The struggles of getting a haircut as a non-binary person

[Awning10]

twitter.com/i/status/1224664146257620994

But now I think, if you keep meeting people who are trans or whose gender is not immediately obvious, if that becomes normal, then that's a good challenge to the gender binary. Like, an actual challenge, rather than just words.

Why challenge the gender binary?
Surely it is vastly more important to challenge toxic masculinity, to allow men who don’t fit the gender stereotype of big tough men to be happy and confident in their masculinity. And to challenge the stereotype of femininity we are being presented with via instagram etc.

To say to a man ‘you aren’t big and butch and don’t like football therefore you aren’t a man’ and to say to a woman ‘you don’t want to remove all your body hair and cover yourself in inches of make up therefore you aren’t a woman’ is what needs challenging. Not being non binary which is the opposite.

Eh? My hairdressers cuts men and women and has done my hair long (well chin length) and short. (as in near pixie) over the years. Why does there have to be a question about it, just shop around until you find the right one that fits you as we all did

My mum simply has her head shaved too on grade 3 (mid 60s) and it costs £15 for the two of us or a tenner just for me if I've done her hair at home with the clippers. Bargain

that's a good challenge to the gender binary

I think that it is far more important to challenge sex stereotypes so that people feel that they don’t have to conform to any ‘gender’ as a binary concept or not. If so many people have gender disphoria issues, it is a sign that society does need to change. However, shouldn’t it be making people of all types comfortable to be who they are rather than making so many uncomfortable that they need to take up labels like non-binary in the first place. Maybe look at the hyper-sexualised content that surrounds us first. Most of it feels like ‘woman’ has been reduced to a very narrow sexualised band. My own teen feels she is non-conforming because she likes the Avengers and Star Wars rather than Riverdale. The girls at school have told her for years she must be a boy because Star Wars is for boys!!! Yes, there are others like her, but they all seem to taken the ‘non-conforming’ pathway. Yet, most of my friends female and male all love Star Wars and Avengers and non of us feel we are less a female because of it. (Can’t get her to live Star Trek yet though!)

This is just one very small sample of the pressures being faced by young people today. It feels like the teenagers who dyed their hair green or blue when I was in my twenties. They did it to be ‘non-confirming’ and it just felt they were conforming to what society felt was non-conforming for that time. And that they missed the whole point...

It's okay. I dont actually mind having feelings and expressing them

Likewise. And I will continue to do so.

Where is this person going to get their hair cut FGS?

Pauline at Cuts 'n' Curls might struggle to deviate from a nice bouncy blow wave but there are literally thousands of trendy salons around. They'll do whatever you ask for!

Sounds like twittermoaner needs to broaden their horizons and have a look around.

How did we cope in the '80s/'90s ?!!

the gender binary does dominate everyday life

Yes it infiltrates everyday life and makes life hard for women and also many men, in various ways. It is shit. It's something we should fight against. And importantly, it's something people have been fighting against, resisting, challenging and subverting, for centuries.

If you want to do that, you can be a plain old woman or man who says no, I don't have to be restricted by gender expectations, and as a woman or man I will do/wear/be what I like. Like MILLIONS of people do, including me. In fact probably only a small minority of people adhere 100% to narrow gender norms (and most of them are trans people trying to "live as" the opposite sex).

If you say "I want to resist gender norms, and being a woman obviously means I have to adopt the pink frilly perfumed norms, and being a man means the opposite, so I must be neither a woman or a man" that's not challenging gender binary at all - it's saying "the gender binary is so true and inherent that the only way to resist it is not to be the sex I am". It's astonishing that a generation is capable of such illogical thinking in the face of all the gender non-conforming that has gone before.

While gender norms still exist, it is not as simple as everyone except Gray Crosbie (and others who declare themselves NB) loves pink or blue, only goes to their "own gender" hairdresser out of 2 strictly defined and separated types of hairdresser, and can't fathom deviating from those norms. It is actually really bloody rude and patronising to suggest that. For example I have been to many hairdressers and I've never even seen one that's all pink and perfumed. The default decor for a hairdresser's is black or white. However, gender expectations do persist in a million more subtle and important ways that have flown right over this person's head - like making women feel so shit about their bodies and roles that they feel the need to opt out of womanhood.

When you encounter an individual who thinks this way, and thinks they're important and special for basically holding up stereotyped gender norms as inevitable and cast in stone, you have to consider they think that because they've been encouraged to and pandered to including by the various authorities and platforms who take this stuff seriously. And because no one has ever helped them think through the reality of gender and sex, how they relate and how they work - and it's mad that this isn't basic education for everyone.

Gray comes across as a woman to me, but I agree the deeper voice gives a more male impression which might suggest some medication. There are various videos and blogs from detransitioners who massively regret what that kind of thing has done to them. Many of them say if they'd understood feminism and that you can be GNC and a woman, they wouldn't have gone there.

Ironically people like this are massive victims of gender expectations while thinking they're brilliantly beyond them.

Winesalot
It feels like the teenagers who dyed their hair green or blue when I was in my twenties.

