Charmaine Carvalho

Lunar | Hair trigger: why Hong Kong schools are against schoolboys having long hair

Culture is not static. With this understanding, it’s clear how arguments by prison and education authorities that long hair is not masculine work as a form of social control

Reading Time:3 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Jet Li in a still from the 2002 movie Hero. Men wearing their hair long was the cultural norm in China for centuries. Photo: Handout

Charmaine Carvalho

Published: 2:45pm, 29 Jul 2022

Recently, a teenager in Hong Kong lodged a complaint with the city’s equality watchdog against a school policy prohibiting male students from having long hair. The student, surnamed Lam, said in an Instagram video that the policy was not only discriminatory but also overlooked gender dysphoria – a sense of unease experienced because of a mismatch between one’s biological sex and gender identity.

Lam, who used “she/her” in the Instagram post to indicate the pronouns preferred for use, was inspired by former lawmaker Leung Kwok-hung. Leung won a long legal battle challenging the Correctional Services Department policy that forced him to crop his shoulder-length locks when he served a prison sentence.

Then chief justice Geoffrey Ma Tao-li, who wrote the judgment, noted that the department had failed to explain the basis for its argument that it was only following a social norm. He also said that if the aim was to give less prominence to individuality, it was unclear why female prisoners were allowed this expression of individuality.

Secretary for Education Christine Choi Yuk-lin said last week that “relevant rules were established according to schools’ own culture and value for education”.

Culture is often invoked to short-circuit debate, but culture is not static. Roberto Ribeiro, a judge on the city’s top court, observed during the Leung case that, “In the days of the Beatles, people had longer hair … I find it very hard to see how you can have a standard that doesn’t change.”

A student has filed a complaint to Hong Kong’s equality watchdog over a school ban on male pupils wearing their hair long. Photo: Instagram

Philosopher Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble that gender or sex – she sees the two as indistinguishable – are not inherent qualities but constituted only through repeated performance. The insistence on short hair as a signifier of masculinity is an example of an arbitrary standard being applied to hold the two sexes apart, lest – heaven forbid – the two categories collapse.