I was tearful at having to wear shorts to school ...let alone a skirt

ON a particular Monday morning each spring during my primary school years my whole world fell apart.

I would awake to find my mother had laid out my little grey uniform as usual: blazer, shirt, tie, black shoes, socks... but what’s this? Oh, God, no! How can she do this to me? I’ll be the laughing stock of Mile End Primary!

The regulation long trousers which made me feel confident and cool had been replaced with short ones which rendered me vulnerable and foolish – a mummy’s boy, a joke.

‘Nonsense’, Mum would say to the infant in tearful meltdown before her. ‘It’s nearly summer. All your little friends will be in shorts today.’ ‘They won’t! None of them will be!’ In fairness to her, a few of them usually were.

I recall this harrowing tale from the 1970s today because, yesterday in Edinburgh, some little boys were waking up to find mummy had laid out a skirt for them for school.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she would have chided. ‘Everyone is wearing them today.’ That, certainly, was the plan for the school day at Castleview Primary whose teachers emailed all parents encouraging them to send their children to school in attire which would have left young boys of my generation utterly destroyed.

It is all part of a campaign to establish in infants’ minds that there is no such thing as girls’ clothes or boys’ clothes – that ‘Clothing Has No Gender’, as the Twitter hashtag driving the whole regrettable endeavour has it.

It is, to be sure, an interesting discussion point, but haven’t we been here before? This may come as a shock to new arrivals from Planet Woke but, in 1969, Mick Jagger appeared at a Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park wearing a skirt. Said stage costume now qualifies as an antique.

Not long after that David Bowie posed for an album cover in a dress. No one cared. Frank Zappa had been at it for years.

The whole ethos of the glam rock era, which coincided with my earliest primary school days, was red-blooded males raiding their girlfriends’ wardrobes and make-up boxes.

Plastered

It’s all here in the popular culture annals. Men wore ‘women’s’ clothes in the 1970s if they wanted to. The examples were legion, plastered all over teenage bedroom walls, in fact. The world kept turning.

I couldn’t help noticing, though, that skirts, dresses and frilly blouses for men never had quite the enduring mass market appeal of trousers, jackets and shirts.

It was almost as if men expressed a conscious preference for a certain mode of attire and stuck with it through the decades notwithstanding the other modes available.

Personally, I seemed to grasp at a gut level that my hairy calves sticking out below a knee-length skirt was not the look I was after. I didn’t give it much more thought.

But it came down to something I was too consumed with panic to fully communicate to my mother all those years ago on Short Trouser Monday. I wanted to feel comfortable in what I was wearing. It didn’t seem too much to ask.

Consider what a school is asking children as young as three today. Wear a skirt and make a point which has been made repeatedly for decades without gaining quite the traction we would prefer.

Do it to make the world a better place. Do it because we are telling you – and you are too young to argue – that clothing has no gender.

It should be said, of course, that Castleview Primary’s skirt-wearing day was optional. Only pupils who were ‘comfortable’ putting one on should do so.

But isn’t the entire concept deeply uncomfortable? Why are children too young to know their times tables being dragged into this complex debate at all? When did it become all right to weaponise them in society-wide battles on which, in good time, they will form their own opinions? The slogan for the day may have been Clothing Has No Gender but I have to say the tweet of one bemused parent, Megan, sounded far more appropriate. ‘Let kids be kids,’ she said. It seems to me this idea fills increasing numbers of educationalists with horror. ‘What? Let them be kids and run the risk of their gravitating naturally towards stereotypical male and female pursuits and dress codes?

Wiring

‘Let them find their own way rather than configuring their wee brains with gender neutral wiring as soon as we get our hands on them?’

Well, if it matters, it’s certainly the approach many parents would prefer.

After all, the World of Woke is a confusing place even for grown-ups. I’m in my 50s and still don’t understand it.

In recent years, for example, I’ve been educated on the offence inherent in cultural appropriation – defined as the impudent adoption of the customs, practices or ideas of a societal group by another, typically more dominant, one.

White people blacking up is beyond the pale. Wearing your hair in corn rows is a style crime against an ethnicity unless you happen to be of that ethnicity.

Now the appropriation of the skirt by all young boys – in support of the minority of boys who actually want to wear them – is positively encouraged. How does that work, Miss? Please explain.

How about we really do let kids get on with being kids?