what the fuck
i’m just gonna take this post for a moment so i can rant but like
i Hate how entitled adults can feel over a child’s hair!
it started when i was young myself, i wanted a mohawk, but my dad didn’t approve of that look on a “girl”, and insisted i’d regret such a bold cut. at 16 i was finally given full autonomy over my own head.
but then i have a son and everyone around us is trying to keep his hair short. when we finally moved out just me my partner and him, i told him he doesn’t need to get any haircuts he doesn’t want.
so he starts growing it out, it’s still short but coming on mid-length. his teacher makes a point to tell me it’s getting long as if i don’t have eyes. i hear her walking out with him one day talking to him about haircuts, as if to coax him into one. eventually i get child services called on me for ‘forcing a transgender lifestyle’ over what i can only assume is from a combination of me drawing cute ponies on his valentine box and letting him go to school in a ponytail.
he kept it short for awhile after but told me he wanted to grow it out again, so i let him of course. he comes home one day after getting a haircut at his grandpa’s and tells me he didn’t Want the haircut.
i ask why he got it then and learned he was bribed with a promise of a surprise IF he cut his hair.
tl;dr people need to back the hell up off of children and let them have owership of what’s on THEIR body! /rant
Same thing about getting a child to curl or straighten their hair. Or do anything with it. Just let kids have control over their bodies.
This happened to me when I was little too!! Growing up I had naturally tight Shirley Temple curls. The only problem was that you can’t get a hair brush through it if your life depended on it until it grew out over a few years.
but This One Lady from church decided that leaving my hair messy and curly was child abuse and threatened to call social services on my family every damn time she saw me until one day she was the designated kid watcher and ho boy my momma tells me i came out with tears in my eyes and greasy slicked down hair and that’s where she ends the story because i think my mother beat her ass but yeah.
Leave kids hair alone.
I’m going to be honest, parents who are super-controlling of their children’s hair creep me the fuck out and I’m not entirely certain why except that I get a vague feeling they kind of relegate them to, “annoying talking doll” status.
I loved my daughter’s long blond hair. It was thick and wavy and beautiful but when she told me she wanted it cut short ‘like a boy’(she was four) I took her to the salon and let her whack it off.
The stylist was skeptical, ‘are you sure?” and the thing is, she said this to me, not my daughter. So I asked my girl ‘are you sure you want it cut short?’ She was. The hair went. The stylist acted nervous most of the way through like she was waiting for one of us to burst into tears, but it looked cute! And my daughter loved it! (And it’s been short ever since.)
Autonomy over your hair is bodily autonomy and we as a culture need to start holding bodily autonomy as sacred
there is a reason that so many of us who’ve experienced trauma will reclaim control over our bodies and our selves by cutting and dying our hair. it’s part of us. it’s part of our expression. that’s vitally important to people, especially kids, who are still early in the process of learning how they fit into the world around them.
For some reason, “stop enforcing your gender identity and sexual orientation on children” never applies to cis-het people who are the only ones actually enforcing it.
