Girl Got A New Haircut. Father Shocked By The Things Strangers Now Say To Her.

It’s not TRAs challenging a possible transgirl in the womens toilets or whinging about a seeming transgirl playing on a girls football team and calling her “he” and “him.” It’s GC activists. You know it, I know it. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

You and I know nothing of the sort. I don't know any women who shout at children in toilets.

Incidentally are you an old poster with a name change? You seem awfully familiar

No it isn't. You just made that up.
Traditionalists and the religion of gender identity béliève in this stereotypic shit, not those who are gender critical (the clue is in the name).
You don't appear to know what being gender critical means.
I also note your repetitive use of the term 'GC's', which is dehumanising.

Honestly. It's transactivists who say that a woman can live as a man just by cutting her hair. Gender critical women say the opposite. That hair length is zero indication of sex.

It's gender ideology that claims superficial stereotypes suggest if you are male or female.

Stop blaming GC women for trans ideology nonsense.

And if you think it's only gender critical women who don't want males playing on female sports teams, you're very much mistaken. It's practically everyone.

No matter the twisted motivation or misdirected agenda, there is a power imbalance when an adult confronts a child about their looks, style, clothes, gender or gender identity…”

Well yes, of course. Those adults were way out of line. Obviously.

But back up a step, no sensible adult should find a child's haircut 'confusing' in the first place. Hair is hair (just like toys are toys, clothes are clothes).

Seriously stop with these ploppy gotcha articles, and start applying some critical thinking.

It is an appalling article, that focuses on gender identity, and completely fails to address the real issue, that being society is pigeon holing everyone and someone mistaking an other's gender is not a great act of violence.

It could easily have been written with a totally different slant on it, the author chose this one and it is a poorer article for it.

they’re not challenging a trans girl.

they are challenging what they think is a boy. Or a transboy, in the case of the football. The judgement is short hair= male, and the assumption is there’s a boy playing on the girls team, or a boy in the women’s toilets.

if it were a trans girl she’s have long hair.

a child with long hair on the football team or in the female toilets would probably not pass comment.

Agree OP - I've always believed children should be well out of this.

No trans lobby groups / individuals "training" children in schools.
No lobby groups "educating" children in care of the state about trans ideology
No drag queens performing for children.
No adult born males changing and showering alongside girls
No adult trans groups influencing the health care of vulnerable children in GIDs or the NHS
No charities giving children body harming binders or "helping them"to access drugs from dodgy struck off doctors online

Nobody should be using children as a front for their campaigning - queer theory politics doesn't get a pass.

The actual harm being done to so many children by these adults is off the scale so well done for realising that children should be kept well away from this issue.

There is no mention of the adults in the article being gender critical, in fact they seem to be the opposite: people who believe in gender and it's artificial, cultural rules about things like hair length. I'm not sure the OP understands that gender critical people want to abolish gender and that many of us can see that the promotion of gender over sex is making society more sexist and homophobic. Sex = girls are human female children. Gender = girls are human children with long hair. The latter is regressive and cultural.

I do get cross at this assumption that GC feminists are somehow invested in gender stereotyping. That's the TRAs toots. Without the stereotypes, how can trans males 'live as a woman'? What does that actually mean beyond 'adopt a set of gender codes that most people will read as woman.'

We. Hate. That. Shit.

Gender critical people don't judge children's 'gender' by their haircut.

You really don't understand what the term means.

That man wasn't a transactivist or gender critical. He was someone who idiotically assumed short hair = boy.

You must be reading a different article to me - there is no confirmation that the adults challenging Jenny are gender critical. There's a massive assumption made, but no evidence is put forward.

This has always happened, it happened to me back in the 80s and it happened to DS back in the naughties. The only thing that has changed is the volume of girls with short hair - practically negligible now, it wasn't that uncommon when I was a lass.

I'm not giving HuffPost clicks. They are very firmly of a position.

I wish Kate Middleton would chop her hair off. I didn't particularly like Lady Di but her short hair made the 80s much better for those of us with short hair. I still got told to leave the Ladies numerous times, in many ways from polite to not-so-polite. As a child. And a clearly female one in every way but hair.

I think your point seems to be that ravening hordes of GC adults are rampaging around toilets waiting to pounce on unsuspecting children with their vile GC ways. I mean I do understand that you want to paint the Toilet Wars as balanced. They aren't really. The whole issue would be solved by everyone accepting that single sex spaces are exactly that.

In the article it’s a GC man and a GC woman mistaking sex and harassing the authors daughter.

I can't see anything in the article which suggests those adults were gender critical. I'm not sure you correctly understand what it means if that's what you inferred.

I had short hair throughout my childhood - 70's and 80's and so did lots of my classmates. It was pretty normal.
My mum has always had short hair even when young ( calls it her Judy dench hairstyle now).

I occasionally got called laddie but quite rare and usually by very old men. Never remember being mistaken by somebody my own age.

So regressive that short hair is now considered the preserve of men. Society has got very weird.

Tempted to cut it short again just to make a point but not sure I have the face for a pixie cut now.

Any adult shouldn't be bullying kids full stop.
But why on earth are you assuming it would be GC adults assuming 'gender' in a (slightly) gender nonconforming child?

I had really short hair throughout my teens and twenties. I was never called out for being a boy.

And I think it's vanishingly unlikely that this man's daughter is.

But if she is, so what? What does that prove other than that our gender rigidity has become so tightly enforced that it's really hard for anyone to step outside it's rigid confines?

I've never really understood why TRAs consider this some kind of gotcha. Gender critical people don't want to enforce gender, we want to smash it down.

I want girls to have long hair, short hair and everything in between. I want boys to do the same. I want all children to play with whatever toys they want and pursue whichever career path makes them happy.

The people who are rigidly enforcing gender are the one who think if a boy prefers playing with Barbie rather than Ken, we need to cut off his penis.

Dd always found it odd that her classmates would insist the girl with short hair must be a boy, “because only boys have short hair”.

yet absolutely none ever called their teacher sir, or told her she was a man, even though she had short hair.

My DD got the same when she cut her hair off into a pixie at secondary. Ooohhh, are you gay, trans, bi. You must be. You definitely are. She almost believed she was because of the group think, and bullying, and the fact that she hung out with other non conforming kids, because they were the only ones who accepted her for who she was. She was also voted most unlikely to get a boyfriend in the Year book. She is a strongly feminist Cis (sorry but you have to state that as well these days) young woman who has now grown her hair because she got so tired of it all.

I dont think that's a fair assessment. There are two separate issues which ate being blurred.

The first issue, which the writer is complaining about, is people assuming his daughter is a boy based on her fashion choices.

The second issue, which apoears to be the concern of the people challenging the daughter in the article, is the issue of males of any age identifying as women and invading women's spaces and sports.

Because males are invading female spaces, women (or in the case of the article, the father of another girl) are exercising their right to challenge people they might suspect of wrongly occupying female spaces.

With adults, it's almost always possible to identify someone's sex, regardless of hair or dress. Only very occasionally do people get this wrong, and in those cases it's almost always mistaking a woman for a small man; very rarely do people mistake a man for a woman.

The problem is that in pre-teen children the secondary sex characteristics have not developed yet, so the only way to guess the sex of a child is by their hair and clothing.

For this reason, if I dress my 2 year old boy in a pink flowery top and put a bow in his hair, I can reasonably expect that strangers will assume he's a girl, and it would be downright stupid of me to get annoyed by this . If the same boy wears a skirt and crop top when he's 15, no one will assume he's a girl. The writer's 12 year old child is in between these two extremes, but is still pre-pubescent, therefore hair and clothing are the primary indicators of sex.

The writer of the article seems to misunderstand the position of those who are challenging his daughter. Her challengers are not saying "I don't think girls should be allowed to have short hair". They are saying "I don't think boys should be allowed in girls toilets"(correct) and "I think this child is a boy, based on the evidence available to me"(incorrect).

Perhaps if there weren't so many males trying to sneak into female spaces, then other parents wouldn't feel the need to be so vigilant, and would assume the short-haired child in the girls toilet was a girl, like they used to in the good old days.

Me too. Short hair was all the rage all through the 80s when I was at secondary school. It was a tiny minority of girls who had a style longer than collar length. How has it come to pass that 30 years on things have regressed so much that if a girl wears short hair they are presumed to be a boy.