I had a friend in junior high whose father and uncle decided they’d had enough of his long hair (beautiful, silken, golden wheat-colored, cascading well below his shoulders). They trapped him in the bathroom one Sunday night, held him against a wall, and shaved his head down to the skull. He showed up on our school bus the next morning ashen-faced and despondent — altered from an astoundingly beautiful young prince of the world into someone who looked and probably felt like an escaped convict.

This was in 1972. I grew up in the Midwest, where it was common for strangers to menacingly say: “Boy, you better cut your hair. You look like a girl.”

We talk a great deal about America as an experiment in democracy. An equally important metaphor about this “land of the free”is our nonstop, somewhat confused conversation about identity, especially with teenagers. No matter what adults believe, the major lesson virtually all young people come to terms with eventually is that there is no such thing as one answer to questions about who they are.