Published in UWA’s Pelican and Peafowl magazines, Queensland’s Blue Bottle Journal, and Perth’s youth magazine Pulch, Jas Saunders is a recent Honours (Creative Writing) graduate from the University of Western Australia, with an undergrad in English Lit and Public Health. Like most writers, she began as a child – her first story being Pokémon fanfiction. Her thesis recorded how the ghost can serve as a form of hope for the future and a mentor figure within bildungsromans/coming-of-age narratives, subverting genre expectations. Her writing interests often focus on - but are not limited to - liminal spaces, nostalgia, and memory, with representation her younger self would have desired to see.

a medusa of my own

jas saunders

If I remember right, I first wanted to cut my hair when I was twelve—nearly thirteen.

It would have been a good way to start the school year at the new school if I had cut my hair then. Start afresh; reinvent myself to look more like myself; untangle my old knots. I had always been a tomboy in primary school, so I wasn’t cutting down any trees to get myself to where I had wanted to be—I was encouraging the roots to grow in the right direction.

However, as a twin, I was conscious of disrupting the balance. Two girls with their go-to thick braids. Two girls with pigtails in kindergarten school photos. We’re non-identical; fraternal, which only reinforced the ideas in my head that I was expected to be a part of a matching set. After all, people expect twins to look alike.

I only knew one girl with short hair in my public primary school. She was two grades below me but in the same choir group. I didn’t know her well, though I remember her getting mistaken for a boy and wishing I could have that ability. Until I noticed her, I didn’t realize it was an option for girls to have a boys’ haircut. It was something almost always reserved for straight, middle-aged and/or elderly women. Or lesbians, who were only spoken of negatively with disgust or offensive jest.

When I got to middle school, I knew three girls with short hair.

Two of them were in my grade but not in my classes. I saw them in the hallways or on school camp. One of them had a pixie cut with a heavy side fringe, as if she was in her emo phase. She wasn’t at our middle school for long, and the fringe looked too girly for me—like passive-aggressively giving eyelashes to an M&M to say, Hey! She’s a girl!

The other girl had shaggier, slightly longer hair, like a mullet—but without the shaved sides, since it wasn’t the trend then, especially not in Anglican school. She left our school in ninth grade, and when I saw her a few years later, she had grown her hair out, like she could get away with it when she was young, but once she’d gotten older, she didn’t want to be assumed to be one of those evil lesbians. There’s nothing straight girls hate more than being assumed to be one of those.

But I was still jealous that their parents let them have short hair without attaching the stereotype that it made them gay, that they didn't care that people could think of them as other because of their hair. They could just have what they wanted.

The third girl, however? Three grades above me in senior school, we only shared recess time. She was different. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was definitely my own Alison Bechdel’s Ring-of-Keys moment. She wore the girls’ school dress uniform, but her masculinity radiated straight through it. She was butch. Unlike the other girls, she was one of the evil lesbians. The side of her hair was buzzed down as much as the dress-code allowed. She didn’t walk; she swaggered around the campus with confidence, as if the conservative school was a Pride parade. With her, I felt admiration and longing, a bitter disappointment that our paths only crossed for twenty minutes of the school day.

When I was fourteen, I started feeling dysphoric. I hated my long hair. I hated my chest. I hated my voice. I hated myself. In hindsight, some of it was probably hating my sexuality. I had my first celebrity crush on Zooey Deschanel when I was five. Entering middle school was the first time I properly realized I wasn’t like the other girls. I still didn’t like dresses. I knew I didn’t like makeup; it was something I had only borrowed from my mum once—when I was five also—asking her to put red lipstick on my nose so I could pretend to be a clown. As a teen, I felt like I couldn't escape out of my own brain. Whenever I told my mum I wanted to cut my hair, she said I’d regret it, or that it would take forever to grow back, as if I’d inevitably want long hair as soon as I hacked it off. Maybe that was the real clown behavior all along.

After I got outed to my mum at the end of high school, I told her to not panic, that I wouldn’t want to look like one of those lesbians.

*

My dad worked with an older, hard-butch lesbian dubbed the Australian Ellen DeGeneres by the department full of men. They teased her about being a manly dyke. She was true-blue though, knew how to take it on the chin—a real Aussie battler that could give banter back like a superpower. I met her once or twice; five years ago, when Australia legalized same-sex marriage, I had a blast dancing to “Nutbush City Limits” at her small backyard wedding where she wore a suit. I wish I hadn’t been so anxious to confide in her about my own lesbianism and ask her advice as a baby butch. But I was stuck in a dress. My hair was long. She was essentially a stranger.

*

Mum knowing my sexuality deepened my internalized homophobia. I could get away with wearing my masculine clothing, but only because I had the long hair to compensate. But I had to have no body hair. I had to wear makeup. I could be a half, but not a whole of who I was.

I finally managed to cut my hair this year. It started with an undercut until I knew I had to get rid of the rest. I know butches can rock long hair, but the knots and the emotional tangles weren’t worth it. I was sick of being pretty, like an object, sick of my hair dragging me and my confidence down. I wanted to feel handsome for once; I wanted to feel like me.

My mum wasn’t keen on the idea, despite having short hair herself back in the ‘80s. But I booked myself an appointment, told her about it the day before, and did my best to ignore the look on her face. When I came home from the studio the next day, I felt as light as a feather. And she came around; I knew she would.

Being in a dress with long hair feels like I’m in drag. Femininity is attractive; it just doesn't feel like me.

I haven’t worn a dress since graduating last December, but I still feel like people want me to splash on makeup or wear something feminine, even when they say that I suit my hair more now, or that they can't imagine me with long hair or in a dress. There’s this expectation that I need to make up for the absence of long, lingering locks.

But cutting my hair was a vow to myself. And I’ve stuck to it.

When my hair gets too long, that’s when it feels like there are snakes in my hair, sliding down my head and to my shoulders, as if I’m a Medusa of my own kind—except I turn to stone when someone looks at me.

After finally having what I’ve wanted for so many years, my subconscious takes it away from me. I’m transformed back into who I once was—an uncomfortable adult who hates to look in the mirror, who showers with her eyes closed.

I lie in bed, and the snakes slither like restless children across the pillows, down my neck. They’re cold, and their scales scratch me. I have nightmares that they talk to me, trying to tell me that I’m not good enough, strong enough, butch enough. But I don’t believe them, and I wake up. I always do.

And that’s a part of my reward. I get to push onwards and persist, because I am who I have always been. I look how I have always wanted to. And I let little girls know they can look like me; I let little Jas know she does look like me. In a world that hates masculine women, I wake up and hold my head high, cropped hair and all.