When A Boy Wears A Skirt to School

The NYTimes asks Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School? But the story finds they already are. From this paragraph you’d almost think it’s a southern phenomenon:

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.

The wild west is still free:

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.

The story finds that adults have become “the gender police through dress codes” and that “dress is always code, particularly for teenagers eager to telegraph evolving identities.” But even the kids apparently don’t know the code:

Often a student’s clothes, intended as a fashion statement, can be misread as a billboard about sexuality. In recent years, “emo” style has moved from punk fringe almost to pop mainstream, with boys wearing heavy eyeliner, body-hugging T-shirts and floppy hair dyed black, to emulate singers like Adam Lambert and Pete Wentz.

“The emo kids get a lot of grief,” said Marty Hulsey, a guidance counselor at a school near Auburn, Ala. “Even teachers say things and I had to stop it. One child came to me who was an emo kid and said he was accused of being gay but that he had a girlfriend.” Mr. Hulsey said he affirmed the boy’s right to wear the clothes that expressed his taste.

I don’t envy school administrators this challenge.