'You look like a girl'

Accusing a boy of being like a girl has been the go to misogynist insult for as long as I can remember.
Why is it socially acceptable to hate girls? That is what I would like explained.

Can’t be arsed to sew on one patch?!
Lucky you don’t have a girl guide or Boy Scout, you’d be well practiced in the art of sewing patches and then picking them off and rewsewing dozens in a single night when they go up a level!!

I managed to get year 1 DD into lace up brogues for wetter days. She's excited by them because the laces mean their "big girl shoes", I'm excited she won't have to get wet feet!

SheShriekedShrilly- same as my DD this year - she always had the patent Mary Jane type shoes, but this year so she could play football with the boys, she chose a different style. They are girls’ shoes, but a lace up style. Much more practical and in fact the older girls , year 5 and 6 , tend to wear more trainer type black shoes rather than the pretty ones the little infant girls all wear.

I had an interesting conversation with my dd about shoes. Which concluded that she knew they were just shoes which kept her feet dry and were good for football, but everyone at school would say they were boys shoes. And tease her accordingly. But that, on balance, she rather be teased for not having the right sort of shoes for a girl than have wet, cold feet. But she hadn’t felt that way in Y2, but as a mature Y4 ( ) she felt differently.

So I think this is about other kids imposing their stereotypes, not purely a ‘girly is bad’ thing.

He's growing it again at nearly 9 - he wants to look like Qui Gon Jin from Star Wars...

Awesome!

Up to about 10 or 11 years old boys and girls look very similar. I think this is partly why dress and hair conventions are used to make them easily distinguishable.

Once past puberty it is much more obvious which sex people are so it's easier to go against conventions whilst your sex is mostly clear.

Part of it is that at 7 a long haired boy actually does "look like a girl" as long hair is a cultural marker of sex, and in such young pre pubescent children culturally expected artificial markers are the only way to tell.

Putting things and people in categories is essential for not only functional communication with others, but to organise coherent thought. For this reason learning to categorise is a very important developmental phase. Children learn to apply very rigid categories with very superficial, obvious markers, before learning about exceptions and subtlety and the reasons not to categorise or stereotype so rigidly...

I think this one comes down to child development.

I had a long haired son who asked to cut his hair at 5 because adult's were insisting on refering to him as a girl even when corrected, which IMO is fairly unforgivable and totally different to children's reactions. Obviously I let him cut it - it's his hair not mine.

He's growing it again at nearly 9 - he wants to look like Qui Gon Jin from Star Wars...

This is from Etsy, would probably do the trick with the jeans at least.

I'd definitely get a patch for the jeans, something that's iron on would be easy enough.

I'd probably push the Thor angle re the hair. And Jason Momoa!

Keep talking to the school if the name calling in the playground comes back, it will be good for other kids to hear that long hair doesn't make a girl and short hair doesn't make a boy - it might help counteract any trans nonsense they're being fed in other areas too.

I think there's a subtle difference between the impact of "you look like a girl" and "you look like a boy". To me, a girl being told she looks like a boy is a way of saying "you're ugly", it's a failure to be pretty, to look like a boy. Whereas the reverse isn't true, a boy isn't being told he looks too pretty when he's told he looks like a girl. I'd say that was more of a "you look like something lesser" because all elements of being a girl are seen as a less appealing, shameful alternative to being a boy. It's a variant of "don't be such a girl" type phrases that mean don't be weak, don't be pathetic.

By the time he's in secondary lots more boys will have longer hair. Depending on where you live, short hair on boys can be seen as quite 'chavvy'. Long tousled mops are definitely a middle class marker in a lot of the schools I've taught in.

Men with long hair - Jason Mamoa - definitely not a girl !

It's a difficult one because I think it's good he wants to not conform and have his hair how he wishes. I think in my DD's class all boys have short hair, and all the girls have long hair. No one is outside of this norm at all. In the school there are a couple of boys with long hair and a few girls with bob haircuts but I can't think of one girl in the whole primary school with a short pixie style cut at all. Definitely don't make him wear the jeans though, with the heart. A plain patch is a good idea to cover the shadow.

I wouldn’t force him re the jeans.

