Is this dress inappropriate for a 5-year old girl?

A 5-year-old Houston girl was reprimanded for wearing a spaghetti-strap sundress to public school because it was deemed too revealing. 

Jef Rouner went to pick his daughter up from school that afternoon, only to find she had been forced to wear a T-shirt over her dress and jeans underneath because she was technically violating her school's dress code. 

"I'm not surprised to see the dress code shaming come into my house," Rouner wrote in a blog for Houston Press. "I have after all been sadly waiting for it since the ultrasound tech said, 'It's a girl.' I didn't think, though that it would make an appearance when she was five years old." 

Rouner's main problem with his daughter's school dress code – which prohibits showing midsection, torso, back and chest – is that it is clearly designed with only females in mind. 

"There are literally no male-specific guidelines anywhere on that list," he writes. "I mean prohibitions against exposing the chest or torso could hypothetically apply to boys except that they don't. They don't sell boys clothes that do that." 

Rrouner goes on to defend his daughter's dress, which he says she was very excited to wear that day. 

"I didn't pick up my daughter's dress at My First Stripperwear," he says. "It's not repurposed fetish gear from a store for very short people. It's a dress from a mall chain store in her size. She's worn it to church, and in the growing heat she was looking forward to wearing it a lot because it's light and comfortable." 

The blog continues on with Rouner's disbelief that these restrictive dress codes are still in place in 2015 – and begin at such a young age. 

"We still live in a country where someone can decide the shoulders of, and I can't stress this enough, a five-year-old girl are so distracting that they must be sent away and decently hidden," he says. 
"Now I have this child, the one that argues scientific points about everything from the top speed of land animals in Africa to the classification of the planets with me endlessly, wordlessly accepting that a dress with spaghetti straps, something sold in every Walmart in America right now, is somehow bad. Wrong. Naughty," he continues. "And most importantly that the answer is to cover up." 

Rouner plans to discuss the school's decision to ban his daughter's dress at an upcoming parent conference, according to the Huffington Post.