Oops I did it again! Yet again I posed a question about women’s attire and created another (although smaller) conversation about what women must and mustn’t wear in court. Last time it was tights… this time it was hair.

It’s not the first time I have asked questions about hair. During my first six my supervisor was a reviewing lawyer; I therefore went where her cases went. Mere weeks into pupillage I was asked to robe up by instructed counsel and suddenly I was in a pickle! With no supervisor there to assist me, how would I manoeuvre the unspoken rules of barrister etiquette and attire?

I did what any respectable millennial would do. I took to Twitter! Bar one barrister, every one told me to tie my hair up. Satellite conversations noted senior counsel’s fury at young female barristers daring to walk around with their hair down. I wasn’t comfortable with this level of Nimbyism but I was only a few weeks in. Better to shut up and conform. Plait my hair.

Conformity however has never suited me and misogyny will outright irk me! I grew up in India. My childhood and youth were tainted with a particularly religious, traditionalist and violent form of misogyny. In India if you don’t play your feminine role well, you will end up raped and murdered on the side of the road and the police will come round to burn the evidence. My role was drummed into me early and perpetually.

A huge part of how that misogyny plays out is appearance. The performance of a demure, shy, quiet and well-presented young lady. A wife who will fulfil her duties silently and without complaint. No amount of violence, discrimination or unhappiness should ever compel a good woman to speak out of turn. My childhood was simply a rehearsal, training for fulfilling that role. My catholic convent played the role of teacher very well. Silent, polite, young wives in waiting. In the seven years I was there, we knew of only one lesbian couple. This when homosexuality was still illegal. The lesbians simply disappeared one day. No one heard from them or saw them again. The message was clear, fall in line!

Part of our training was to look the part. Strict rules applied for our hair. Charmaine, a particularly sadistic nun, would come round with a foot ruler and measure the length of our hair and accordingly categorise it:

1. Up to the base of your neck and you could get away with it down, so long as you have no fringe or side bangs framing your head. Fashion or vanity was not allowed!
2. Below your neck – Two side ponytails. Still no bangs and never a single pony tail. Good girls divide their hair in two.
3. Shoulder blade and beyond – Two plaits. No bangs and remember good girls always have their hair in twos. No single plaits.

My mother wasn’t around growing up and my father didn’t know how to plait, why would he? So, I never learnt to plait. For the longest time, I tied my hair into two pony tails until Charmaine caught me one day. For months, she tormented me. Kicking me out of class, sending me home for my hair. I’d have to go begging around school asking for help for someone to plait my hair until one day I finally learnt to do it myself. When I started school in Scotland I was shocked to see all ages of girls with their hair down. I never saw a bloody plait again and if I did, it was a single one. Promised land indeed.

Soon I discovered that this new cold, wet and windy land though progressive in many ways had its own hang ups with hair. As an Indian woman I have thick and back then, big curly hair. Soon I realised there was some sort of distinction between the beautiful smooth straight hair of my Caucasian counterparts and my unruly, bohemian locks. Not helped by the fact I was attempting to get into Art School at the time. “Exotic” was a term thrown around often.

My equally sadistic and racist music teacher found new ways to police me. She’d call me a wally often and called my family “heathens” when I told her we would put whole spices in Irish stews. When we dolled up in our Scottish garb for Choir she’d single me out and scold me. “Why it is up like that? Why do you have curls coming out? Why do you have to be different?” Thus began a new way of policing my hair. First it was sexism now it was racism.

Maybe my experiences have left me particularly sensitive but that may not necessarily be a bad thing. Surely it’s never a bad thing to question a practice simply because it’s the done thing? This is a profession that prides itself on curiosity and intellectual rigour. It is simply not sufficient to excuse outdated beliefs by saying “but I am old fashioned”.

In a piece Laurie Penny wrote for the New Statesman in 2014, Penny argued that short hair was a political act as it rejected the calls of men wanting women to be perfect feminine objects of desire. Long hair = fertile, feminine and sexual. Whilst short hair = masculine, damaged and abrasive. Penny, as per usual, received a lot of online abuse for that piece. Ironically one woman who called her out said “Having long hair that you do NOTHING with apart from tying it back has a similar ‘not-playing-the-game message’”. There it is!

You could read Penny’s article and infer that if short hair meant a lack of sexuality and long hair meant flaunting it, then tying it back would have the effect of taming that wily fertile, sexual nature. Then someone says it and your fears are confirmed. You’ve suspected it your whole life and then someone says it. Tying your hair back, you are taking yourself out of the game. “Boys I am not open for business. While my hair is tied, I am a respectable, demure and professional machine but the minute I let my locks down …”

Policing hair is not a new phenomenon. The Black community have had such a hard time of having natural hair recognised as a legitimate way of wearing their hair that films, documentaries have been made and legislation enacted to educate us. For years’ beauty standards have been Euro-centric and now we use the same standards to determine professionalism. We exclude children from schools, withhold jobs on the basis of this unspoken standard. And when we speak up, we are referred to as “stroppy” people of colour.

I don’t see the difference between the tights and the hair debate. I mean absolutely no disrespect to my esteemed legal Twitter colleagues but I am surprised so many of us make the distinction between hair and tights. I do however make the distinction of tying ones hair back for wigging up and every other occasion. Perhaps we as a sex have spent so long being told that something is simply the done thing we don’t think of it’s origin or its purpose. I am convinced the purpose is policing; whether it is policing sexuality or race.  If you are policing a woman’s body it will inevitably be mired with misogyny because we still live in a misogynist society. It is not outlawed, it is not defeated, it is not eradicated! If someone wants to tell me otherwise in the shadow of Couzens, the Met’s and the polices’ failures, comments and sexist practices then I really have to question your motivations.

I don’t wish to be shouting annoyingly into the void of legal Twitter and I certainly do not want the profession to hate me. But to not question or call out sexism or racism is to betray the very qualities that I admire about this profession. So, until I tire, I guess I’ll be doing it again.