Celebrate Explicit Legal Pants Day (except in Mississippi schools)

YA author Scott Westerfeld has a great post about Ceara Sturgis, the top student at a Mississippi high school who saw every mention of her purged from her senior yearbook because she is a lesbian. Scott puts the fight to dress how you choose and express your gender identity in your own way into historical context, noting that this year marks the centenary of "Explicit Legalization of Pants in Kansas! (Otherwise known as ELPK Day.)"

Of course, it's easy to laugh at this, and reassuring to think that we no longer live in a world where women have to get legal advice for something so simple as wearing men's clothes, right?
Well, um, wrong.
Because just a few days ago, on almost exactly the 100th anniversary of ELPK Day, a student named Ceara Sturgis has found herself erased from her school yearbook. Why? For wearing a tuxedo in her senior photograph. And when I say erased, it's not just that the school administration wouldn't print the photograph. No, they actually deleted every mentioned of Ceara from the yearbook, even though she's an honor student, the goalie of the soccer team, and plays trumpet in the band.
By the way, she's also a lesbian. So wearing this tuxedo wasn't about flouting some imaginary dress code, but about who she is. That's what clothing means in all these conflicts.
After all, it's the trousers that our nameless widow wore while gardening that said, "Hey, I'm the head of this family. My labor is what keeps us fed. Deal with it." And the uniform that Deryn wears that says, "I'm as good an airman as any boy, so you can all get stuffed." And it's the tuxedo you wear in your yearbook photo that says, "I am who I am, and four years in your school hasn't changed me. So I win."
So, yes, these Explicitly Legal Pants are very important. Because even now, a hundred years after ELPK Day, we still have small-minded people around to tell us what we have to wear, and trying to tell us who we can and cannot be.
I hope she sues the pants off them.

Why Pants Are Legal in Kansas

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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wylkyn

Let me see if I can figure out the timeline here…
-Student didn’t like having to wear a dress for her photo.
-She challenged to policy.
-Her challenge was denied.
-She wore the tux anyway.
-The school didn’t print the picture in the yearbook.
-She was outraged, and her mom enabled her outrage by claiming discrimination despite the apparent contradiction between lesbian and cross-dressing issues.
-Someone on BoingBoing shared the outrage and was quick to pass along the myth that the school was trying to erase the victim from existence because of her sexuality. No mention of the lesbian vs. cross-dresser aspect.
-BoingBoing continues to promote the myth of identity-erasure, despite the fact that the original story has clarified that the girl does indeed appear in the yearbook.
-Comments continue to express outrage that students have to follow rules in school, probably due to no real understanding of the underlying reasons for these rules.

I get the first 5 items of this timeline. I even get the fact that a high school girl threw a tantrum about having to conform to a school policy. After that is when it became a bit overblown and hyperbolic. This isn’t about a girl being persecuted because she’s a lesbian. It isn’t about a school trying to erase her, or stifle their students. It is about an apparently conservative school setting a dress code for their own reasons, and sticking to their policy.

I’m guessing that their reasons are probably a combination of outdated ideas and a desire not to have to sift through every senior photo to make sure that some sort of objectionable T-shirt slogan or whatever would slip through. The one parent complaining about pants is not as big a threat as the 100 parents complaining about the “Zombie Jesus” T-shirt. Who knows for sure, though? Maybe the school is just trying to make one lesbian student suffer because they hate homosexuals. It’s not impossible. It just seems not as likely as the “this is our policy” scenario.

I’m not supporting the school here. I don’t think clothes are such a huge deal. But I get why some people would rather remove them from the equation using policies such as this one, or school uniforms and such. Yes, they stifle a student’s ability to express himself/herself through clothing. Tragic…sure. But it is possible that the school has more important considerations than whether a student should be allowed to cross-dress in a yearbook photo.
Flyne

This is just a friendly reminder that in this case, as in almost all similar cases, the school probably didn’t care about her sexual orientation. Rather, it’s almost certain that the school had a policy of requiring women to wear skirts and men to wear pants, and when she failed to comply someone, somewhere, took it as a threat to their authority. From there things escalate. But this is not about discrimination any more than it would be had she wanted to wear a Halloween mask – she made a choice which violated policy and someone decided to enforce the policy rather than decide if the policy needed to be revisited.

