Grown-Ups Are the Problem Here

Interesting article in the New York Times, partly about rebellious teenagers and dress codes, partly about sexual orientation and gender identity, and mostly about stuffy grown-ups who are trying to force their outdated hang-ups on young people who are growing up to live in a future world:

BY now, most high school dress codes have just about done away with the guesswork.

Girls: no midriff-baring blouses, stiletto heels, miniskirts.

Boys: no sagging pants, muscle shirts.

But do the math.

“Rules” + “teenager” = “challenges.”

If the skirt is an acceptable length, can a boy wear it?

Can a girl attend her prom in a tuxedo?

In recent years, a growing number of teenagers have been dressing to articulate — or confound — gender identity and sexual orientation. Certainly they have been confounding school officials, whose responses have ranged from indifference to applause to bans.

Last week, a cross-dressing Houston senior was sent home because his wig violated the school’s dress code rule that a boy’s hair may not be “longer than the bottom of a regular shirt collar.” In October, officials at a high school in Cobb County, Ga., sent home a boy who favored wigs, makeup and skinny jeans. In August, a Mississippi student’s senior portrait was barred from her yearbook because she had posed in a tuxedo.

Other schools are more accepting of unconventional gender expression. In September, a freshman girl at Rincon High School in Tucson who identifies as male was nominated for homecoming prince. Last May, a gay male student at a Los Angeles high school was crowned prom queen. Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?

I'd say there are two ways to handle school dress, and no middle ground. One, schools can have uniforms. There are lots of good reasons for it, it eliminates a lot of hassle at home and at school, in the classroom and on the playground, it's clear and easy to enforce. You wear the uniform and that's it, it's a perfect way to raise a generation of robotic conformists. If the uniform calls for white socks and you wear gray ones you go home and change. Two, you let students dress themselves. Again, lot of good reasons, young people learn to make choices, to express themselves and develop as individuals, to accept others who are different.

But some schools seem to think you can let students choose their clothing within some vague limits. What are "sagging pants?" How much of your butt-crack has to show before you are cited for breaking the rules -- and then if you just pull your pants up while the teacher's looking, are you okay? What is "long hair?" "Too much make-up?" A school that tries to manage such rules, it seems to me, is going to find itself with nothing but headaches.

Beyond teenage rebellion there is a more serious question in this article, of course, and that is, how should a school manage the presence of students who violate traditional gender norms? The examples given in this NYT piece are good ones -- the transgender boy, originally known as a girl, who runs for homecoming prince, the gay boy who becomes prom queen. Interestingly and obviously, the students featured in these examples are popular and well-liked by their peers, even if they are unique or unusual young people. I have seen this in my own children's lives, they have friends who are gay and transgender, and it doesn't seem to matter. It's just a fact of life for them, Carrie has changed her name and is a boy now, it doesn't seem difficult or even awkward except when you try to explain it to your parents.

It seems to me the school administrators are causing this problem, they aren't responding to a problem. If you allow students the freedom to dress themselves then, as this article points out, you will have to accept that students who are allowed to express themselves may choose to express themselves in surprising ways. (Most American schools that have uniforms are religious schools where attitudes about sexual orientation and gender identity are handed down by authority.) There has been a revolution in the way Western society thinks about sex and gender in general, and part of it has been the acceptance of nuance in gender expression. Women wear pants these days, did you notice? Sex and gender are not really binary as the older generations believed.

The solution sounds easy, though it will be hard to implement. Schools could support students who choose to develop their personalities in unique ways, whether it has anything to do with sex and gender or not. There has to be some limit on aggressiveness, and some limit on expressions that genuinely cause disorder in the school environment -- and I don't mean that a bunch of bullies are teasing some kid for being different, I mean the disruption is caused by the student in question. I don't think our society is really suffering from a plague of nonconformity. Cultivating a positive sense of oneself as a unique person could be part of the educational system's mission.

Pretty good statement here:

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules.

“This generation is really challenging the gender norms we grew up with,” said Diane Ehrensaft, an Oakland psychologist who writes about gender. “A lot of youths say they won’t be bound by boys having to wear this or girls wearing that. For them, gender is a creative playing field.” Adults, she added, “become the gender police through dress codes.”

Gender as a "creative playing field." Pretty good.

Letting -- and even helping -- transgender young people transition to the gender they are most comfortable with certainly will not lead to mass confusion; instead the result is that a adolescent gets to be who they really are in an environment that supports them. Their peers can handle it, now we need to get the adults on board.