Girls can have short hair too campaign

Fucking hell! How about a campaign to keep boys out of girls sport, so nobody needs to worry about that. Then girls (and boys!) can be left alone to choose whatever hair style they want.

I get an eyeroll from my friends when the subject of hair length in women's sports comes up, one of my hobby-horses!

I maintain that 'a personal preference for long hair' cannot explain why, out of two squads of players in women's football, not one single one has short hair.
I suspect there is some kind of influence - subtle, subconscious or explicit from sponsors, I don't know - for sportswomen to look 'feminine'.
Hence more ponytails at a women's football match than at a gymkhana...

Little boys and girls with short hair do tend to look pretty much the same in sports kits, and as PPs have said, this wouldn't be problematic if eligibility rules were 100% respected.

There's a post on another thread - a mother asking for recommendations for make-up lessons for her 15 year old daughter... I didn't respond because I couldn't trust myself not to lose it a bit, and I don't want to be rude or confrontative.

But it's 2025, and 15-year-old girls are being coached in how to look more conventionally 'feminine', and older than they are. By their mothers. And girls with short hair are assumed to be boys.😦

It's batshit.

School geography trip in 1967 (I think - I was 17 or so). About twenty of us plus 3 teachers (all female, I went to an all girls school - which I realise now was incredibly empowering, all my role models were women who had careers, many were not married, at least three were in Lesbian relationships inc. head and deputy - pupils were not privy to this btw but we worked it out!). All three field trip teachers have short hair - was the fashion - and I am among only a handful of the girls who had long hair. Most girls in the 50s and 60s had their hair bobbed and I knew only one woman who had long hair (she was Polish, though I am not sure that's relevant - both her DD also had long hair). In the 70s long hair became the fashion - partly hippy, party, I now think, because long hair became easier to care for with the advent of portable hair driers (it would take all evening for me to dry my hair in the 60s) and better hygeine so the possibility of head lice was lowered (not eliminated).
But it was a choice. I knew young women with short hair, too. 50/50 I think,now. It was as common for young men to have long hair - very long in some cases and my late DH maintained this till death - as young women, at least at university (possibly not so much in offices and shops where there were quite strict dress codes).
The problem is not how long anyone's hair is, but that boys and men are identifying as girls/women and muscling (literally in some cases) in on their sports etc. Get men out of women's sport and the problem goes away.

The 1920s

The 60s - Mary Quant, Twiggy. Although it wasn't so much that hair was short, as that it was straight and sleek, not permed and waved as in the previous decades.

Joanna Lumley as Purdey

The 80s, when we were back to perms - still mostly short, though. When we weren't wearing pixie cuts.

Utterly ridiculous that we are having to restate the absolute bloody obvious. As many pp have said, girls having short hair was normal for ages.

The "gender identify spectrum", Barbie-GI Joe scale chart produced by and pushed into schools by Mermaids, has caused an immense amount of damage. Short hair? You are a boy.

We need celebrities with short hair. Remember the Princess Diana haircut that so many copied? To overcome the ideology planted in children at school, short hair needs to be fashionable.

We all had short hair back in the day. Pudding basin cuts because it was easier to deal with nits and hair washing. I look back at family photos and laugh.

My God, we’re going backwards at an alarming rate.

I was looking at my secondary school photo the other day. 85% of the girls had short hair. wtf happened between then and now to make girls think short hair is only for boys.

My husband watches England women's matches and I've said to him that if I played football I'd have short hair. A swishing pony tail would drive me mad and those elaborate plaits, what a waste of time.

It's exhausting isn't it? When I was a teenager I almost, almost felt we had cracked this. Then from about 2002 onwards it's been a slow creep backwards again. It's so frustrating.

Also wouldn't have been needed before boys started identifying as girls and being allowed into girls spaces.

I think this is the problem really. Because previously it would've been obvious that it was a girl just with short hair seeing as it's a girls team. But now we have "I identify as a girl" it muddies the waters and you don't actually have a clue, are they a girl? Are they a boy who wants to be a girl? It's hard to know.

They make it sound like it's unreasonable to question whether the kid is a boy or not. They don't need to campaign about short hair, they need to stop boys playing in the girls teams.

I am so sick of having to re-fight battles my grandmother (and in some cases her grandmother) won.

<Sigh.>

Girls cutting their hair short was mildly radical 100 years ago. It was then completely normal for almost a century.

What next - a campaign for the acceptability of female trousers?