Homecoming is one of the most well known nights of high school. The Homecoming parade, the float voting and the crowning of the Homecoming court make the Homecoming game different than any other football game. These events also make for unforgettable moments in high school.

However, this year of Homecoming nominations, I decided to break the standards and focus the usual attention of winning Homecoming court to an issue much larger: breaking gender norms.

I decided to wear a suit and run for Sophomore Homecoming Princess to represent the message that clothing holds no gender. Eventually, a campaign and Instagram account were created for me, called “CG Outside the Binary HoCo,” that pushed for my nomination and, more importantly, the concept that clothing holds no gender. 

I wish I could state that this campaign has been the easiest and the most supportive two weeks of my life, but it hasn’t. Instead, it has been one of the hardest and scariest two weeks of my life. Putting myself in such a vulnerable position in such a public way was extremely difficult. It felt as though everyone watched me and judged me everywhere. People suddenly knew who I was, and it was terrifying.

The harder challenge of introducing this campaign to social media and to fellow peers, while trying to spread this message of clothing holds no gender, went as predicted: extreme backlash from my fellow classmates. To them, the concept of change in such a public light was threatening –almost scary– as I broke almost every norm they had seen at Homecoming for their entire life. But this only motivated me to push even further with the campaign.

The campaign and slogan of “clothes have no gender” continued to grow bigger until this campaign name was larger than my name and why I was running –but that was the overall intention. My goal was to spread awareness and break these norms using myself as a representative of the campaign. I wanted people to look past just a girl wearing a suit and see the larger message behind me. 

Homecoming was the perfect spotlight for this. I would be in the school’s public eye –subjected to the thoughts of hundreds of visitors, families, administrators and sponsors while standing on stage to represent a message much larger than just myself.

Homecoming put my campaign on the loudest speaker of the biggest night I could find at the school. 

The campaign eventually won myself the title of Sophomore Homecoming Princess, but I hope this campaign can give to others more than just a title and a sash. I hope it gives hope, confidence and most importantly, pride. This campaign gave me pride within myself, my gender, my identity and my femininity.

I hope others can look up to me, see me breaking one standard, and they gain more confidence in themselves. I hope that they start to break other standards, gaining confidence, hope and more pride within themselves. I hope people can see me as someone who made it somewhere they were told they couldn’t make it. I hope people use this same fire and passion this campaign gave me and use it for their own hopes.