Girls can have short hair too campaign

[TeenToTwenties]

Football club unites to support girls with short hair - BBC News

Wouldn't have been needed back in the day when loads of girls had short hair.

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

<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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

It's batshit.

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.😦

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.

Quite. Sometimes I think the best thing to do is carry on as normal and ignore the bollocks (so to speak). Because sometimes only by no reaction whatsoever, do things pipe down.

Of course this is the bbc, so, sadly, there is also a question about whether they are subscribing to the ‘some girls have a penis’ pov

I think the marketisation of 'pink' for girls really began in the 1980's......before that it really wasn't a big thing. Aligned to that was the marketisation of childhood itself, and just about everything else - after the liberalisation of 'the market' and 'the city' under Margaret Thatcher.

Britain really seemed to embrace American consumer culture then. The credit card became a thing......and success was seen as owning lots of consumer products, expensive watches, designer clothing, foreign holidays....even the 'plebs'.

I think that is when more rigid categorisation of girl toys/boy toys and the 'girly pink' thing took off too. I was born in the 60s and grew up in the 70's and this pink business just wasn't a thing, and I had short hair at different times during my childhood, and then again at 12 ( and still do now) when I got my ears pierced for my birthday. Having short hair felt liberating.

Disney became a huge marketing machine...pushing gender stereotypes and imagery and all of that princess guff. My grandmother called me her princess when I was a child, but she didn't mean in in that way......all fluffy and dressed up as Snow White. You can guarantee that whenever there is a World Book day at school now - half the girls will be dressed as Disney princesses.

Toy stores have boy and girl aisles - with certain toys designated for boys and others for girls.

Some female hair stylists simply no longer work with short hair; they don't know how to cut short hair on women. My daughter experienced this when taking her daughter ( my granddaughter) to get her hair cut short when she was 6 ( she'd asked for short hair). The allocated stylist freaked out.....and the owner of the salon had to do it.

i dont think this is necessarily entirely a trans in sport issue, even if this is what sparked this in particular, but the current trend for girls to look traditionally feminine.. aka, long hair.

my 16yo dd recently had her hair cut short.. its sort of a shortened wolf cut, not a pixie, but not a bob, and while some commented it looks nice, there was definitely an undercurrent of 'boy hair' from some of her male peers.

I have very short hair. ON THIS VERY SITE I've been told to grow my hair (it was in the context of the fact that I keep being mistaken for a man, despite having a 36-25-36 figure and not wearing make up).

My granddaughter is nine and girls in her class have "skin care regimes" with expensive products, and one even held a spa day gathering for the girls in the class on her birthday. The girls got facial treatments and their nails painted.

So infuriating. My DD (14) has had her hair short for the last few years. She's quite petite and doesn't have much of a bust yet and prefers comfortable clothes like tracksuit bottoms and hoodies. She is very much the opposite to her female peers at school and has been mistaken for a boy on many occasions (doesn't bother her) I'm so proud that she doesn't feel the need to conform to stereotypes and is happy to just be herself. I just hope that societal pressure doesn't start to take it's toll on her and make her feel less. Everyone working with young people should be charged with building their confidence and learning to love the skin they're in, rather than enforcing outdated and damaging stereotypes.

my 16yo dd recently had her hair cut short.. its sort of a shortened wolf cut, not a pixie, but not a bob, and while some commented it looks nice, there was definitely an undercurrent of 'boy hair' from some of her male peers.

That's sad. Lots of my school friends had short hair in the 80s and 90s and no one thought anything of it, it was fashionable.