Priory School in Lewes has banned skirts, meaning all students must wear trousers.
The reason? To deal with complaints from parents about short skirts and to make the uniform gender neutral for transgender students.
What about the transgender students who want to wear skirts?
If it is all about their rights, why not give them carte blanche to wear what they like?
Surely to be completely supportive and inclusive, it would make sense to allow all pupils to wear a skirt or trousers, a cardigan or blazer, depending on which sex they are connecting with on the day – staff too.
As one mother said: “If girls dressing differently than boys is now to be considered sexist, then it is equally sexist to have female teachers wearing skirts and not wearing ties.
“If they want this, they must live the values they force on others and go fully gender free.”
Another mother said: “My daughter said she has got a gender and it’s female so being gender neutral when she has got a gender is a big deal for her, as she proud to be a girl.”
Taking skirts away from girls, shows transgenders wear the trousers -– and that is the exact opposite of what they want; choice.
It also puts their rights above every one else’s.
Being a teenager is hard enough, even if you are not gay or transgender or anything else besides. I think people forget that.
It seems if you are not battling with some sexual, mental or physical condition, you have nothing to complain about and no rights.
As for stopping girls (or boys) wearing short skirts, rolling up my ugly pleated skirt after my dad dropped me off was a rite of passage.
My legs were all I had to distract boys from my acne and frizzy hair.
I’m pretty sure they are the reason I finally passed my driving test.
Without the ability to show my stems, school would have been all the worse for me.
School, as I recall, was torture.
I was that flat chested girl who hid in the toilet in the changing room, embarrassed by her lack of chest and livid purple stretch marks.
I was the girl whose coat bore another girl’s name tag because my parents bought it in a charity shop and everyone laughed at me.
I say find a way for your uniform to represent who you are and flaunt it.
Do all you can to be comfortable in your skin.
I’m 36 next week; the trunk of the Ganesh elephant tattoo on my left buttock is slowing starting to slide down my thigh. My short skirt days are over.
A school in Nottinghamshire has banned parents from buying “cheap” uniform from Asda or Tesco and instead they have to buy bespoke branded ones for three times the price.
Why and what now, since all the stocks have run out?
How can wearing £16 trousers with the school logo on them make a school better?
On one hand there are headteachers so focused on the rights of their transgender pupils that they ban skirts, while another headteacher is so obsessed with every pupil looking exactly the same, they only allow bespoke uniform?
Schools can waste time putting people in isolation for uniform errors or they could get on and teach them, which is what they go to school for.
Out here in France, I’ve spoken to a lot of ex-pats who decree “England its political correctness gone mad”.
It’s hard to argue at times.
Much as I like it out here, I’m not sure I could live here. People working on the tills stop to talk to their customers, while scanning items, for ages.
Even after the food has been packed away and paid for, they continue chatting, oblivious to the long queue snaking round the shop.
No one is bothered by this sedentary pace. No one, it seems, has anything better to do. Shocking.
Don’t they know that we have no time to stand and stare? No time to stand beneath the boughs and stare as long as sheep or cows. That said there is not much else to look at round here.
In Withdean, a gardener got the shock of his life when his banana plant had a banana on it. “It’s extraordinary,” he told the Argus.
In Peacehaven, a World War II bomb, which wasn’t a bomb but a disused fuel tank, caused schools to close and 60 people to evacuate their homes.
In Surrey, seven police officers in five cars were sent out to seize a violent Yorkshire terrier from its 76-year-old owner after it chased a delivery driver, who fell to the floor screaming “he’s killing me”.
Maybe it’s safer to stay out here.
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