t look like a boy,” the woman said, sitting down next to me. “You look like you have just come in for a shampoo and set.”

“Maybe she’s wanting a perm,” the man joked.

“Do you want a perm, sweetie, and maybe a manicure?”

“No, thank you. I’m a boy.” I restated quietly but more directly. “I’m just playing. My mom is getting her hair done up front.”

“It’s okay, sweetie, we don’t mind if you play girl back here,” the man said, delighted with me. “But you really should be wearing a cap if you’re going to sit under the dryer.”

The lady hairdresser reached into a drawer and produced a plastic stretch cap and pulled it over my hair. “Oh, isn’t she cute. I have some time; would you like me to ask your mother if its okay if you had your nails painted?”

“No, thank you.”

The male hairdresser laughed, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” I remember he said those exact words, ‘cause I didn’t have a clue what he meant by it, and it stuck in my head. Years later, I discovered it’s a quote from William Shakespeare. I blushed all over again, when I thought back, realizing that little fucker had seen right through me. “Can I do your makeup?” he asked sincerely, and I was struck dumb. These people were not listening to me at all. I didn’t know what to do. Do I just sit here or do I run screaming? What was going on? At seven years old, I was ill-prepared for a social situation like this. So I said nothing. I continued to say nothing, while the hairdressers painted my fingernails and toenails, and gave me eyes and lips to match.

My head was a mess. “What is up with people? Why do they keep trying to make me a girl? Don’t I look like a boy? Do I act like a sissy? I guess I must. They keep doing it to me.” The attention was kinda nice, and they seemed to really like me. Then the damnedest thing happened. Once again, I was aroused, and this time there was nobody I was in the least bit attracted to in the room. But there was the feeling, and it felt wonderful. Having no clue what this was doing to me psychologically, and accepting that adults are in charge, I simply decided quite rationally to relax and just go with it. “Fine, lets explore being a girl,” I thought. “It could be fun.”

Too bad my mother didn’t think so when she saw me.

I was presented to her in the front of the store, after being complimented and paraded in front of all the customers and staff. Oddly, she said nothing to the staff, other than politely asking if they could clean me up, as it was time to leave. However, once we were out of the salon, I caught a major ration of Scottish wrath. “Hells bells and buckets of blood! What are you bloody well playing at! Yer a boy, not some bloody fairy!” She ranted as she dragged me by my arm down the street.

“If ye want to be a lassie, ye can bloody well wait till yer out of my house. Ye looked like a idiot in there and ye embarrassed me. Now they all think I’m raising a little poof! Thank God yer father didnya see ya!” My mother’s Scottish brogue always comes out thickest when she’s pissed.

“Wow,” I thought, “Now that is a spectacular reaction.” I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t my fault, that I had no control over what happened. I knew my mother wasn’t listening, and she wouldn’t understand about the spaceship, or the loss of atmosphere, or the spacesuit, or any of the other strange difficulties an intergalactic space traveler encounters out there in the universe. It was easier just to remain silent. Because that’s the code of the galaxy. So now I was shaping up quite nicely as a budding little trannie and world class twisted fetishist. However, there were still a couple things waiting to happen yet to me before my fate was sealed.

 

– to be continued –