Article content continued

It’s about time for a change in fortunes for a group once pronounced to be vampires by the German Catholic church (sure it was the 15th century, but still …) The indignities inflicted on those of us with strawberry in our blond have diminished over the centuries, but redheads have always been a target of one kind or another.

As recently as 2013, six redheaded students at a U.K. school were beaten as part of “kick a ginger day,” intermittently “celebrated” since a 2005 episode of South Park introduced the idea.

While modern-day gingerism knows no geographic boundaries, cruelty has been particularly rampant in the U.K. I experienced this first-hand when I was nine years old and my family moved to Northern Ireland. I was shocked by how much redheads are teased and told they’re ugly.

Almost immediately, my classmates started calling me “ginger minger” (Irish slang meaning an extremely ugly person). No one has been able to determine exactly why redheads are so maligned in the U.K. One theory is that it’s linked to anti-Irish prejudices.

Things have been bad enough that in 2007, the BBC ran an article asking, “Is gingerism as bad as racism?”

But times are changing — even the once-bullied Prince Harry told the Australian press last month that being a ginger is “the No. 1 thing one person can ever be.” It’s a bold statement, coming from a redheaded man. This is one context where men have been disproportionally stigmatized. (Redheaded women, for their part, tend to be hypersexualized, in a Jessica Rabbit kind of way.)