In this topic you only ever see posts by folks who experienced this random and shockingly unstopped obvious cruelty by schools that only happens in some places. You never see the opposite experience, of liking shorts and these uniforms would have been right and suited and not cruel for you, but you did not have them. That oppositely cruel bad luck happened for me, and so much were year round shorts uniforms never a thing in South Wales, I actually grew up not knowing they existed, for my entire schooldays. Nor is there enough awareness of an awful heartbreaking tragedy for the shortist identity - and I feel it as an identity, that merits adding to identity politics. A sensory issue identity. By long narrow waterways there are local climates of saturated damp air, that causes respiratory irritation hence catarrh, symptoms like a persistent cold. So, if you have no source of knowledge that year round shorts are not harmful and do not mean catching cold, what does this nasal climate do to ability to find out by yourself ?
While this will happen less now that the web exists, a kid might have no web access by poverty or may have it oversupervised, so this can still happen. In South Wales, under the "Cardiff catarrh" known locally by my family, the climate meant I did not get shorts uniform schools, not even in private school starting in 1973! and no "that one kid who always wears shorts" to wake me up.
The media never told me that either the life option or those schools exist. Nor did it tell those schools' victims that opposite cases like South Wales exist. By not discussing it, it left us both in our local bubbles thinking the whole country was like them. Folks still post shock at finding out online those schools still exist. My mother never thought it possible, she believed all question of shorts in winter had ceased to exist when the mid century boys' breeches era ended, and she dated that to late 50s, She thought the scouts' dropping of their old breech shorts included the cubs too. On all those she was wrong !
Particularly heartbreaking is about cubs: they had a shorts uniform then, but we did not know, because never saw them around, and I hated football, so when I was interested in joining cubs because a classmate did, my grandma, sourced from local chats, warned that they often played football and persuaded us cubs would not suit me. Other memories I have seen of fast failed experience of cubs have featured football, so it looks like she was right, but how devastatingly stupid that the national scale giver of a shorts uniform experience to thousands of boys had its activity unsuited to exactly more sensitive softer boys who would like shorts, like me, and trying to suit instead the rougher types who would be down on both shorts and the idealistic parts of scouting. That football barrier is how narrowly I failed to discover in childhood that a year round shorts identity really was doable and does not mean catching cold.
This sorrow could even happen to a kid in the place the Prime Minister was MP for, James Callaghan. At 10, I tested the feel of staying in shorts all through Oct at home, longing to push its beautiful feeling on into Nov, and as the season turned the nasal irritations left grimly clear that year round wearing was an impossible dream that could not exist. This is a very deep sorrow and anger that still makes me cry, when since waking up in only my 20s, I have been a year rounder for over 30 years, and have recognition of it as a work need as part of being autistic.
