Last week Lizzy Martinez wore a loose fitting long sleeve t-shirt to school and decided not to wear a bra. The 17-year-old, high school student at Braden River High School in Florida didn’t think anything of it, but her fashion was in direct violation of the dress code. School officials pulled out Lizzy from her class and forced her to cover up her nipples with Band-Aids. She explained the entire experience through a series of tweets, which went viral.
Just a thought #MakeTheBoysCoverUpToo #LizzyMartinez #ManateeSchools #StopTheDoubleStandards pic.twitter.com/mY03ZYwzyx
— ~Chrys Mo~ (@SuchACoolChick) April 9, 2018
“I decided not to wear a bra today and got pulled out of class bc one of my teachers complained that it was a ‘distraction to boys in my class.’ My school basically told me that boys’ education is far more important than mine and I should be ashamed of my body. @Manateeschools :). They said my outfit was ‘distracting others’ lmk how a long sleeve t-shirt and jeans are distracting.. smh at body shaming if another girl with smaller boobs or a guy was wearing my t-shirt it wouldn’t have been ‘inappropriate.'”
And that’s not even the most humiliating part of the story.
In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Lizzy talked about what happened after she was pulled into the office by the dean of the school.
“They had me put on a second shirt and then stand up and, like, move and jump around to see how much my breasts moved,” Lizzy told BuzzFeed News. “I was mortified.”
Lizzy’s mother, Kari Knop, said to The Toronto Star, that the dean — who is female — should not have made her daughter go through this at all.
“If it was a male dean that asked my daughter to do this, we wouldn’t even be on the phone trying to justify it, therefore we should not be doing it as female deans,” Knop told The Toronto Star.
The school has issued a statement that Lizzy was in direct violation of the dress code, but that the school should have handled the matter differently.
“It is undisputed that this matter should have been handled differently at the school level and corrective measures have been taken to prevent a reoccurrence in the way these matters will be addressed in the future.”
However, the school dress code does not mention anything about whether a student must wear a bra.
For anyone making the argument that Lizzy “violated dress code”, here is an excerpt from the official 2017-2018 Manatee County dress code: pic.twitter.com/C7BUndw1nn
— sami (@samidrouin) April 10, 2018
