Pushout by Monique W. Morris Page A

the office just for the person in the office to approve what I had on. Now, I’m not going to lie and make it seem like I’m this perfect person, or whatever, ’cause I did push the uniform guidelines.”
    â€œSo, you had to wear uniforms?” I asked.
    â€œYes,” Paris confirmed. Ninety-five percent of the public schools in New Orleans require students to wear uniforms—the highest percentage in the nation. 21 “And the boys and the girls had different uniforms . . . like the girls had to have plaid skirts . . . I never did understand why they didn’t make plaid for boys. I would love to see some plaid for boys, because I know a few boys that may like to wear plaid. All the boys had a basic Dickies or basic cotton shirt with the school logo. . . . But I would push the school, as far as dress code. Like, if they say your skirt ain’t supposed to be past three inches above the knee, I may push it to four inches above the knee. I would try it, just because I knew I was different. I knew that I was going to cause controversy anyway. They were never happy with me.
    â€œWith me [gender] transitioning from middle school to high school, I had an assistant principal who hated my guts. She hated my guts. She didn’t really like LGBT individuals, particularly gay young men, and that’s what I identified as [in middle school] . . . before knowing myself further. I thought I was happy because I was leaving middle school, but this [administrator] followed me. She went from being our middle school’s assistant principal to being our high school’s principal, and she thought that she was going to be able to wear it out . . . but she didn’t know that I had a supportive mother who fought my battles, who stood behind me.She didn’t know I had that type of support in my family. So we had to go to the school board. . . . [They could not] deny [me my] education because of [my] sexual orientation. [They] can’t do that. . . .
    â€œOnce that [principal] heard that she could not do anything, that the power she thought she had was crushed, her dreams, her hopes, her aspirations were gone . . . at that very moment, I got up and I swung my hair, and I said, ‘Thank you.’ I didn’t have any problems [after that].”
    I applaud Paris. She was determined to complete her education, and she did. But for other Black girls, the marginalization that occurs from being sexualized (or reduced to their sexuality)—in and out of school—may be too intense to handle, especially without adequate support.
    From the pullout of girls who are being trafficked to the oppressive school dress codes that irrationally institutionalize adult panic over the morals of girls both cis- and transgender, we see how Black girls continue to live with the burden of under-protection, where a girl’s virtue certainly is “not an ornament and a necessity.”
    * The Department of Justice defines residential placement as “secure and nonsecure residential placement facilities that house juvenile offenders, defined as persons younger than 21 who are held in a residential setting as a result of some contact with the justice system (they are charged with or adjudicated for an offense). This encompasses both status offenders and delinquent offenders, including those who are either temporarily detained by the court or committed after adjudication for an offense.” Statistics on residential placement do not include data for prisons, jails, federal facilities, or those exclusively for drug or mental health treatment or for abused/neglected youth.
    * Urban Dictionary and other pop culture sources define “THOT” as a slang acronym meaning “that ho over there.”
    * The National Institute on Drug Abuse defines molly as ecstasy, a synthetic psychoactive drug that has similarities to both the stimulant amphetamine and the hallucinogen mescaline.

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    LEARNING ON