This past week, Air France faced backlash from its female crewmembers after requesting that they wear more modest clothing during flights to Iran and put on a “loose-fitting jacket and headscarf” before getting off the plane at the Tehran airport, The Guardian reported.

The airline has not offered flights to Iran in eight years, but it decided in January to resume flights on April 17. The airline claims these regulations are not new, and that similar regulations have always been in place for the airline’s flights that pass through Saudi Arabia.

When I first read about this issue, my first reaction was immediately to side with the women who objected to Air France for telling them what to wear on the job. However, after reading more into it, I realized that it was much more complex than I had initially thought.

France has a deep history when it comes to religious attire, specifically attire usually worn by Muslim women. In 2004, the country banned headscarves from schools.

In 2009, a French-Muslim woman wore a “burkini” to a public pool, causing outrage in the French Parliament. A burkini is a swim outfit that covers a woman’s body and includes a veil. One of the French representatives said the burkini was “clearly a militant provocation.” In 2010, the country banned women from wearing the full-face veil, or the niqab, in public, a decision that the French court upheld in 2014.

And in February, the human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe released a report that noted more “homophobic, xenophobic, and anti-Muslim” events in France and stated that the country was dealing with a “loss of tolerance.”

These sentiments were clearly echoed in the response to the new Air France regulations, especially when the head of one worker’s union referred to the headscarf as an “ostentatious religious sign.”

On one hand, I do see both sides. If, for some reason, a flight attendant for Air France feels so strongly about not being told what to wear, then she should not be forced to work on that flight. In fact, this is exactly what Air France decided to do when the company quickly announced it would allow flight attendants to avoid routes that flew to Iran if they did not want to comply with the clothing regulations.

However, on the other hand, I have a hard time believing that most of this resistance to wearing a headdress stems from harmless reasons like inconvenience. I also do not buy the idea that refusing to wear a headdress is some kind of mini feminist revolution, and that it symbolizes women standing up for themselves when told what to wear.

I find it very ironic how much of the argument against wearing this attire stems from the crewmembers who feel like their independence is being suppressed. They apparently do not want to be told how to look or how to dress, and some actually see the headscarf as an “insult to their dignity.” The same union leader who called the headscarf “ostentatious” stated, “We have to let the [female crewmembers] choose what they want to wear.”

But if this scandal was supposed to represent some kind of liberation for the women who work on Air France, then why would the union leaders refer to the headscarf, an article of clothing that some women do choose to wear, as “ostentatious?”

This request from Air France was not about forcing crewmembers to conform to a religion they did not believe in. It was about showing respect to a culture’s customs, a practice that the crewmembers and union leaders disregarded as soon as they insulted the headscarf.

To me, it seems like a no-brainer. If you willingly choose a career that will take you around the world, you need to be prepared to show every culture, country and religion the same amount of respect. The protesters do not have any right to determine what values a traditional headscarf stands for, and their presumptuous protests were not admirable. They were ignorant.

Although this story may be settled from a legal perspective, its implications are important. The heroes of this story are not the crewmembers who stomped their feet when asked to show respect to a different culture’s tradition. The heroes are the Muslim women all over the world who choose to stay true to themselves and wear whatever they want in the face of blatant discrimination and disrespect.