Female student barred from her graduation for wearing pants

[jmowreader]

http://www.fayettevillenc.com/article?id=234819

Douglas Byrd High School senior Bobbie Spanbauer was barred from participating in her school’s graduation ceremony Wednesday because she refused to wear a dress.

Spanbauer showed up for the ceremony at the Crown Coliseum wearing the clothing required for boys: black slacks, a white dress shirt, black belt, black tie, black dress shoes and black socks. Two diamond earrings sparkled on her ears.

Girls were required to wear a black or white dress, hose that matched their skin tone and black dress shoes with a closed toe and heels.

Her reason for appearing in the required uniform for males: "I never wear dresses." (She styled her hair and applied makeup before attempting to attend.)

Which, of course, explains why you showed up for graduation in men's clothing.

I can see three points of view to this:

First: It's thoroughly within someone's legal rights not to be forced to wear a dress to anything.

Second: There was another article in the paper about this yesterday. I noted Ms. Spanbauer's comment and asked my friend Ben, who teaches English at Douglas Byrd High School. He's positive half the girls in that school don't own dresses. They wear slacks, jeans, capris, whatever, but no dresses. If I never wore dresses, but I went out and bought all these clothes that I'd wear one time so I could walk across the stage, and then they let Bobbie Spanbauer walk across the stage in pants because she never wears dresses, I would have been majorly pissed.

There is this thing called a dress code. If you're gonna throw it out for one person, you just about have to throw it out for everyone. I guarantee that if they would have allowed it, fully a third of the graduating class would have walked across the stage in kente. There's this place downtown that has great kente stuff.

Third: Dear Bobbie, you pretty much blew your case right out your ass when you walked up to the door wearing the complete Men's Uniform. Yes, women's slacks are professional attire, and if you'd have come to graduation in a woman's blouse, women's slacks and women's dress shoes with hosiery, perhaps they would have allowed you to enter--maybe not to walk across the stage, but you could have at least watched your friends receive their diplomas. But men's shoes with men's socks? A man's shirt with a tie? Were you TRYING to give the administration a finger in the eye?

Yesterday morning I was on Spanbauer's side. When she showed up dressed not in slacks but dressed like a man from the shoulders down, I switched to the administration's. There is such a thing as decorum here.