Aside: why do I never hear stories in a similar vein, only with men wearing skirts?
Anonymous

To the person asking why they don’t see articles about boys wearing dresses, here is an article about a school diciplining a boy for wearing a kilt. Guess where: Jackson, MS!

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/22/national/main1159371.shtml
apoxia

It seems strange they would think banning a woman’s image based on her wearing a tuxedo is somehow more acceptable than simply being openly homophobic. How is either of those options acceptable at all?

Strangely, my mother told me about how in bible college in the late seventies in Perth, Australia all women had to wear skirts or dresses at all times – no pants allowed. In winter the women would wrap themselves in wool blankets in protest. Apparently the ban was lifted shortly after she graduated.
- Anonymous
  
  In TN, in the middle 60s, women were not allowed to wear pants on campus, unless it got below 10 degree. When I was in high school (early 60s), in northern Minnesota, we were not permitted to wear slacks at all.
Anonymous

In the early 70′s I went to an all girls high school.

We were not allowed to wear pants to school. We had a pants rebellion one day, teachers and students came to school in pants to protest the policy. It was changed as a result.

They still measured skirts. You had to kneel on the floor and the skirt had to no more than 2″ off the floor.

Calhoun, formerly The Calhoun School for Young Ladies, is now a very liberal school on Manhattan’s upper west side.
- CeeDee
  
  Ha! I went to a Catholic middle school in the mid 90′s. There was a policy of no pants for girls unless it was below 30 degrees (F). It was a humid environment, so 31 degrees doesn’t exactly feel nice when you have to wait for your bus at the corner of the street for 30 minutes. Now, this was also in “tha deep south,” (Louisiana) so it may have something to do with the idiocracy. Or it may have been the whole Catholic school thing. Either way, I’m glad to be far away from both of those now.
Heartfruit

“I hope she sues the pants off them.”

This!

Although I wouldn’t blame her for a moment if she wants to walk away and never think about anyone involved ever again. If she’d wore jeans and a paint splattered t-shirt to photo day I could maybe understand the justification for keeping her photo out of the yearbook. But she dressed in an appropriate manner for the day. And the rest is just petty.
Anonymous

The news story I read said she’d been at the school K-12, so it’s more like 13 years hasn’t changed her. Too bad the school administration hasn’t learned anything in 13 years.
Anonymous

Of course I’m amused by the “especially if she’s were the head of the house.” Implying that it would be less somehow less ok if she still had a husband.
AllisonWunderland

Allison Wunderland is MALE. Just for the record . . .
tmccartney

At this point, it’s clear that anyone who makes their gay kid go to school in Mississippi is just engaged in child cruelty.

Is the Miss. ACLU the busiest in the country?
- fxq
  
  (I’m not trying to trash MS, I’m just trying to be honest to my Liberal perspective and relate what I know because I live on the border.)
  
  The MS ACLU can’t pay talented people enough to work in that hell-hole of a state. Seriously, we need to start a fund that gets gay, lesbian, and trans-gendered kids out of there.
  
  The really sad thing is what happens to gay, lesbian, and trans-gendered kids of color in MS. For them, coming out of the closet is like assigning yourself a death sentence.
  
  Every once in a while I meet a gay, lesbian, or trans-gendered college student from MS. Each and every one of them will tell you a story of a friend that didn’t manage to escape.
  
  Gitmo is a better place than MS for these kids.
  - ravenword
    
    Seriously, we need to start a fund that gets gay, lesbian, and trans-gendered kids out of there.
    
    The Point Foundation does basically that. http://www.pointfoundation.org/
Kevin Kenny

I still predict that we’ll see a news story about the school withholding the woman’s diploma, refusing to release her transcript, or releasing her transcript with her record defaced. I’d love to be wrong.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  Dude, I’m still really hoping you’re wrong.
  
