The Negative Influence Of Dress Codes In Schools

From the day you are born you are assigned a sex, either male or female. With this assigned sex comes a predisposed set of rules and expectations that the individual gets almost no control over. For most people if you are assigned the sex of female at birth you tend to follow the predisposed rules of the female gender that has been dictated to you (same with most males and the male gender). For those people their lives are easy and “natural” because they fall into the roles society has already laid out for them. What if you don’t fall perfectly into this role? Gender may be influenced as soon as one is born but it is not assigned like sex is, and therefore it is often fluid. People find where they fall on this “gender spectrum” as they age.
Some dress codes are clear and need to be in place. Dress codes are needed to stop students from wearing clothing with gang affiliation or other harmful activities. They are also needed to make sure that a student’s body is covered in an appropriate way. Although the dress code system implementing uniforms seems to have the safety of the student in mind, can dress codes still cause harm? The inability of one to be expressive of their gender and sexual orientation can cause one to be in serious mental harm. The repression of one to expression their gender by the school and other influential leaders in the community directly affects young people’s perspective. The punishment transgender students get for their violation of dress codes paired with their breaking of social norms leads other students to think that being gender fluid is wrong. Students follow the rules implemented by the school systems because they believe that is the right thing to do. If the rules are targeted towards a group of students, much like the dress code against transgender students, it will be reflected in the student. This may cause students target that same group and make them believe that transgender people need to be punished because of their constant violation of school uniform. Hoffman shares that Lawrence King was a known crossdresser from Oxnard, California. He was known for wearing high heeled boots, makeup, and other
Hoffman state a main reasons is that “All this is too much for educators, who say high school should not be a public stage to work out private identity issues. School, they say, is a rigorous academic and social training ground for the world of adults and employment.” The implications of the dress code are also supported by some students. Hoffman quoted Kay Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, to put their view better into perspective “It’s hard enough to get kids to concentrate on an algorithm — even without Jimmy sitting there in lipstick and fake eyelashes.” As the quote states some students find these students self-expression as distraction from the learning process. Again the point comes down to the academia of school, but in discriminating against these transgender students they disrupt their advancement in the