Marine Taveras has struggled with gender identity for most of her life.

“I actually went through my whole life just thinking that I was a very feminine boy, and that kind of like was all that I knew,” Taveras said. “So I didn't understand, like, what trans people were or what being transgender even was.

“And then I was taken in [as a teenager] by my chosen mother as she kind of showed me what it was to be transgender and why I had some of the questions that I had, or some of the battles that I had with myself, like the way that I saw myself in the mirror.”

When Taveras looks in the mirror today, a huge part of what makes her comfortable is her hair. As a trans person, she hasn’t had the best experiences in hair salons.

“I've had to deal with people speaking about me in ways that were very derogatory,” Taveras said. “It can be very traumatic, and it scared me away from going to salons, which is why I cut my own hair.”

That was before she met Halie Ross, a hairstylist specializing in gender-affirming and queer haircuts.

“I’m not here to tell anyone how their hair should be,” Ross said.

She says the hair industry is gendered when it doesn’t need to be, and to make her salon more inclusive, she decides pricing based off time spent on the cut — not someone’s gender.

“Most places that you walk into, it's men's cuts or women's cuts. Like literally binary gendered, which can be super problematic in general because if you're non-binary, like what haircut am I supposed to book?” Ross said. “But B, also it contributes to like a pink tax.”

To others, something as small as a haircut might seem trivial, but for Marine, it’s so much bigger. It’s about what makes her feel best — but also about her safety simply existing.

“Whatever is going to help me pass more and not get assaulted in public is what's important to me,” Taveras said.

For people who are not part of the queer community or don’t know anyone who is, it may be harder to understand the importance of having gender-affirming hair, but Ross says one thing everyone can understand is a bad haircut.

“A bad haircut is a bad haircut, and that is basically what a gender un-affirming haircut experience is,” Ross said. “It’s a really bad haircut because it’s the wrong haircut for that person.”

But now, after her haircut, Taveras’ smile says it all.

“It's just nice to have a good experience, and to like get what I asked for, instead of what other people think would be on my head,” Taveras said.