Students Sue Texas School District For Banning Boys From Having Long Hair

A group of boys in Texas are suing the district over its bizarre and sexist hair-length policy

With all due respect? What is wrong with Texas? In a matter of months that state has rolled out Handmaid’s Tale-inspired abortion bans, obsessive laws about NOT wearing masks in classrooms, and now boys can’t have long hair? One school district’s bizarre mandate over hair length has a group of boys fighting back.

Seven students (all male) are suing a Texas school district, with the help of the ACLU, over a district policy that requires boys — but not girls — to wear short hair. In the state that is fighting tooth and nail to make sure schools can’t require masks in classrooms, one district has a requirement on hair length? Make it make sense.

The students that are suing the Magnolia Independent School District all range in age from 7 to 17, and claim that the district’s policy is based on gender stereotypes.

“We have warned the district repeatedly that its gender-based hair policy violates the Constitution, but the district continues to derail students’ lives and deny their right to a public education free from discrimination,” Brian Klosterboer, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement provided to The Washington Post.

The rule requires that male students’ hair must be “no longer than the bottom of a dress shirt collar, bottom of the ear, and out of the eyes,” the district’s handbook states.

Sounds like a whole lotta pearl-clutching that boys might want to **gasp** grow out their hair. Also, the transphobia inherent in the guidelines is pretty transparent. As the ACLU points out, the hair rules also hurt trans and nonbinary students who don’t identify as male, even if that’s what it says on their birth certificate.

Also, the punishment for having long hair is severe.

Per The Washington Post, the suspensions have lasted days or even weeks. Also, some of the students were even sent to alternative schools “typically reserved for students who have violated state or federal law or committed serious violations of school policies.” All because they won’t get a haircut.

Worse still, the testimonies of the boys in the lawsuit are heartbreaking.

One 15-year-old high school student, who lost both his mother and his grandmother to COVID-19 said his hair is “one of the only aspects of his life that he has full control over.”

I think Texas should reverse their draconian abortion ban and get their damn vaccination rates up before they worry about whether or not some teenage boys have shoulder-length hair.