  I’m just going to say this once: Mississippi, grow the fuck up. Singling out and discriminating against gay kids is childish and petty, and will lose your school districts a lot of money they can’t afford to lose. It’s your property tax dollars, do you really want those dollars squandered away paying off lawsuit judgments and settlements because of the petty actions of a few incredibly small-minded school administrators?
  
  ELPK Day: I celebrate it every day I go to work as I have to wear pants (and steel toe boots).
Ambiguity

So wearing this tuxedo wasn’t about flouting some imaginary dress code, but about who she is.

Of course I fully support this woman, and think that what the school did was inane and abhorrent.

That said, I hope that over time we as a culture can move towards expressing “who we are” in much more meaningful ways. I’m really uncomfortable with how often expressing individuality comes down to what products we buy and use. Clothes are a commodity, after all, and the longer we self-identify with the trappings of consumerism, the longer we keep ourselves disempowered to express who we really are.

If I had no music to like, no clothes to wear, no computer platform to prefer, who would I be? I think that’s an important question, and one that is hardly ever asked.
- arikol
  
  Ambiguity, in this case it’s worth thinking about that it is by no means certain that she was “expressing who she is” OUTWARD by wearing a tux. I say that meaning that she was not necessarily saying “hi, I’m a lesbian” or making a point at all, just coming dressed nicely in a way she is comfortable with, which is expressing who she is TO HERSELF.
  Formal wear may have been mandatory, and she may feel uncomfortable in a dress, but yet wanted to be dressed nicely and feel special on a special occasion (most of us want to do that). A tux may be a formal version of her everyday clothes, and a much closer representation of her self image than a dress could be. In the end it is about feeling comfortable with yourself, IMO.
  
  Of course, pretty much everyone who read boingboing seems to agree that the school officials are amazingly cruel and inept to a young person they should be supporting rather than breaking her down.
  
  And I’m half tempted to buy a man-skirt of some sorts (kilt, utilikilt or something like that) just as my small personal protest of unfair silliness like this. Airing out the dangly bits would just be a bonus.
- Snig
  
  I hear what you say, and I agree what we intrinsically are is much more important than the objects we wear. That said, as a pretty vanilla male breeder, I’d be uncomfortable if I had to wear a dress. Especially if that was the iconic photograph that all my peers had of me as a keepsake. Even if everyone else around me was Scottish. It doesn’t mesh up with who I am in my head.
  - Anonymous
    
    Huh? Vanilla is hermaphroditic, with stamens and carpels in the same flowers. Which probably explains why you’ve been able to breed it with only “males”, but not why you haven’t noticed the fruits.
- ripley
  
  Ambiguity, that makes as little sense as asking “what would we say out loud if we were completely alone in the world with nobody to talk to”
  
  It’s not about buying, because you can wear things you don’t buy. If someone is choosing to communicate only the price or other kinds of status that I don’t care about, then I find that sad. But expressing yourself through what you wear is a profoundly human and wonderful thing. There is no culture and no society in the world that doesn’t adorn itself in some way. How we present ourselves to the world and to each other is part of who we are. Choosing to dress in a way that doesn’t stand out, or choosing to let someone else choose, is still a choice on how to adorn yourself. There’s nothing sad about it. We are social, physical beings, not brains floating in the void, and we communicate with each other using all available senses. I think it would be sad if we didn’t!
  - Ambiguity
    
    Ambiguity, that makes as little sense as asking “what would we say out loud if we were completely alone in the world with nobody to talk to”
    
    It’s not about buying, because you can wear things you don’t buy. If someone is choosing to communicate only the price or other kinds of status that I don’t care about, then I find that sad. But expressing yourself through what you wear is a profoundly human and wonderful thing.
    
    I think you’re right in a theoretical/philosophical way, but in a practical, real sense so much of what we choose to “express ourselves” ie inextricably linked to the trappings–and at times detritus–of consumer life.
    
    There are really no black+whites, it’s all a matter of emphasis. We all have hair styles, for example (even if we’re shaved bald), and there are ways of wearing our hair that make us more comfortable, and ways that make us less comfortable. There is no problem with that, and as you say, it is very “human.” As others have pointed out (for example, snig @23) there are styles of dress that any one of us would feel uncomfortable wearing, although just what that is varies from person to person (I live in a small Appalachian town, and there is one guy who always walks around in a kilt. No one really knows why, and it would make me uncomfortable, but it seems to work for him).
    
