I started shaving my pubic hair before I knew what it was. While the immediacy with which I took a razor to my nascent pubes probably suggests I had already managed to internalize a slew of gendered beauty standards before even reaching adolescence, the pursuit of hairlessness felt instinctive to me. A Cosmopolitan survey found that 57 percent of women between 18 and 35 go completely bare, and 46 percent of men prefer it that way. Just six percent of women said they keep things all natural, and the same meager percentage of men voiced a preference for a bush-sporting partner. According to some of them, that day may finally be on the horizon.

Alok Vaid-Menon is a poet and performance artist who campaigns on trans visibility with bold, colourful portraits on social media. But they are often trolled for the way they look. When I told my family I was trans, one of their initial reactions was, "But you're so hairy! It's going to be so difficult to remove all your hair to be a woman, so you should just give up. People still have a limited understanding of gender as binary.

The other day a curious question was presented to me: Many women shave their vaginas, so should their hairy-balled boyfriends shave their junk in solidarity? Does shaving your balls make you a better feminist? It was a delightful question. Then I remembered that I had laser hair removal done.