Student Suspended for wearing a dress.

[BabyRaptor]

Welcome to the US, where anything that doesn't scream "hot-blooded heterosexual" must immediately be condemned and burned in a fire.

This is the land of the free if you're a rich white Christian male. Anyone else gets whatever scraps they "deserve."

 

[ultimateownage]

That dude's mum sounds awesome!
Eh, he went in to school wearing a dress. I'm fine with the three day suspension, considering people in my school got a three day suspension for smiling during a class because they were apparently laughing at a boy getting bullied.
More than the 3 day suspension is stupid, though. He didn't harm anything but his dignity and reputation.

 

[minimacker]

Well, everyone has the right to think what the want, wear what they want and so forth. I don't know why this happened, since the school has literally broken the law.

Y U NO SUE?

 

[Owlslayer]

Hm... Well, i seriously doubt that this would happen in schools where i live, but I'm not gonna test it out either way.
Still, i find it quite odd to go to school wearing a dress (as a male, that is), but if he wanted to, then i wouldn't stop him.
Though i can imagine a guy wearing a dress could get bullied and laughed at pretty hard. You really have to have quite a lot of confidence to pull this off, so i guess kudos to that guy.
Also, the captcha (or whatever it's called these days) said "walk free", so...
Coincidence? I think yes!

 

[Reallink]

Ok, so men and women are different. And saying that you don't care doesn't change how society acts. Gender roles may not be important to you, but just saying 'I don't see people differently' doesn't make it apply to everyone. Guys are perceived to need to be strong/skilled etc, and even if you don't care about that, people are getting it force fed by various media that we consume on a regular basis. Social apathy does not change a situation.

As to my opinion, I think that if the kid was acting like an idiot and broke rules, he should be suspended. If he was just acting like he would normally and did nothing wrong, the school is at fault. But the issues that are being brought up are important and need to be discussed. The kid didn't question gender roles, but he did create a scenario where it was an apparent issue. I think it is probably equally important to ask if inferred rules, such as boys not wearing womens clothes can/should be enforced.

 

[Shoqiyqa]

"It wasn't in the rules. There was no rule saying men can't wear dresses. They do have the right to sue. And NO public school should have the right to gender restrict clothing. That just crosses a line."

Do you have the rules, and know this for a fact?

Or does the school have the right to determine offensive or disruptive modes of dress and act appropriately, whether they agree with your definition of 'gender related'?

Also, I would point out that if you've been suspended for this before, and didn't attempt and legal action *then*, exactly what basis do you have *now*?

The hat was against a printed rule in the rules he accepted.

The dress is not against any printed rule anywhere in any of the rules he accepted.

How is this not clearly different?

As for make-up, Eric wears make-up in The Crow and I wouldn't say he's cross-dressing there.

...

Why does it look like the USA is fucked up nowadays...It was always about freedoms and enforcing your right and yet suddenly this all looks like communism but replace Stalin with corporations and the secret police are terrorists from another country(world maybe ).

Communism is exactly the same as monopoly capitalism. Halliburton-Disney-Dow-AA-MegaPharm-McDonalds-Dominos-Diebold-NewsCorp now owns everything, allots you a place to live and a job, provides creche facilities and canteen facilities and may even, if you're lucky, let you get your employee ID card that allows you to go off-site for a while. The President's the President. The CEO's the Prime Minister. The Board of Directors is the Party. The Chairman of the board is the Party Chairman. The names may be different, but the effects are the same. Go too far left or right and you find yourself in the top-right corner. Go too far down and you get shunted right by bastards. Somewhere in the middle, we do alright.

...

Meh. If he wants to get his ass kicked at school, who are we to stop him?

Meh. If some girl wants to get covered in acid, hacked with machetes and set on fire, who are we to stop her?

 

[Kune35]

Comon, I'm all for gay rights and being whomever the hell you want to be, but even I think its stupid for a male to wear a dress to school. First off dresses by their nature are designed for the female FORM, so its not "sexist" or whatever to say no to men in stupid dresses. He did it for attention, knowingly at the expense of accepted norms, which makes HIM the sexist.

 

[Your Fearless Captain]

Ah, the US. Land of the free indeed. This is fucking disgraceful that people still exclude other people simply for doing something different. And just to put this on a flat line for the school, you think that it being a dare from someone else it would have been all fine, considering he wasn't doing it to simply wear feminine clothing.

Ugh, I hate this world at the moment.

Edit: And just because of the nine years of being on the net, I finally got first post!

Well.. he KIND of was.. he wore makeup and a hat, even though hats are against EVERY schools dress code I have ever seen. The makeup is a bit of a grey area, but I recall during Halloween, me and a co-drum line member decided to use that spray can stuff that makes your hair colored. I cant remember if i picked red or green, but we each picked one of those colors, and in all my classes I got smirks by the teachers, but only in band class did the teacher literally throw us out of class for the hour. It was TEMPORARY hair spray that was colored, and yet somehow we were kicked out of class for the day, even on Halloween. We weren't wearing anything else "offensive" that day. Although, the same instructor had kicked a guy out of band entirely for shaving HALF his head. It was like the right side of his head had hair, and the left side was just totally shaved. And this was back in the 90's before "emo-esque" hair was "in style". Realy quick, this is just an opinion, but OMG, emo hair looks like it NEEDS to be cut, but they intentionally make it grow that way! And I had long hair back then, so that is saying something, but this was the "alternative" days when looking like a stoner was cool. Back then it would have been considered "gothic" maybe? But he was a good wind player, so it was a bit of a loss for the band in our up comming competitions. However, you know how it goes, people judge people by their appearance instead of their personailty, and therefore it was considered an "okay" move by the school.

