“A Place to Just Be”: Inside The Barb Shop’s Gender-Affirming Vision

Walk into The Barb Shop on a weekday afternoon, and you might find Ro mid-consultation, talking a client through not just the cut they want but the person they want to see when they look in the mirror. It’s a distinction that matters here. Ro, who uses they/them pronouns and goes by a single name, is a non-binary hair stylist who has made affirming that distinction the center of their practice.

The path from Portland to San Francisco was not entirely planned. About a year ago, Ro was performing transformational haircuts as part of a comedy show in Oregon when they caught the attention of the team behind The Barb Shop. “I was sponsored to come do a haircut on stage,” Ro explains, “and that led to being offered a spot at the flagship location here.” The move made a kind of intuitive sense. Ro grew up in South Lake Tahoe and had spent childhood weekends visiting the Bay Area. Coming back felt, if not exactly like coming home, then like arriving somewhere that fit.

Celebrating the Radical Queer Voices of Bernal Heights

Filling a Gap Nobody Was Talking About

Before The Barb Shop, Ro worked at the Chameleon Salon in Portland, specializing in gender-affirming services. The gap they were trying to fill was not subtle. “Traditional salons and barbershops were not meeting the needs of queer and trans clients,” Ro says plainly. “There was this whole space in between that nobody was serving well.”

The problem isn’t just technical skill, though understanding how to work with a wide range of bodies, presentations, and transition stages certainly matters. It’s also about the consultation itself. Ro describes approaching every appointment with a careful, unhurried conversation about what a client actually wants their appearance to communicate. That thoughtfulness, it turns out, resonates well beyond the queer community. Many of their current clients are straight and cisgender. “They just appreciate being asked the right questions,” Ro says, “instead of someone assuming they already know what you need.”

Still, queer clients are the heart of the practice. The Barb Shop has become something of a self-selecting community, clients who want to be in a space where queerness is unremarkable, where a stylist’s pronouns are on the intake form, where nobody has to explain themselves from scratch.

Ro of The Barb Shop, Gender Affirming Hair in Bernal Heights

Coming Out, Twice

Ro came out as a lesbian in high school. That was one chapter. The next came in 2020, when they came out as non-binary.

“2020 was a big year for a lot of people doing interior work,” they say with a dry laugh. The non-binary identity brought its own complications, particularly in conversations with older lesbians, women who had spent their formative years with very limited options for gender expression, who had fought hard for the identities they claimed, and who sometimes struggled to understand the terrain that younger generations were mapping.

“There’s a generational thing,” Ro says, not critically, more observationally. “People who came up in a different era didn’t have the same language or the same options. So sometimes those conversations require some patience on both sides.”

Ro finds that genuine curiosity, even when it comes bundled with confusion, makes educational conversations worthwhile. “If someone actually wants to understand, that’s a completely different interaction than someone who just wants to push back.”

The Space Itself as Activism

Running a queer-affirming barbershop in the current climate is not a neutral act. Ro is clear-eyed about that. “It’s harder right now for the community,” they acknowledge. “The broader social environment is not easy.”

But Ro sees the shop itself as a form of resistance, or at least, refuge. When the space is explicitly designed to be safe, employees and clients self-select accordingly. “You end up with this ecosystem,” Ro says, “where queer and ally people all choose to be here, and that shapes everything about what the room feels like.”

There’s also the matter of what a haircut can mean when someone has been waiting a long time to look like themselves. Ro talks about clients for whom a gender-affirming cut was not just a style choice but a milestone, a before-and-after moment in a much longer process. “Hair is one of the most visible things about how you present to the world. It matters.”

The Barb Shop: Building Community Through Cuts and Soft Serve

What’s Coming This Summer

June brings Pride, and The Barb Shop has a full calendar. Ro is organizing a photography night featuring the work of queer photographer Kirby Stenger, which may also include a community Polaroid component, an idea that fits the shop’s emphasis on documentation and visibility.

Then in July, Ro is hosting another queer speed dating event with a specific focus that reflects a gap they’ve noticed in community programming: the 45-to-65 age range, with an emphasis on sapphic, lesbian participants. “There are so many events for younger queer people,” Ro explains. “But older LGBTQ+ folks, especially lesbians in that age bracket, don’t always have spaces designed for them. That feels worth fixing.”

It’s a thread that runs through everything Ro does, noticing who isn’t being served, and building something to serve them.

Here are just a few of our queer friends on the hill

Bernal Connect

Mike Doherty serves as Chief Experience Officer at Greening Projects, a nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming underutilized urban spaces into vibrant green areas

“A Place to Just Be”: Inside The Barb Shop’s Gender-Affirming Vision