In France if you suffer from hair loss as a teenage girl and cannot afford a real hair wig the school will try and force you to go to class bald. The school will make you buy a chemotherapy turban, you will buy two different so that the school can choose which one they prefer and you will prove that they are chemotherapy turban and not hijab but once you wear it they will change their mind and say it looks too much like a hijab and insist on you going bald or buying a real hair wig that you cannot afford.
If your doctor makes multiple documents confirming that you suffer from alopecia because of stress and the medicine you have to take for your epilepsy and that wearing a bonnet or something is recommended for your mental health as youâre not ready to go out bald in high school as a teenage girl, instead of admitting they are wrong the school will accuse the doctor of lying and report him to the Ordre des MĂŠdecins (equivalent of the General Medical council). Your doctor will find himself asking you for a document stating that you are not Muslim in order to defend himself and prove that no he wasnât colluding with you so you could wear a substitute for hijab.
In France if you are a North African nurse at a public hospital and wear a fabric surgical cap they will try to make you remove it because apparently itâs a hidden hijab. They will accuse you of going against secularism and when youâll argue that they are discriminating you by assuming youâre Muslim for a surgical cap on your head they will change their angle and claim that you should wear nothing on your hair because you wear the same surgical cap in multiple bedroom which is unhygienic apparently (which is a bullshit argument cause you wear the same scrub/uniform in different bedrooms as well). They will go as far as claiming that disposable scrub caps (you know the thin papery ones?) are not okay to wear in a hospital even if you change it regularly. And then they will fire you for a lack of hygiene because you wear a surgical cap.
All of that will be done in the name of secularism and womenâs right despite having nothing do with either quite the opposite.
The teenage girlâs story is also not just about racism and Islamophobia itâs also about ableism as the girl is convinced that the real reason the school is trying to push her out is because she had an epilepsy crisis in class and nobody knew what to do and the school nurse was absent. It could have ended badly had her best friend not known what to do to help. Apparently it was bad enough to cancel class for the rest of the day and the teacher was shocked to the point of ending on sick leave.
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