The world according to Celia Walden

‘We have an increasing number of students who are at that crossroads of understanding around their gender,” declared Tony Smith, the head teacher of Priory School in East Sussex last year, defending its decision to implement a “trousers-only” uniform policy. Since then, at least 40 schools have followed Smith’s lead and banned girls as young as 11 from wearing the second-oldest garment known to man… sorry humankind, in a bid to win the much-coveted PC Prat of the Academic World Award.

All this leaves me, and every sane parent out there, not so much at a “crossroads of understanding” on the ever-more-impenetrable issue of gender, as an impasse. Luckily, our understanding isn’t required. At Copleston High School in Ipswich, skirts have been placed on a list of “unacceptable items” alongside “facial piercings”; and Philips High School in Bury was so high on its own virtuesignalling that it didn’t even see the need to consult parents on its new uniform policy. “There was no letter or email,” says Diane Burdaky, whose daughter attends the school. “And my problem is why this has happened. I can’t think of any reason why girls shouldn’t wear them.”

Here, Mr Smith can help out: it’s about “equality and decency”, and the certitude that skirts “sexualise” girls. It’s about making transgender students feel included, and “removing the need for anyone to make a decision”. This is a funny way to sum up liberation, and calls to mind another man who removed the need for anyone to make a decision; then again, when Chairman Mao put women in boiler suits and forced them to chop off their plaits, maybe he, too, was allowing them to enjoy a pleasant pause at the gender crossroads where they could consider their options.

Of course, you run into difficulties with the “options” part, on account of this being an out-and-out ban, but if we gloss over that and move on to the gender-neutralising aspect, you can concede the point schools are making.

A friend’s daughter, who has resented wearing skirts for years, was tearful with joy when her school allowed her the option of wearing trousers. She wasn’t demigender, intergender, anogender, polygender, collgender, pangender or bigender – just a 12-year-old who liked climbing trees; what used to be called a tomboy before the word became offensive to people of both or neither sex, as well as people called Tom. Anyway, her joy was short-lived, what with the arrival of breasts, which have unfairly sexualised her, to use Tony Smith-style language.

But unless a nationwide chest-binding policy is also to be implemented, this may just have to be something she learns to deal with, as people used to say before the notion of learning to deal with things became offensive.

To break from the flippancy for a moment: I and every woman can remember how awkward and selfconscious those years could be. I can remember what a relief wearing a uniform was, and how girls were spared so much of the time and energy they would have to devote to dressing for the rest of their lives (not all of it unpleasant, granted, but time and energy nevertheless).

However, I can also remember how pleased some of my larger or less confident school friends were that we were in skirts, trousers often being far more form-fitting and “sexualising” than a lampshade-like piece of fabric that could be tailored as you pleased. And tailor them we did, rolling up the waistbands and slashing the sides in a bid to attract boys. Let me be quite clear on that point: yes, we were sexualising ourselves; no, the slashed skirts weren’t worn for our own sense of female empowerment; and, yes, it was all done to attract the opposite sex. Thank God today’s young women are loftier-minded.

It was during one school uniform debate a few years ago that Alexander Davidson, the author and historian, clearly summarised a uniform’s purpose. “When some aspects of society have become much less certain,” he wrote, “uniforms suggest schools are there to provide certainty and order.” These 40 schools are failing to do just that, choosing to bend and blow in the wind instead.

And let’s see where it gets them? Because when you get into this game of moral and ethical Twister, you’ve got to be quite the contortionist. And when that teenage boy demands to wear a skirt to school, are you really going to deny him that right?