6 degrees

I tweeted D00ce today and she replied. Consequently, I’m feeling like a minor celebrity. A minor celebrity who hasn’t taken a shower today and is surviving on Theraflu, soft-boiled eggs and self-pity. A post I actually put some thought into precedes this one. Why don’t you go read that instead?

Victor/Victoria

I’ve been following with interest the Mississippi girl whose picture was banned from the school yearbook because she chose to wear a tuxedo. Today’s New York Times has an interesting take on schools and gendered dress codes. [subscription may be required].

One of the reasons I’m interested in this is that I spent a lot of time in high school, college and early grad school wearing men’s clothes. I wore my father’s old sweaters. I wore thrifted jackets several sizes too big for me. No one batted an eyelash. Why? Well, maybe it was the way I wore them. I wasn’t trying to be in drag. I just liked the clothes (well, there was probably more to it than that, but I’ll get to that in a minute). And, more importantly, I wasn’t gay. There were not other behaviors giving people pause. I wasn’t opposed to looking girly some of the time too. Not that that was anyone’s business but my own. And maybe that of my parents, who helped foot the wardrobe bill.

But does any of that make it more okay for me to wear men’s clothes to school than for Ceara Sturgis? No. Should the rules have been different for me than Ceara? Of course not. If the schools think they’re just critiquing wardrobe, they are kidding themselves. If there’s any doubt in whether the focus in the story is on the choice of tuxedo over a dress versus sexual preference – Ceara Sturgis is gay – check out the url for the link to the original USA Today story above. It’s coded “2009-10-18-yearbook-photo-lesbian_N.htm.”

If anything, I should have had the book thrown at me long before Ceara. I wore men’s clothes to school, where, according one reason cited in the Times story for gender-based dress codes, they could have been potentially distracting. Ceara only wore her tuxedo in her yearbook photo, where viewing of a girl in a tux was entirely optional and other students may not even have been present. What could be distracting about that?

Despite all this, I’m not opposed to dress codes. I think they can be helpful. For one thing, it actually may help kids learn that dressing for work is not the same as dressing for other activities. Not a bad lesson and, if my college students are any indication, one that quite a few people need to learn. The last high school I went to had some pretty strict dress codes and for some pretty good reasons. It was a huge school and there were gang problems to monitor. No hats or sunglasses inside, no bandannas. But there were not, at least to my recollection, a lot of other rules. Sweatpants and pajamas were not forbidden. And in fact, tons of people wore sweats to school. This surprised me, because at the generally more relaxed high school I’d attended for sophomore year, the one that had open campus, we weren’t allowed to wear sweatpants. Athletic clothes were for sports, not for school. I find it easier to carry the no sweatpants rule into the realm of gender differentiation than the gang colors rules – athletic clothes: athletes as boy clothes: boys as girl clothes:girls. Unless you think of gay students as a gang (which may, in fact, be the case). But the gay students I knew in high school thought of themselves as the opposite of a gang. They were mostly loner outcasts. They were not too at risk for their fashion choices being adopted by the masses.

Trying to put a gender policy in place is, I think, risky. Where do you draw the line? Does it make a difference why the student is cross-dressing? Does it matter if the student is intentionally trying to be disruptive? It should. But it also, I think, can’t. Is there be a difference between the transgender teen boy who wears a skirt to school and the boy who wears a skirt to school to cause trouble? Yes, but you can’t treat them differently under the rules. It’s really not fair. You either ban skirts on boys or you don’t. If the boy is wearing the skirt to cause trouble, chances are you can nail him on some other behavior, but leave the dress code alone. If the boy is distracting merely by wearing a skirt and not by his behavior, chances are his fellow students will get over it fairly quickly. You may have one distracted English class, but teachers, it’s just not that unusual anymore. By the time they’ve moved on to history, it will be old news.

Letting dress codes accommodate individuals is not caving to the left. It’s an opportunity to teach our kids about tolerance. A boy wearing a skirt to school is taking a huge personal risk, but it’s his risk to take. Maybe we need to let the rest of our kids take the risk along with him. In my experience, high school students tend to be more tolerant of one another than those making the rules for them. Do you really want to send the message to students that they need to pretend to be who their not? They’ll either find a way in the world that refutes that, or they’ll learn that the hard way. Why make it a rule?

Most importantly, though, we need to be really careful to keep rules about dress and not about sexuality. For one thing, there are lots of different reasons why kids might crossdress. For me, it was partly about looking different. My open campus high school practically had a uniform, even though it wasn’t spelled out in any formal dress code, and I’d felt really confined by it. When I moved into the bigger school, I experimented more and ended up with a lot of men’s clothes in my closet. Why men’s clothes? I’m not sure I could have articulated it at the time, but looking back I can tell you that it was because I was uncomfortable with taking on the role of “girl.” I didn’t like feeling like I had to choose between being pretty and being smart. But I cared a lot more about being smart. Men’s clothes hid my curves, which I developed late and had not yet come to terms with. They also, in being a little too big for me, made me feel smaller, less visible. If my school had decided to ban them, I would have felt stripped of my armor. As if high schoolers don’t feel vulnerable enough. Gay students are not the only ones who live in fear of being outed.

I seriously considered wearing a tux to my graduation dance. My date, who was gay, would not have minded in the least. I had envied D, the senior at my previous high school who’d worn one to prom. She wasn’t gay either. She just looked fabulous in a tux and she had the dramatic personality to carry it off. And no, her boyfriend did not wear a dress, although he took a lot of ribbing about it when word got out. But I didn’t think I was confident enough to pull it off, nor did I think I’d look anywhere as fabulous in a tux as D did. I ended up buying a black dress that I knew I’d be able to wear for orchestra performances in college. But I always felt like I’d caved in to convention.

I am generally in favor of dress codes to a point, as long as they’re not full of tiny, nitpicky rules. A uniform is fine. So is no uniform with a few key, logical guidelines. I am not, however, in favor of separate gender codes. At this point in our history, given the way we dress, it doesn’t make a lot of sense and any restrictions in this area infringe too greatly on personal freedom. I do think disruptions in the classroom need to be minimized – it’s a school, after all, not a Fashion Week runway. There is a difference between a boy wearing a skirt and a boy wearing stilletto heels and a boa. If the clothes would be okay if a girl wore them, then it should be okay for boys to wear them too (and vice versa). If the clothes would be outré for anyone, then ban them, and specifically.

Also, given that the wardrobe restrictions are supposedly to prevent distractions and student safety in the classroom, then it should not matter if a girl is wearing a tuxedo in her yearbook photo. Ceara Sturgis found a way around this restriction: her mother took out a full page ad in the yearbook to run Ceara’s photo in a tuxedo.

Part of me can’t believe this is still such an issue 25 years after I graduated from high school. Part of me knows it’s not going away any time soon. In the mean time, I’m glad Ceara’s gotten one thing out of high school – she’s learned to stand up for what’s important to her. That’s probably more valuable than just about anything on her transcript. Good luck to her.