Essay on Why Dress Code Should Be Banned

Topics:	Critical ThinkingDress CodePublic School
Words:	452
Page:	1 This essay sample was donated by a student to help the academic community. Papers provided by EduBirdie writers usually outdo students' samples.
Updated:	23.02.2024

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They tend to target girls more on dress code than they do for the boys. The dress code bans clothing that girls commonly wear and requires clothing that is not easily available for girls but is for boys. Clothing like tan-tops and leggings are often banned from some schools. Guidelines such as the “fingertip rule” stating the need that students’ shorts must be longer than the fingertips when hands are down at sides are a lot easier for boys to adjust to than girls (Barrett). They prioritize boys’ needs. Many times, the wording of a dress code tells girls they should dress in a specific way because their clothing is “distracting” to boys. Banning this clothing takes away a student’s comfort level at best, and at worst, suggests that boys should be comfortable but girls do not have the same needs for class comfort (Zhou). School dress codes encourage victim-blaming instead of holding perpetrators of sexual assault responsible. Dress codes encourage making it okay for people to say, “You should not have been wearing that, what did you think was going to happen?!” policing what people wear, instead of teaching others to be respectful and consensual assumes the false idea that certain outfits will protect you from sexual assault while others will make you feel unsafe. It also promotes the harmful heteronormative rhetoric that “boys will be boys” and “cannot control themselves” (Barrett).

The dress code enforces gender stereotypes. Dress codes force trans and non-binary folks to wear either “male” or “female” clothing. It seems that fashion has a gender identity. Transgender students have been sent home for wearing clothing dissimilar to what is expected of their legal sex, while others have been excluded from their yearbooks (Zhou). Dress codes entrust school authorities with student identity and can establish discriminatory standards. The prevalence and convergence of today’s protests suggest that schools not only need to update their policies, they also have to recognize and address the latent biases that go into creating them (Firestone). For example, on December 5, 2020, a male student was given in-school suspension for wearing nail polish at a Texas high school. The student named Trevor Wilkinson, an openly gay teenager had been called out of school and was put on in-school suspension for wearing nail polish. He was originally given a suspension on Monday at Clyde High School after he returned from Thanksgiving break with his painted nails. The painted nail supposedly disobeys his school’s dress code. Trevor had tweeted on Monday and said “Imagine your school not allowing boys to paint their nails and giving boys in-school suspension for it. And the whole administration being okay with it, homophobic and sexist? Welcome to West Texas.

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Essay on Why Dress Code Should Be Banned. (2024, February 23). Edubirdie. Retrieved November 28, 2025, from https://hub.edubirdie.com/examples/essay-on-why-dress-code-should-be-banned/

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