Houston, TX – When Jef Rouner bought his 5-year-old daughter the rainbow spaghetti strap dress she had been wanting, he was happy to giver her the present as any loving parent would be. But then last week, when he made the mistake of letting the little one wear said item to her school, that was when all the trouble started.
The officials at Rouner’s daughter’s elementary school told the young girl that “spaghetti straps were against the rules,” citing Houston’s school district as the culprit of such seemingly draconian limitations on outerwear.
Nevertheless, rules are rules, and so the girl was forced to change into essentially a tomboy’s outfit that she didn’t want to wear – a t-shirt and jeans. This led to Rouner finding his daughter “crestfallen” and embarrassed at the end of the school day. It’s enough to make any parent’s blood boil, the thought of one’s own flesh and blood being bullied at school, but it becomes inexcusable when the offender amounts to the administration of the school itself – a group of educated, professional adults who should know better, yet in cases like this exude the behavior of an infant with a mean streak.
Rouner, infuriated at the administration’s incompetence and saddened for his daughter’s situation, wrote a scathingly good Op-Ed for the Houston Press as a result of the whole incident, in which he directly implicates the school for ridiculous and harmful behavior against its students by enforcing its clearly ridiculous dress code.
Here is the key excerpt from the piece, entitled, “The Apparently Immoral Shoulders of My Five-Year-Old Daughter”:
“I’m not surprised to see the dress code shaming come into my house. I have after all been sadly waiting for it since the ultrasound tech said, “It’s a girl.” I didn’t think, though that it would make an appearance when she was five years old.
Five. You get me? She’s five. Cut her hair and put her next to a boy with no shirt on and she is fundamentally identical. I guess you could argue that a boy would not be allowed to wear a shirt with spaghetti straps either, but the day they sell anything like that in the boys section of a Target I will happily withdraw my objections.
Have you ever stopped to think how weird a school dress code really is? I went and checked out the one for my daughter’s school district and it’s amazing in how hard it tries not to say what it actually means. There are literally no male-specific guidelines anywhere on that list. I mean prohibitions against exposing the chest or torso could hypothetically apply to boys except that they don’t. Not really. They don’t sell boys clothes that do that. There’s nothing that is marketed to boys that is in anyway comparable to a skirt or a sun dress. Essentially, a school dress code exists to prevent girls from displaying too much of their bodies because reasons.”
There you go, folks – sexism really does still exist… When it involved little children who are at the mercy of their teachers and principals and can’t fight back. And that fact that there even exists such a thought to cover up a young girl who hasn’t even reached an age in the double digits is disturbing for two reasons: One, because the vast majority of well-adjusted adults won’t care, so why is it any of the school’s business? And two, because this is once again a result of one-size-fits-all choices national and state governments love to impose on broad areas they have no business getting involved with. Remember, it’s the district and not the individual school that possesses the stupid rule in the first place.
Rouner has a plan moving forward, though:
“Part of me very much wants to go buy a nice dress for myself and drop her off at school in it for the rest of the year to prove a point. In the meantime I think I’ll employ the greatest weapon a five-year-old possesses; the question “Why?” The next time the kid wants to wear her dress I’m going to let her, and I’m going to tell her that there’s nothing wrong with it or her because she is dressed in a perfectly normal manner and cute as a button to boot. I’m going to tell her that some people think a girl who shows too much skin is wrong or dangerous, but that those people are, for want of a better term, lackwitted thugs living in a bad place. And if anyone tells her to change I’m going to advise her to ask why and to keep on asking that person “Why?” until she gets an answer she likes.”
Teaching his children to question authority at the tender, impressionable age of 5? We like this guy!
The post School Shames 5-Year-Old Girl As “Immoral” For Showing Her Shoulders appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.