Opinion: Schools should stick to academic rule-making

More than 5,000 years ago, the warriors of Babylonia painted their fingernails with kohl to go to battle. More recently, A-list actor Brad Pitt wore nail polish, apparently just for the heck of it.

Yet for some reason, it’s a showstopper when a 17-year-old male in Texas wears nail polish to school?

Granted, women have been practically the only ones decorating their nails for the last few centuries. But custom and convention are no reason for nail polish to be an exclusively female style — witness how earrings have become commonplace for men.

The real problem is schools’ efforts to force traditional gender roles on students, including dictating the way boys and girls dress and groom themselves. These rules continue in many areas of the nation. It’s the modern equivalent of making sure that girls play with dolls and boys with toy trucks.

Trevor Wilkinson, the aforementioned 17-year-old in the small central Texas town of Clyde, was given an in-school suspension this month for wearing nail polish, even though the school dress code allows girls to wear it. The same would be true for makeup, if Wilkinson had chosen to try that. He’s started a petition to change the minds of school authorities.

But it shouldn’t be up to the Clyde Consolidated Independent School District to update itself to contemporary reality, in which sexual identity is more fluid than the rigidly binary world of “he” and “she,” and more people, regardless of their sexual orientation, are bending traditional gender norms in fashion, sports and lifestyle.

The courts have generally upheld schools’ authority to create and enforce dress codes, as long as those rules don’t infringe on students’ rights to free expression, such T-shirt slogans that spell out their political beliefs. And as long as those rules are reasonable — no showing of underwear, for example — they can be a good idea.

Of course, students’ stylistic choices are the last worry on most schools’ minds these days. They’re more focused — rightly — on whether and when to reopen campuses, how to keep kids learning from home and, once they reopen, how to keep staff and students safe from COVID-19.

Not so in the Lone Star State.

Schools might argue that they’re not discriminating when they have dress rules for both boys and girls. But an increasing number of people, particularly young people, are claiming their ground to identify and present themselves in more fluid ways. Schools should stick to deciding what academics they’ll learn — and to teaching kind and tolerant behavior toward all.

— Los Angeles Times