Growing up in a modest household, I never really faced the wrath of being sent down to the principal’s office to change into a shirt or pair of pants due to a school administrator’s judgement of my clothing. Along the way, however, I witnessed my some of my friends being scolded for wearing tank tops with straps the width of two fingers instead of three, shorts being too short for one teacher but acceptable to another, or unintentionally wearing revealing shirts that would cause too much of a “distraction” in class. Being called out for what you wore became extremely normalized throughout grade school, and until I really read through my school’s dress code policy, I never realized the flaws within it that evidently led to the potential for gender discrimination.

It wasn’t until sixth grade during the sagging pants fad where boys in my school rebelled, claiming it wasn’t fair that for once boys were being told what to wear and not wear, that I realized the disparity between clothing standards for boys and girls that the school emphasized. As hard as administrators tried, many gave up and let boys hang their pants loose while many girls were being singled out for wearing clothes that they didn’t even intend to be scandalous.

So when I heard about the consideration for a policy change in the dress code in the county my middle and high school resides in, I thought back to these days where administrators called out many of my peers, creating their own definition of “excessively tight” and “too much cleavage” and going to extremes such as giving out-of-school suspension and calling home. In my eyes, this possible change of dress code could be a huge step in overcoming the presence of unfair, extra pairs of eyes schools lay onto female students not only in my home county or schools in general, but also to society as a whole that puts pressure on girls are supposed to wear and not wear at that young of an age. Making the dress code more gender-neutral not only makes the rules more inclusive and eliminates the bias towards girls in schools, but also teaches the students who may be “distracted” by another student’s outfit choices to grow up and be mature about the situation, as girls should never be blamed for that.

At the end of the day, government institutions such as public schools really shouldn’t impose their opinions on what students should and should not wear, especially by creating subjective guidelines that open too many doors to gender discrimination. Although I realize the need to present professionalism in academic environments, fashion is a student’s personal choice and expression and as as long as a student isn’t eliciting harm or violence, there is no need to creating a situation out of nothing. This therefore wastes class time, and only enforces the antiquated notion that girls have to limit themselves in many ways to conform to the ideals of boys in society. It is 2018, and I have hope that the transformation of the female-biased dress code into one less gender-biased will help eradicate this notion inside and out of the classroom.