beard!

My beard continues to fill in, which is quite reassuring now that I live up in the cold hinterlands of New England. Snow is forecast for the next few days (before Halloween! What have I gotten myself into??) and while I was just missing my muttonchops the other day, and thinking about going back to a sideburns/goatee/'chops situation, I may hunker down and wait til spring before I mess around with exposing my face to the elements.

My beard still looks a bit scraggly to me sometimes, especially compared to some of the exceedingly thick and luxurious beards that some of my fellow New Englander men are sporting. But I also regularly see other guys with very similar patterns, and certainly when I look back to compare pictures of my beard from last year, I can instantly see how much it's filled in.

Here are some current pictures- it's been more than two and half years on T, so about two years since I started trying to grow my facial hair out at all, and about a year and a half since I've been able to achieve any reasonable growth at all.


Here are the requisite close-up self-portraits, the kind I might label "Tranny Photo Essay!" were I the type to use the word "tranny" casually, which I'm not. I get that it can be a cute and/or sassy way for trans folks to reclaim a historically hurtful word, and refer to themselves with some degree of levity, but I just can't ignore the condescension that, to my ears, drips from the word, and so don't ever use it myself. And I don't ever think it's acceptable for non-trans folks to use.

Anyway. Goofy self-portraits:
But look! You can see I'm finally starting to achieve my dearest facial hair wish: connection! My moustache is finally starting to connect to my beard.
Of course, at more than 5 inches away, one still can't really make out the Bering Strait of my facial hair.

And the connection, such as it is, isn't even as robust as that on my left side, where it's, erm, tenuous at best. But I'm quite satisfied.

For comparison, here's a shot from May '08- less robust facial hair, clearly. Gratuitous chest hair shot! That's been filling in, too, though not as much.
Then we go back another 6 months, to December '07. Again you can see how my moustache didn't connect at all, and whoa, you can really see how '08 has been the year of the hairy chest.
And finally, a shot from July of 2007, which appears to have been my first full scale effort to "grow out my beard." I didn't bother with the moustache, patchy as it was, and you can see that the beard itself was very much confined to my jawline.

Aww, in that last picture I was wearing my RUNT: Stick up for the little guy! shirt. RUNT was a party at a bar for short guys and their friends and admirers- I think it ran for much of 2006. At any rate, a bunch of us who used to frequent the Transmasculine Support Group at the LGBT Center in NYC used to frequently head over to RUNT after 'Group,' as we called it. Most of us were pretty short, so we fit right in!