    None of this is an issue, and a sane, just system doesn’t go out of its way to make people do uncomfortable things just to ensure conformance.
    
    As I hope (and think) I made clear in my initial post, this isn’t about her; this is an attempt to open up the discussion of who and what we are, and to open up the discussion on how we express this. And so that I don’t sound too agreeable or middle-of-the-road: I think it is explicitly a bad thing that many people are so enmeshed with their role as consumer that the most “profound” way they can think of expressing themselves is though the clothes they buy or the music they buy (or download, as the case may be). But I don’t assert the girl in the story is this way: I really don’t know enough about her.
    
    For the most part we never grow out of it. The tee shirts we choose to wear become the cars we drive, which in turn transform into the neighborhoods we live in. “Linux guys” look down on “Windows users,” “Windows users” look down on “Mac fnabois,” and “Mac fanbois” look down on everyone. Etc. etc.
    
    And not to pick on you, but comparing the question of who we are when separated from our stuff and our preferences to “what would we say out loud if we were completely alone in the world with nobody to talk to” displays (IMO) this kind of fundamental confusion. I’m not my stuff. I’m not my likes. I have stuff, and I have likes, but they don’t define me.
    
    So what are we when we’re stripped of the external trappings and how do we express that? That is a very complex issue, and one which can’t really be addressed in a blog comment thread. That’s why I said what I said in my original post, and I chose my words carefully. I think it is an important question, and I think that it is problematical that we rarely even ask it, much less chew on some of the possible answers.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      I’m not my stuff. I’m not my likes. I have stuff, and I have likes, but they don’t define me.
      
      She’s a high school student. Even the Buddha had to pick a prom outfit when he was a teenager.
      - Xopher
        
        Oh, do tell us the story of the Buddha going to prom! My sense was that he became Enlightened AFTER high school, but I really haven’t studied his life the way you have. I suppose it might have gone something like this:
        
        THE BUDDHA: I wish to attend the prom.
        HS ADMIN: OK, who’s your date?
        THE BUDDHA: I have none. I have released myself from all Earthly desires which may bind me to this plane.
        HS ADMIN: Huh? What’s that got to do with the price of…uh, anything?
        THE BUDDHA: Girlfriends, and thus also prom dates, come from desire. As I have no desires, I have no prom date. I will attend in my pure and solitary form.
        HS ADMIN: Well, you need a date to go to the prom. No stags. Itsa rules.
        THE BUDDHA: It appears that you discriminate against the Enlightened. Perhaps the ACLU will be interested.
        HS ADMIN: Oh, all right. But you have to wear a tux.
        THE BUDDHA: I will wear my saffron robes.
        HS ADMIN: (moans) Come on, kid! Can’t you wear, like, a saffron tie and cummerbund or something? Even a whole saffron tux? You’re killing me here!
        THE BUDDHA: You have learned what I’ve come to teach.
        HS ADMIN: Wha?
        THE BUDDHA: Suffering is the central fact of human existence.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        My sense was that he became Enlightened AFTER high school
        
        That was the point. He was in the warrior caste and probably actually killed people. But he lightened up later in life.
    - robulus
      
      Ambiguity said “As I hope (and think) I made clear in my initial post, this isn’t about her; this is an attempt to open up the discussion of who and what we are, and to open up the discussion on how we express this.”
      
      So you’re not interested in the post or the subject, you want to talk about your pet central observation that we in the West are enmeshed in a consumerist society that abstracts our sense of self into commodities for the financial gain of the powerful.
      
      I think in wedging your axe into this thread you’ve ignored the fact that our dress has been an integral part of how we define ourselves since we somehow managed to overcome the Neanderthals.
      
