School Fashion Show Canceled Because of Gender Fears

A third-grade fashion show planned as part of a Women’s History Month assignment has been canceled because of some parents’ rigidity over gender roles.

Teacher Tonya Uibel asked her students at Maude Wilkins Elementary School to dress up in women’s costumes from some period in history, reported FOX News. She was clear in her letter to parents about the assignment that boys did not have to wear dresses.

"If your child is a young man, he does not have to wear a dress or skirt,” her letter explained, “as there are many time periods where women wore jeans, pants and trousers. However, each child must be able to express what time period their outfit is from. Most of all, your child should have fun creating their outfit and learning about how women's clothing has changed!"

One mother says her son came home in tears after getting the assignment, however, afraid that other children would make fun of him. She contacted the teacher. Now, although the school principal says she received no complaints about the assignment, the school superintendent has stopped it. Students will now simply draw a picture of a woman in an historical costume.

FOX News, not surprisingly, is adding fuel to the flames in their coverage by including an image of women in very feminine, early 20th-century dresses and the caption, “Some suggested styles for elementary school boys at a now canceled fashion show at New Jersey's Maude Wilkins Elementary.” They clearly didn’t read Uibel’s comments about pants.

Had the girls been asked to dress in male costumes, however, I doubt anyone would have complained. There is clearly a double standard at work here, when it is more acceptable for girls to dress as boys than the reverse, as Emily Hartl notes at After Ellen.

I offer the cowgirl picture here as proof that it really isn’t hard to find outfits that both represent women’s roles and would be pretty easy for most boys to accept. Hartl similarly found a great picture of World War II Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP’s), whose leather jackets and military boots are as tough and masculine-looking as anything.

At the same time, I have to think it would be freeing for the boys to wear dresses should they so choose, in a safe setting where other male classmates are doing so as well. Even for those who are not LGBT, it could be a way to be a bit subversive, if only for a little while.

To be fair, the son of the woman who first contacted the teacher has Asperger’s Syndrome. His mother told FOX News this makes him very sensitive to ridicule. That may be true, and if so, the parent and teacher should work together to develop an alternate assignment. Canceling it for the entire class seems extreme — doubly so because FOX News cited no other parents at the school who had objected. They had to go over to Pennsylvania to find one mom who complained to the New Jersey school principal after seeing the first mom’s Facebook post about the incident.

The mother who first complained also pointed out that the fashion show had been scheduled for this Friday, when the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is holding its annual Day of Silence to raise awareness about anti-LGBT bullying. The innuendo, it appears, was that the teacher was somehow trying to push GLSEN’s “homosexual agenda” on the class. There seems to be no evidence, though, that the teacher was in fact connecting the fashion show to GLSEN’s observance.

It is ironic, however, that the mother chose to get upset about a gender-based costume assignment that coincided with a day commemorating the victims of gender-identity- and sexual-orientation-based violence. To cite just a few examples: Lawrence King, a 15-year-old middle school student in California, was shot and killed by a classmate in 2008 because of his sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2009, 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover and 11-year-old Jaheem Herrera of Georgia each committed suicide after months of taunting about their perceived sexual orientation and gender identity.

Could it be that a day of dressing as women would have given the class not only an appreciation for women’s historical roles, but also for any non-gender conforming classmates, now or in the future? Seems to me that’s a lesson worth teaching.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons