Beyond That First Glance
In 2011, Helen Phillips stopped wearing a scarf to cover her head. Her reason for wearing it was not religious: It was that she had been bald for 18 years. And while she might not look like a typical American woman, she is not alone in her baldness: She is often mistaken for other New Yorkers who, like her, have the hair-loss condition alopecia universalis. “I have been approached by strangers who greet me warmly, asking about my dog or reminding me that we met at a party or assuring me that I was in their yoga class yesterday,” she wrote in The Times. So when she met her dopplegängers — Megan Sanders, Rachel Fleit and Brittany Myers — they felt as if they had known one another already.
They have things in common, some good, some not: “The ability to shower in 30 seconds. Irritation at the way sweat drips off a hairless scalp when doing downward dog,” Ms. Phillips wrote, referring to a yoga posture.
But even though they live in New York, “where a bald woman is rarely the oddest thing anyone has seen on a given day,” they also share the experience of being stared at or questioned about their appearance.
Still, they have made peace with their hairlessness, and are determined not to let it hold them back. Ms. Myers loves rock climbing and runs ultramarathons, activities that “simply couldn’t be done while wearing a wig,” Ms. Phillips wrote.
She, for one, says she would not go back to having hair if she could. A recent dream in which she had “thick, lustrous hair,” she wrote, was a nightmare.
Of course, if she still wore a scarf on her head, she would still draw attention, as many Muslim women do. Moscow is home to two million Muslims, but for decades Islam in Russia has been associated with terrorism and fighting in the North Caucasus.
Now, women like Rezeda Suleyman, a fashion designer, and Natalia Narmin Ichaeva, a public relations specialist, see an opportunity to project a positive image of their way of life.
Both are featured in a Times documentary, in which Ms. Suleyman recalls a time when people, seeing her head scarf, would switch to a different subway car. To challenge such thinking, they have put together initiatives such as a charity fashion bazaar to highlight Muslim styles. The response of one non-Muslim participant, a TV actress who wore one of the featured dresses: “Of course I’ll wear it. It doesn’t matter what religion the designer is.”
That’s the kind of reaction that Ben Mattlin wishes more people would have to him. Mr. Mattlin has used a wheelchair his whole life because of a genetic condition called spinal muscular atrophy. In 26 years of marriage, he has had to dispel people’s assumption that his wife is his sister or his nurse, or that she is “a saint” for staying married to him.
At times he has been discounted entirely. When he was at Harvard University, a dean rejected his request to have roommates because of how his disability might affect the others, he wrote in The Times. Even now, visitors sometimes talk to his aide as if Mr. Mattlin were not in the room.
As part of “a huge and often marginalized segment of the population,” he wants others to see beyond stereotypes. He doesn’t want them to see a wheelchair. He wants them to see a person.