      Communist society was particularly well known for using dress sense to define social homogenity, it is quite clear that our clothing and sense of self are intertwined in ways that are disctinct from consumer culture.
  - TimDrew
    
    I find this is a fascinating aspect of human societies, and an indicator that we have not strayed that far from tribal thinking; the cultural standardization of identity-roles through uniform-wearing or adornment is particularly strong here. I think she wasn’t singled out because she wore a tux, it was because she didn’t follow the unspoken, but established rules of the tribe.
    
    It’s amazing how, without clothes, we are generally pretty individualized (look at Some of Ryan McGinley’s work for an example). Often, it seems to me that wearing clothes makes us more uniform in appearance, rather than less.
- Nahid Yazidzade
  
  Um… you miss the point. She’s “expressing herself” by wearing clothing that she likes. She doesn’t wear dresses – this isn’t stunt-photography, it’s her personal clothing. She shouldn’t have to wear what for her is drag because you think we need to be beyond having social standards. I am of a similar bent – stick me in a dress and I’d be angry and deeply uncomfortable, because when I dress up, I wear *pants*.
- Anonymous
  
  While I totally agree with your comment about materialism, I think it’s a non-sequitur here. I consider what this young woman did to be a form of political performance art that challenged the oppressive morays of her society. And based on the negative response she got and the personal consequences she suffered, this is a classic case of speaking truth to power. This isn’t about defining yourself by your possessions (a tuxedo?), it’s about whether the state tell you what you can and can’t wear? Or, more relevant, who you can and can’t marry.
jjsaul

So what constitutes a dress? Would they have accepted a burka? How about Pope’s vestments?
- Anonymous
  
  The idea of butch-identifying lesbians wearing men’s liturgical vestments to circumvent gendered dress rules has me literally lol-ing.
aixwiz

I really don’t understand the problem a Mississippi high school has with a girl wearing a tux. We see people of both genders in business suits (with pants!), etc everyday and never give it a thought. This “girls must wear dresses” attitude isn’t helping anyone that wants freedom and liberty to dress how they wish.

I once wore a kilt to school and no one noticed. If I can wear a kilt in public she should be able to wear a tux!

(NOTE: I know a kilt is not a dress, but both can have a rather nasty draft!)
BritSwedeGuy

Conversely, most men working in offices in the UK are still required to wear shirt and tie, in one instance I know of a “business belt” is required – WTF?!
- Anonymous
  
  I’m pretty sure they might have seen BONES a few times. Seeley J. Booth has some, uh, inventive belts for a person stuck in a otherwise very conservative attire.
Anonymous

She’s lucky that her parents support her.

When I was in highschool, I didn’t appear in the yearbook because I couldn’t face the tux-vs-dress fight and nobody at all had my back. I went to prom with my girlfriend, but in a dress. I was lucky, I guess, that they let me do that much in the 90′s. But I couldn’t take the fight the extra step to wear a tux. Because even then I knew it was more ok to be gay if you conformed to gender roles. And I could do it for one night, but I couldn’t be pictured in the year book that way. My mom had blown up an 8×10 photo of the last time I had long hair and kept it framed in the living room, on top of the piano. She would have loved a picture of me in a dress. I would have had to look at it every day and she would have gone on about and what a pretty girl I was etc etc etc.

All I needed to do, 13 years later, was start injecting testosterone and suddenly everybody thought the idea of me in a dress was as weird and uncomfortable as it had always felt to me. Not every lesbian cross dresses. And not every cross dresser will eventually be transsexual. But some will and we deserve to live our lives and participate just as much as anybody else.

The guy above who thinks this is just a dress code thing should spend years of his life being forced to pass as the wrong gender and then see how he feels about things. The policy is in place BECAUSE it forces people into normative gender roles BECAUSE they hate queers. It’s not a funny side effect, it’s the bloody point.
dainel

Why is it OK for women to wear pants but men cannot wear dresses? Or am I mistaken? Is there a lot of boys wearing dresses in the school pic?
Felton

I’m going to take a page out of the Pat Robertson playbook and say that God is punishing Mississippi for being such a hotbed of homophobia.
Xopher

Rats. Wishing to attend the prom is itself a desire. No, sorry, Antinous, the Buddha did NOT have to pick out a prom outfit.
donniebnyc

“By the way, she’s also a lesbian. So wearing this tuxedo wasn’t about flouting some imaginary dress code, but about who she is.”