That reminds me so much of someone adult commenting of teenagers in the mid-sixties, "They all wear the same sort of jeans to show they are different."

Yes, back then jeans were only just starting to be worn by both sexes in this country; and if you were female and wearing jeans quite a lot of shops and caffs wouldn't let you in, any more than they would let in a male with hair which was over his collar. (In 1968 a judge refused to hear a petition for divorce because the woman asking for the divorce came to the court wearing a trouser suit.)

I thought by the seventies that we were growing out of that idiocy, but the masters (and it always is masters) of the fashion business have pushed us right back down there again.

What I meant was that the teens dyed their hair to celebrate being individual (as was told to me by several of my acquaintance) not to be part of a movement to be different from their parents by following a trend. I did put it clumsily though. I will admit.

Oh, we wore our jeans to be Individuals! We did all sorts of things to make them Individual, like fraying round the bottoms of the legs or putting patches where there were no holes or embroidering things onto them (usually flowers or curlicues) or letting triangles of patterned cloth into the seams below the legs -- but the effect was as uniform as all the Individual hair was later. (Blue was difficult and more unusual, wasn't it? I seem to remember people having trouble finding a blue hair-dye that was fast.)

I understand from some on Twitter that this is a poem and should be judged as such, rather than a simple complaint against today's unfriendly society. Today's "I wandered lonely as a cloud etc...."

I understand from some on Twitter that this is a poem and should be judged as such, rather than a simple complaint against today's unfriendly society. Today's "I wandered lonely as a cloud etc

With respect to the wisdom of Twitter, if this was just the BBC posting a spoken word poem, then they should be delighted that it has engendered such a thorough examination of the worldview, assumptions, stereotypes, prejudices baked into what the poet gave us, and the language used.

It's really not a terribly good poem....

If that was intended to be a poem then the poet's writing and performance skills need a lot of work.

Political polemic pondering is the new poetry.

Thank you FloralBunting

Political polemic pondering is the new poetry

sums it up beautifully, as well as being such precise and perfectly put alliteration.

IME it's typical of a lot of less professional "spoken word" and slam poetry - basically just slightly stylised oversimplified political complaining, delivered in a smug or shouty way. In fact it's better than a lot of it. Not that that makes it poetry in my book but in those circles it would be considered brilliant.

In my considered opinion, the video and contents thereof are a pile of wank. Just get your fucking haircut, love.

Granted that part of what's going on there is the self absorption of youth, but I feel like there's a certain level of, well, robustness that we should be encouraging young people to develop and that that's not currently happening, which is having all sort of knock on effects.

I was told that this "young person" is actually in her late 20s and having watched it again with the sound off I'd concur. Really think someone of this age should have worked out how to get the haircut she wants by now.

I feel like there's a certain level of, well, robustness that we should be encouraging young people to develop

I was in a yellow wood this morning, and where the path diverged, there was a young man just standing there, dithering. He was wailing because he wanted to take BOTH paths and so he couldn't make up his mind! I couldn't believe it, a fully grown man this was. In my day, we just took a path, even an overgrown one or with broken glass and didn't make a fuss. I feel really sorry for today's youth, even simple decision making seems to be beyond them.

I feel really sorry for today's youth, even simple decision making seems to be beyond them.

But apparently this woman is 28? I'm only 4 years older than she is. That's weird.

It's interesting about the decision-making. I've always known people like this, who couldn't bear to make a decision because of the losing out on one option, but I think there were fewer of them.

About the robustness - yes, it's a weird thing. My DC school have a big thing about "resilience" and have assemblies telling them all to be resilient, but it isn't going to work if you are generally brought up to believe it's a disaster if you ever experience a negative feeling.

I'd almost call it stoicism except that makes me sound about 250 years old. It's subtle, because stiff upper lip and repressing/bottling up emotions is NOT good for us and it is good that people are better at talking about feelings, etc.

It's more that they often don't have the ability to see that finding something difficult, being upset or having a shit day is part of life. You shouldn't pretend everything's fine and bottle it up, but you could just realise that something like feeling awkward in the hairdressers, or someone offending you by having a different opinion, is not a big deal in the scheme of things. You could even laugh it off.

Pauline at Cuts 'n' Curls might struggle to deviate from a nice bouncy blow wave but there are literally thousands of trendy salons around. They'll do whatever you ask for!

I really hate the trope of using a specific name to identify a group of people who aren't knowledgeable enough or cool enough or clever enough to understand something.

Grace Dent (a woman whose success truly mystifies me) does this. Her restaurant review in yesterday's Guardian features "your Aunt Brenda" who isn't cool enough (unlike Grace) to appreciate a pretentious dish made of offal.

stiff upper lip and repressing/bottling up emotions is NOT good for us and it is good that people are better at talking about feelings, etc.

I'm not too sure about this. From the brief discussions we had, my parents had some horrendous experiences during the war eg my father dug young children out from a local school who had died from blast damage. Perfect in every way except dead.

Their generation seemed to take the view "least said, soonest mended". They compartmentalised grief and bad memories and shut the proverbial door on them. However, they both were well adjusted and lived life to the full, without worrying about hairdressers. They cut their own hair!