I used to wear my big sisters’ clothes to school. I kid you not. I particularly remember the duffel coats. How can a duffel coat have a gender, I hear you ask. Well, it was all in the toggles, see? In that girls’ duffel coats had, in those days, toggles on the left. It’s been years since I last saw a duffel coat, so as to whether there are still boys’ and girls’ versions, determined thusly, I honestly don’t know.
Whether little boys are as observant now as they were then I could not say either, but the fact I was wearing a girl’s coat in Noblehill Primary School in Dumfries in 1974 hardly went unobserved in the playground. My nickname throughout my schooldays was Molly — not on account of my sometime outerwear, as it happens, but because of a song we had in music class called Sweet Molly Oliver — but looking back I can see I might have had grounds for claiming all manner of trauma. Except I didn’t. Different times is all.
When you got right down to it, no one cared about clothes. The fact that my parents were getting value for money out of perfectly serviceable duffel coats — which in those days were as indestructible as Kevlar — was not in any way remarkable. While my classmates noticed for a few moments and pulled my leg, in sum it mattered little.
I’m not sure how much in the way of wearing hand-me-down clothes goes on in these days of cheap, one-wear, throwaway garments from international sweat shops, but forty-odd years ago it was a commonplace. We had “play clothes” too. The need to keep comparatively costly school uniforms serviceable for as long as possible meant changing out of them and into the aforementioned before being allowed back out to climb trees and crawl through hedges.
Since I had sisters and not brothers, I also inherited from them several items deemed suitable for the rough and tumble. I actually remember being especially fond of a little lilac, zip-up cardigan that had previously been worn by at least one, if not both, of my sisters. Was I scarred by these experiences? Not a jot. It was just everyday life then. I say again, no one bothered.
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My mother denies it to this day but I swear that I wore some hand-me-down white blouses to primary school as well, made identifiable by buttons on the left like the toggles on my second- and third-hand coats.
The explanation, by the way, for buttons on the left for women, and on the right for men, lies in the past and the lifestyles of the better-off. In the days before the advent of plastic, buttons were expensive items, made of mother of pearl and such, and so featured first on the clothes of the well-to-do. Since posh ladies did not dress themselves, preferring the services of a ladies’ maid, and since most people are right-handed, it was easier for someone standing opposite a lady, and buttoning her blouse for her, if the buttons were on the left-hand side of the garment.
Truth is that none of this is, or ever was, more than a family anecdote. But then I read last week about Castleview Primary School in Edinburgh, which was asking boys to come to school in skirts for a day. It was claimed to be a way of showing solidarity with a boy expelled last year from a Spanish school after turning up in a skirt. An email sent to Castleview parents said that it was about spreading the message that “clothes don’t have a gender”.
Boys from aged three and up were encouraged to take part. As usual, it was all about being “inclusive”, “breaking down gender stereotypes” and promoting “equality”. If boys had no access to skirts at home, the school would provide them. Implicit in it all was: do it, or be seen to be unkind.
Whatever any of that tosh was supposed to be about, it wasn’t inclusivity or equality. More to the point, it wasn’t about skirts or any sort of clothes. Leaning on little boys — pushing them to wear skirts for a day or seem uncaring — was about servicing an agenda that is meaningless to children.
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Education standards in Scotland are falling faster than a piano tipped out of a window and yet, rather than focus on giving pupils the skills they need in life, agitators, grifters and troublemakers prefer petty virtue-signalling at children’s expense.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: leave the children alone.