Boys in skirts? Making uniforms unisex
There’s nothing new about gender neutral uniform policies, said Rosemary Bennett in The Times. Around 120 state schools now let girls wear trousers and boys wear skirts. But in Lewes, a head teacher has taken a radical new step – by banning skirts altogether. The school’s new trousers-only uniform policy is designed to make life simpler for children who are confused about their gender, and to stop girls dressing in “indecently” short skirts (in defiance of rules specifying that skirts must be worn below the knee). On social media, parents were furious: their daughters liked wearing skirts, they said. Why should they be forced into trousers?
I agree with them in one sense, said Sirena Bergman in The Independent. The school should not have banned skirts: it should have allowed boys to wear them, too. To make everyone wear trousers is to suggest that the default gender is male, and to ban skirts fails to take account of the possibility that – regardless of their assigned gender at birth – pupils may wish to express aspects of a traditional female aesthetic. And why not? As for the idea that girls in short skirts are being “provocative”, why does the exposure of the female body have to be shamed and sexualised? Boys wear shorts without anyone wondering if they’re revealing too much flesh. We should be opening options, not closing them down, said Janice Turner in The Times. If girls felt free to wear T-shirts with robots on them, and boys to wear pink, we might have fewer children thinking they were born in the wrong body, just because they prefer different clothes.
Promoting gender neutral clothing has come to be seen as loony-lefty brainwashing, but it’s actually just practical good sense, said Anna Kessel in The Guardian. Boys go to school in sturdy shoes that cover their feet and are good for running and climbing, whereas girls’ school shoes are flimsy Mary Janes suitable for... a party (one where you don’t mind getting soggy feet if it rains). And in shopping catalogues, and on TV adverts, the message is relentless: boys are adventurous and outdoorsy; girls like arts and crafts, make-up and sparkly stuff. Then we wonder why so few teenage girls participate in sport. Literally and figuratively, our girls are being hobbled.