Unless the shadow is unnoticeable to him then go for it.

There is something to be said for wearing clothes sometimes you don't like.

I was quite a tomboy and hated girly things, and mostly my mum indulged me, but one year she got me a very very pick snowsuit which I hated. But she was a single mum, money was tight, and it was half off and as warm as any other colour, so I wore it, and it didn't kill me or ruin my life or really have any effect.

It's not a bad lesson, about waste and thrift at the least, and maybe about how much weight to put on clothes and style. Something that some of these people who think what clothes you like indicate your inner essence need to realise.

I suspect there is something to the idea that markers for sex in terms of clothing etc have a function of sorts in a sexed species. I think there was some sort of study which said that cultures with little difference between the lives of men and women tend to have more of those kinds of cultural markers. Those kinds of studies need to be taken with a grain of salt but its interesting.

Long hair is fine on a boy. Just keep showing him pictures of long haired male celebrities and athletes.

Jeans with a pink heart? No way. I would not wear those when I was a girl. He should be allowed to choose his clothes just like his hair. If you must use the jeans, then let him select a cool embroidered patch and sew it on over the heart. One like this:

My son has long hair and gets told by children that only girls can have long hair, luckily it doesn’t bother him too much as he knows boys can have long hair as he is one.

He does however get annoyed about being called a girl, it happens a lot, but at his age (4), it is hard to tell if someone is a girl or boy it we just focus on looks.

Thats great for your DS challenging notions of 'boyishness', and without making any pretence of being a girl. We need zero tolerance to any kind of bullying and this is no different.

I suppose at some level there is a need for children to start to understand biology and how it affects them. Perhaps enforcing gender stereotypes is part of that exploration? From a child's perspective is "girls have long hair" much different from "boys have willies" ?

Read ‘Cinderella ate my daughter’. It’s about child development stages and how gender conformity is pushed.
They do grow out of it. Later on it’s cool to not conform, so all the boys grow their hair and the girls cut theirs short.
Gender stereotypes are the worst. I’d have them all abolished and let everyone do whatever they want. But sadly they are a thing, and at different stages most (but not all) kids are influenced into conforming to them or fighting against them (which in itself is also a form of conformity - hello swathes of goths/ trans boys/ punks)
My boy got told at the same age that he shouldn’t be in ballet class, because ballet was for girls.
Panopticon stuff. Behaviour control by KS1

My son has shoulder length hair & an elfin face - adults always include him in my count of “daughters” & occasionally direct him to the female toilets (he says no thanks I’m a boy)
He doesn’t get teased for having long hair but does get very annoyed at new kids asking him repeatedly if he is a girl

I do think girl is used as an insult because of sexism- tomboy is not an insult, throw like a girl is etc

get his hair cut

Deep powerful voice over: You will conform.

Get his hair cut. The trans lobby will be telling him he's a girl next and sowing confusion in him

This depresses me. My son is 20 and has had long hair since he was 8 or 9. If he was ever teased about it he never said (though he's so laid back I'm surprised he can stand up straight so it would likely have been water off a duck's back). He did get mistaken, genuinely, for a girl from time to time by adults prior to puberty but it was a mistake that was just shrugged off and everyone went about their day. There was never any mention of 'trans'. Not once. He left school all of three years ago, that's how fast this has changed.

I think this is a pretty normal scenario. Kids that age are still figuring out how flexible or inflexible social practices like hair cuts are, and a lot of times they can be very concrete about many things - applying rules in general.
They are also willing to use almost any unusual characteristic to make fun of someone, if they want to make fun of them.

I often think the hair example is funny since so many men have quite long hair, especially singers and historical figures. Maybe it's because young boys can have somewhat feminine faces, it doesn't have the same effect?

In any case, what I've told my kids in these instances is that the social convention is this, and whether it's one that is really a strong convention and people will really notice, or not. And then that they can decide to do what they like, but someone may say something, or if they really don't like that they can change it. It's not that I want them to change to suit others, more that I want them to think about what's important to them in a clear way. hairstyles aren't really very important, so it's ok to decide they'd rather blend in. It's not like making a decision about career or what's right or being a good friend, where social opinion should not matter much if at all.