from our inbox: Today I was sitting in the hairdresser, reading a Vogue magazine they had given me. I am a lesbian and while I look ‘straight’ with long hair my interest in fashion and make-up is very limited. I was mostly flicking through the pages checking out some of the girls, reading curiously at the tips such as ‘pleats in your hair have an expiry age of 50’ and very occasionally thinking ‘oh that’s a cool jumpsuit’. Anyway a boy around 14 came in with his mum, I noticed that they has the same kind of floppy fringe and it made me smile. He looked like he had a sense of style. A hairdresser asked him what he wanted and he said something like ‘just a trim’. She went on to inspect his hair and kept saying things like oh this bit looks far too girly we need to make it look more boyish. At this an old woman in the salon chirped up with ‘oh well it will need changed right away’ as if she expected the boy to be horrified at the thought of looking girly. The boy looked very uncomfortable. What exactly is ‘girly’ about a piece of hair is beyond me and if that is how he likes it I don’t see the problem. Anyway she went on to cut his hair to make him look more like a typical teenage boy and by the end he looked like he was about to cry. He did not want his hair like that at all. The mum seemed sweet but generally just said ‘yes okay’ to whatever the hairdresser said. My gaydar (which is not always accurate) told me that the boy was probably gay. When he left, the two hairdressers had a discussion in which they mentioned that they thought the boy ‘wanted to be a girl, he didn’t know what he was at the moment’ and that it was ‘a shame’. He didn’t necessarily seem trans* to me but whether he is trans*, gay, straight or whatever is up to him. It is not ‘a shame’ if he is boy who wants fabulous hair, what is a shame is the way he was treated. And I was especially horrified that the hairdresser had said all the ‘this is too girly we need to make it more boyish’ stuff, if she was conscious of the fact that he wanted it like that. It would have been bad to use those words even if he was an average, straight teenage boy wanting a masculine haircut but it could be really really damaging to talk like that to a kid who doesn’t fit with gender norms. As a professional dancer, sociology graduate and member of the LGBTQ+ community, I generally live in a world that accepts and celebrates diversity. I hope that the boy grows up into a similar scene and that this is a one off incident that will soon be forgotten about. I am hoping that you might post this on your wall and that I could show the comments to the hairdresser so that she might do better next time in a similar situation. I do not think that she was being ‘mean’ on purpose but I definitely think she could do with some education. Amy
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 17:50:22 +0000
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