You can wear hats at my public high school. Some people where allowed to wear it school pictures. There fairly lax about the dress code.

 

[Hatchet90]

Are people really debating the morality of this situation? The dumbass wore a dress and got suspended because of dress code. I'm sure he's lucky he didn't get his ass kicked, and I'm damn sure that this wasn't some crusade. It's distracting and downright weird for a man or boy to be in a dress, I don't give a crap who or what you are. Save that stuff for when you're not at school.

 

[LightspeedJack]

Authority + Prejudice = Bad times.

 

[Cap'n Ninja]

I saw a similar article in the newspaper a couple of months back about an eleven year old boy who wore a skirt to school because shorts were taken out of school uniform and students weren't allowed to wear them any more. The boy wore a skirt to show the rule was silly. The difference is though, that the kid got congratulated, and the teachers thought it was clever. The school board is going to look into the issue next year. They're still not allowed to wear shorts though, because it's against school rules.
Oh the differences between England and America...

OT: I think it's unfair what happened to this kid, but it could all have been avoided if he'd cleared it with the brass first. They couldn't have objected, and his mother could have proved to him that high-heels are the invention of the devil when he was in a bad mood with women's feet, and should be removed from all of existence, though they do look pretty.

Are people really debating the morality of this situation? The dumbass wore a dress and got suspended because of dress code.

The point is that it wasn't against the dress code. The crusading aspect is something they've done I assume for publicity or something. There weren't any rules against it.

 

[General_Potatoes]

"I found that very offensive. They told him he couldn't be him," said Leible.

So he wants to be a transvestite? Eh, if he wants too.

 

[MrFluffy-X]

they should be able to wear what they want, but i gotta be honest...I hate people like that

 

[MazdaXR]

Over here (england) all public sector schools have to be all inclusive, as long as a something isnt open in hatred or truely offensive to another. for example a school near where I live isolated a student for shaving his head, the got burnt big time by the regulatory body for doing this as it was not being all inclusive, however if the boy had say Shit shaved into his head then they would have had ground by which to isolate him.

 

[Woodsey]

He only wore the pants to be a troll.

If he was actually gender-queer or a cross dresser, I think it would have been different

I'm not agreeing with the school, but I'm not buying his and his mom's bullshit about it being a moral crusade. Fucking attention whores.

The only thing that comes close to "moral crusading" is "its not in the rules so all they're doing is saying he can't be himself."

His mother even said she agreed with it last time because what he'd done was against the written rules.

 

[OutforEC]

As much as I love the fact that he was expressing himself through his clothing, I'm assuming the school has a policy against 'causing undue distractions' while in class, and that's probably why they're legally able to discriminate against the kid.

 

[Brandon237]

Everyone should wear what they want. If it breaks school rules (like the hat thing) then fine, but if the dress doesn't break school rules then he should be aloud to wear it if he wants.

This, if I were the principle and found out about this I would just laugh it off. I mean suspension, really? If he is not seriously disrupting the other pupils, let him go ahead and be mad. Madness makes the world interesting. The day they ban insanity is the day I start killing sane people.

 

[Noctangelus]

snip

The problem with these arguments "If that's the worst that happens to us then why are we bitching" or "well people have it way worse in other places" is that by that logic, if you live in a country where you have shelter and enough to eat and you aren't routinely beaten or raped by authority figures. you lose the right to complain about anything, because "well, at least you don't live in Sudan"

Your "logic" fails completely, we are not talking about having shelter and food to eat, or people being beaten and raped. We are talking about a boy wearing a dress to HIGH SCHOOL. He is not homeless, he is not starving, and it doesn't sound like he was beaten or raped. If he was beaten or raped, then I would support him in his fight against being beaten or raped.

My actual point was that this is NOT the worst thing we have to worry about, and in fact we should be more concerned with the "routinely beaten or raped" issues. Of course in America, our equivalent issues would be along the lines of substandard education and child abuse.


I stand by my argument(which I feel I did not convey the point well enough in my first post), and I am not even a little concerned that the 1 boy out of 10,000 does not get to wear dresses to school. Hell, I would even support him if they were intruding on his personal life and telling him he couldn't wear dresses outside of school and school functions.

I never actually said that this was on par with being beaten or raped, my point was that you shouldn't let the fact that this is not as bad as other people's problems stop you from being annoyed about it. Granted I probably wouldn't waste a lot of effort campaigning on this kid's behalf and I'm aware that he was just doing it for lulz, but the disproportionate reaction to a boy wearing a dress, which according to the OP was not forbidden by the school rules, points to a real problem with discrimination in society.

 

[DefinitelyPsychotic]

At my high school last year, everybody had this huge plan to wear pajamas the next day to school, and the Vice Principal suspended all of the 100 students that did.

Not really surprised. Besides, cross-dressers are just plain creepy.