Dress Code

All the girls wore plaid jumpers until I turned ten years old. When I reached the fourth grade the uniforms required by my school were adjusted. The girls could still wear plaid jumpers, but they were also offered the opportunity to wear khakis and golf shirts, in white or navy, as the boys did. In my fourth-grade homeroom, I became the only girl who still wore a plaid jumper.

I never liked skirts and dresses. I didn’t like how they limited the ways you were able to sit, or how cold it was to wear them in the fall and winter. I didn’t like how they left so much of my body exposed, even when I was forced to wear white stockings as a small child. So, it was not my choice to continue to wear the plaid jumper through fourth and fifth grade. It was my parents who said I would wear the jumper, despite my protests, even if it set me up as the odd one out.

In the sixth grade, I was offered some small leeway, as uniforms were done away with and a dress code established instead. Girls could wear skirts or dresses, though they had to reach the knee, and anyone could wear khakis and a collared shirt, no one cared what kind. My favorite style was cargo pants with a rugby shirt. I was lucky. No one in my class gave me a hard time about what I was wearing. Never to my face at least. This time I was the odd one out, but it was my choice.

Still, my parents insisted on dresses and skirts for school concerts, holidays, and services at synagogue. It wasn’t until I turned twenty years old that I finally wore dress pants to any of the Jewish High Holy Days.

It didn’t matter to me how my clothes made me look to other people because, even as a child, I was not dressing to draw a specific eye for any specific reason. I wanted to be comfortable. I wanted to look like characters I admired in books and movies (many of them men and boys back in the late 90s and early 2000s). I didn’t dress in the hopes someone would look my way and want to kiss me, or sleep with me. It’s the same today.

My pronouns are she/her. I have always been a tomboy. But before I had the word “asexual,” before I was able to explain how I experienced that part of the world, it was hard for the people around me to accept that I did not care about fitting into any visual gendered category. 

Uniforms and dress codes were supposed to even the playing field. They were supposed to make sure no one was left out or stood out to their detriment. But they largely had the opposite effect on my life. They made me stand out to myself in a way I was not comfortable with then and would not be comfortable with now. The structure of “traditional” gendered expectations, particularly those of a visual nature, the messages they have long announced to the world, were never messages I was interested in delivering.

The stereotypes regarding gender and sex that clothing has long been used to convey have only recently begun to be dismantled. Whether it is model and activist Yasmin Benoit’s photos, my button-up shirts, or wearing a black ring on the right hand, asexuals are currently part of the vanguard breaking down expectations and stereotypes that once dominated the gender binary. 

We are all unique, and we should all be allowed, and embraced, to wear what we feel represents us and our individual experience in the world. A jumper, cargo pants, black tie, any can be worn, though the focus should be on how the outfit makes the wearer feel, not the message the world may have been trained to assume an outfit is sending.