I think it goes beyond that. In both cases, it isn’t merely about how she dressed or who she is, it is about control. It is a message to these women that in order to be accepted in our group you must dress our way, you must act our way, you must think our way. Failure to comply will be met with our most powerful retribution. In the case of Ms. Sturgis, it was denying her existence in the school.

This control of thought through the control of dress and/or actions has historically been the basis of all totalitarian regimes and most religions. Individuality is the enemy of all power structures that wish to control their members.
FnordX

Again Mississippi?

Really?
Yeraze

Wrong.. Read the full story : http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/index.php/site/comments/school_cuts_gay_student_photo_from_yearbook/

They removed her senior photo, that’s it. She’s still in the yearbook numerous other times (baby photos, clubs, etc).

Granted, it’s still stupid.
- donniebnyc
  
  The updated story only makes the school look more petty and ridiculous.
  - Yeraze
    
    I won’t argue with that.. It’s definitely petty & ridiculous..
    
    But better than thinking a school can completely erase someone from existence (a.la Soviet Russia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union) like people keep saying.
    - donniebnyc
      
      I said, “it was denying her existence in the school.”
      
      In English, this does not mean to “completely erase someone from existence.”
      
      I can only defend what I said if I actually said it.
      - Yeraze
        
        Sorry, That wasn’t aimed at you.. Aimed at the original article who said “every mention of her purged” (Cory) and “they actually deleted every mentioned of Ceara” (Quoted Text).
- Felton
  
  To clarify, that’s a corrected article, and it states that the original article did say that she was completely purged from the yearbook. But yes, boingboing might want to know about the correction.
Anonymous

I’m assuming the cover of anonymity for this one post: I’m less than impressed with the ACLU here in Mississippi. I’ve tried to contact them before about establishment clause issues here and they’ve never even returned a phone call or email.
Jonathan Badger

“By the way, she’s also a lesbian. So wearing this tuxedo wasn’t about flouting some imaginary dress code, but about who she is.”

No. Or maybe being a cross-dresser is *also* who she is, but I’d think most progressive people understand that homosexuality and cross-dressing are not the same thing.
- Felton
  
  Is it cross-dressing when a woman wears blue jeans, or does it just apply to formal wear?
  - Jonathan Badger
    
    Well, as the “Woman may wear trousers” article shows, the definition of “women’s clothing” has expanded over time (for some reason only in that direction; it isn’t that clothing is becoming gender neutral in general).
    
    However, a tux is still pretty clearly men’s clothing as of 2010. I would not be surprised if in 50 years this is no longer the case. But my point was that Cory seemed to be suggesting he believed in the old stereotype that considered homosexuals and cross-dressers to be the same. They aren’t.
    - Felton
      
      Point taken. :^)
- Felton
  
  Sorry, that probably came off as more snide than I intended. I was just thinking that she probably chose the tux because the dress would have seemed more like cross-dressing to someone who wasn’t comfortable or familiar with wearing a dress.
accordioncarol

In 1914 my great aunt and her sisters were about to be “churched” in a rural church in Georgia, because they were wearing “men’s britches” Their pappy (Daddy Bill) stood up and told the complaining members “Those girls are doing men’s work on the farm so they can wear those britches. I bought them for those girls” Hooray for Pappy. They got called out later for “bobbing” their hair too!
blueworld

Cory, I know you’re trying to raise awareness about bigoted school systems, but this way of reporting about it is buying into the same kind of discrimination. She was not removed for being a lesbian, but for her gender expression. She absolutely deserves protection for her choice (or nature) of gender expression, and the school rules are wrong. But being butch and being lesbian are not equivalent. To imply that they are erases the existence of femme lesbians and of butch or gender-neutral straight women.
Anonymous

“If she’d wore jeans and a paint splattered t-shirt to photo day I could maybe understand the justification for keeping her photo out of the yearbook.”

