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 you’re 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 Médecins (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 wasn’t colluding with you so you could wear a substitute for hijab.
Source
───────
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 it’s a hidden hijab. They will accuse you of going against secularism and when you’ll argue that they are discriminating you by assuming you’re 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.
Source
───────
All of that will be done in the name of secularism and women’s right despite having nothing do with either quite the opposite.
The teenage girl’s story is also not just about racism and Islamophobia it’s 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.
oh and don't forget that many parts of France mandate by law how much skin women must show in swimsuits, which they claim is about not getting street dirt in public pools but which is disproportionately enforced on Muslim or even just Middle Eastern/North African women
(and of course is also some forced nudity misogynistic bullshit in general, to boot)
The French health system is so racist and ableist all while being on the shoulders of foreign (mostly Romanian and Algerian) health care professionals. But the system is so racist they are paid less than the French (often white) doctors and have to obey and report to French doctors even when they actually have more experience than said doctor.
The system is so racist that when my grandpa goes to the hospital for his annual check up for his diabetes and stuff he always makes sure to find one Black or Arab nurse and get on her schedule cause he knows they won’t dismiss him. He couldn’t get on the schedule of a Black or Arab nurse twice only and both times he almost died because his blood sugar got dangerously low in the middle of the night and he kept ringing for help and the white nurse ignored him. (Once I got involved and the only reason I didn’t punch the nurse and got arrested was because my grandpa told me not to.)
Like when I was between 1 and 2 years old the pediatrician ignored my mom concerns telling her she was just exaggerating that he wouldn’t check on me and that I was okay that she was just wasting his time by insisting. My mom insisted called an other pediatrician in an other city the pediatrician (Vietnamese) took me in despite not working that day. And after a couple minutes checking me she called an ambulance and got me to the hospital. Once at the hospital she told my parents that I wouldn’t have survived the night without the hospital…
Now that I’m an adult I know that this was clearly a case of “syndrome Méditerranée”. Basically during their studies health care professionals are told (unofficially not in the school books) that Black and Arabs don’t feel pain the same way and that we have a “cultural tendency” to exaggerate the pain we feel so we shouldn’t be taken as seriously as a white person. And because it’s France it’s called “Mediterranean” to make it sound less racist but they actually don’t apply it to white Mediterraneans and they apply it to Black non Mediterraneans.