But I betthat if she had dressed like that they wouldn’t have had a problem.
valdis

@Jonathan Badger: “I’d think most progressive people understand…”

That wins for most contra-factual statement so far. If progressive people were involved, this incident wouldn’t have happened.
jackdavinci

Enforcing dress codes might pass legal scrutiny but erasing the existing of a student just won’t fly.
proletariat

Having been apart of the East High Gay Straight Alliance debacle myself, my heart goes out to these kids who have been forced into the public spotlight and forged by necessity into gender warriors for just living their lives authentically.
Kerouac

Okay, so there is some uncertainty about just what presence she was able to maintain in the yearbook, and maybe some uncertainty about how much of this is a dress code issue and how much is homophobia. But let’s find the common ground here. How about… Mississippi is fucked up. I think we can agree on that much, regardless of the details of Ms. Sturgis’ situation.
Anonymous

“By the way, she’s also a lesbian. So wearing this tuxedo wasn’t about flouting some imaginary dress code, but about who she is. That’s what clothing means in all these conflicts.”

Right, because being a lesbian automatically means you’re butch and really a man on the insides.

There are no lesbians who want to wear skirts, makeup and jewelry. None. They simply do not exist. A lesbian who dresses in a stereotypically “female” fashion cannot possibly be a *real* lesbian.

Is the sarcasm dripping enough?

Does this also mean that if I’m a ‘straight’ woman who wants to do something “out of character” like wear a tuxedo I am automatically a lesbian?
octopod

Editor Donna Ladd – Correction appended April 29, 2010
We apologize for the errors and thank the reader who pointed out the mischaracterization.

go old media.
Xenu

Every time I read about crap like this, I send another donation to the ACLU.

I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Daedalus

Oh, silly boingers.

Don’t you know that it’s against the rules to express yourself in school?

It’s “distracting” from the “education process” or somesuch. We need to ensure our children are exposed only to “appropriate” things. It also helps better prepare you for adult life, where if you don’t dress in some sort of suit/dress/pantsuit, you clearly do not fit in with the people whom you must impress to earn your paycheck, and disrupting their system makes you poor, and being poor means you are either stupid or lazy, because America is a meritocracy, so everyone who deserves money gets it.

If you don’t fit into prescribed gender roles, I don’t see how you plan on being a successful part of the system! And that’s what education is all about: making you a successful part of the system. That’s all that anyone should want. Obey, my little fleshy robots! It will be good for all of us!
Anonymous

I’m thinking the tux was just a good excuse for the lesbian-based denial.

But … it’s really a rare day when a woman is called a cross-dresser. That’s a term reserved for men. This case withstanding, a woman can wear any piece of men’s clothing with no repercussion at all. Should a man venture out in a skirt or blouse or even attempt to feel the sensuousness of a piece of lace — well, he’s considered to have a clinical condition knows as transvestism.

I’d love for the ridiculousness of this Mississippi case to stand on end the notion that clothes have a gender or sexual-identity attribute at all.
Paul T Spresser

I thought tuxedos for women were considered chic since Yves Saint Laurent introduced the idea in 1966 – in France anyway, I guess not yet in Mississippi!
Ito Kagehisa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_laws

I already wear “barbarian trousers” but I’m looking for a good pair of Tyrian purple slippers.
Donald Petersen

And here I was gonna celebrate Explicit Legal Pants Day by wearing the most explicit legal pants I own. I wonder if the chaps with the lace dropseat will qualify as legal?
WeightedCompanionCube

Cory, the yearbook story was corrected yesterday. Only her photo was dropped, she was not expunged from the yearbook. She even got HER OWN PAGE, wearing a tux.

Sturgis’ baby picture did appear in pages following the portrait pages with her name beside it, Rodriguez told the Jackson Free Press. She was also pictured several times in other sections of the yearbook, in soccer-team photographs, National Honor Society and other sections. “If she wasn’t in those groups, she wouldn’t be there,” her mother said. A photograph her mother took of her in her tuxedo appears on a page purchased by her family. “I don’t think there was anything they could do about that; I purchased that,” Rodriguez said of the bought senior page.

Either way… If she gender-identifies as male, and she wore a tux, she followed the dress code. :-)