Please, the quote is perfect. The school wants her punished becasue she will not abide by their silly gender rules, so she points out that the people disallowing her from prom are not exaclty being very "manly' about the whole affair, as they are terrified of a kid and her scary, scary tuxedo.

Perfect quote.

how is this still a thing??

1. I mostly agree with you—but the quote is imperfect in the sense that it can be easily latched onto, distorted, and demagogued about.

She has to wear a dress because some faculty said they wouldn't chaperone? I'd imagine it's probably easier and cheaper to find some other chapernones than to try to defend this stupid stance in court. But it's not about practicality, is it?

Everybody should go naked.

The school superintendent overruled the principal, by the way.

@5

You sit between Donald Trump and Pat Robertson, then.

Poor poor Louisiana. Do they have segregated proms too? I hear Alabama and Georgia still have white proms and black proms. Is the Mason Dixon Line some sort of temporal distortion and the people down there are all still living in the 18th Century?
Do they actually have a dress code for the prom or is he just making it up?

@3: It is a fair point, but the people who want to distort it will find a way no matter what she says. If we start self-censoring because we know there are some asshole who will twist our words, the assholes win and their rhetoric takes the day. They are not too timid to speak what they think the truth is, and we should not be either.

I'm not saying that some nutjob on the right won't latch on to the "boy" comment, but I think the effect of that is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the student in question is also African-American (and, knowing that segregation is still a real thing in Louisiana, most of the school probably is, too).

I was really glad to see the superintendent come to the defense of the student, though. Monroe is pretty darned religiously conservative, but I sincerely doubt that teachers threatened not to chaperone if the student wore a tux. That's an excuse the principal was making up.

But I didn't even know or care about the race of the people involved. So if someone wants to make a racial thing out of it; then they were just looking for something to make a racial thing out of.

@8 : " it's still just a high school dance where the kids are served a meal then get photographed wearing tacky outfits they will be embarrassed by in 10 years."

Eh, it matters to people who care about it. As a non-sports fan, I watched the city lose its collective shit over the Super Bowl this year and I felt the same way: "It's just another football game where two teams butt heads together and for a year it matters but..."

@8: All kinds of life events seem far less important in hindsight. Totally irrelevant to the here and now of high school kid.

@8, it totally matters if you are one of the people effected.

I'm old, and I grew up in an era where LGBT kids could not bring a same sex date to a dance. Could not even imagine such a thing. It was absolutely not safe for LGBT kids to be out in school. We were completely shunned and marginalized, with the approval of faculty and all adults concerned.

I can only imagine how my life might have gone in a different trajectory if I had felt safe enough to go to a dance with a boy at that age. Even if I didn't, just knowing that I could would have made a significant difference in my teenaged self-esteme.

It may seem like just a silly dance to you, but to be rejected by the administration of a school sends a deeply harmful message.

I agree with 8. I have a lot of trouble understanding why anyone gives a shit about prom. I didn't go to prom. I didn't attempt to go to prom. I didn't care. Why does anyone care about this bullshit? I'm sure schools are discriminating against LGBT kids in much worse ways than this.

Similarly, I don't get why everyone is so hysterical about dress codes. I can understand being offended at not being allowed to wear a tux, but these days it's popular to cry "sexism" when schools don't allow kids to expose their thongs and bras in public. It just seems like insanity to me.

In case anyone wanted to hear about a third thing that makes me angry, it annoys me to no end how often women act like victims to get media attention. If a guy stayed home from prom and wrote a livejournal post about how he's crying because he's not supposed to wear a dress, I doubt it would get any media attention because it's not socially acceptable for men to be babies.

I agree that using those terms in addressing a black man is especially bad judgement, but both of them should be stricken from the lexicon, period.

I've always maintained that no good ever came from calling a woman a bitch, and "man up" may be on par with that. If you can't convince a man to do the right thing without questioning his masculinity, maybe you're not the right person to be delivering the message.

And "big boy pants"? Really? Yeesh.

Her comments rubbed me the wrong way too. If homophobia is sexism's little sister, let's not use sexist language to fight it.

Am I reading too much into this? I thought that she deliberately used gendered (and infantilizing) taunts because that's precisely the mindset with which the principal was approaching the issue.

i think it's pretty cliched for a lesbian to wear a tuxedo to prom. it would be more subversive to wear a frilly as fuck dress.

Blip and Reverse Polarity both surface feelings I have. I remember at my HS "prom", out in the parking lot being in the fetal position in my car as I heard a boy outside (who I feared daily) saying "I"m going to pee over this faggot's car!" (damn, I wish I had a pic of that) - but then was gladdened by then overhearing another student saying "I'll beat you up if you do."

Clearly, all adolescents endure abuse from their classmates, gay or straight. A part of me says "Oh, just play it cool. Teenagers are too full of themselves, and creating a scene for self-validation is not worth the spectacle, and it's better to be polite and respect your elders.

However, when I was that age the sheer fact of same-sex marriage, let-alone gay rights in employment and housing, didn't even seem like a knowable unknown in Rumsfledspeak.

Hence, all the power to her (or to maybe even 'him' someday) -- even though tuxes are among the most uncomfortable and overpriced apparel the world has ever known.

Raindrop I'm shocked that you've apparently only ever worn rental tuxes.

I've had that "big boy pants" line thrown at me before. It's the chic phrase freshly-formed feminists use, sometimes joking, sometimes serious, but always condescending. Whatever.

Now, as to Mr. Savage's hand-wringing over the white woman/black male dynamic... a fucking idiot that shouldn't be trusted with a burned out match is a fucking idiot that shouldn't be trusted with a burned out match, and I don't care if they're gay, black, Hispanic, atheist or whoever gives a damn. And whomever steps up to the plate to call them on it is okay by me. Sure, some folks will try to make hay over the racial dynamic, but those people are stupid fucking idiots as well. This isn't hair-splitting moral quandaries here. This is a clear issue of right & wrong. So the guy is black. He's also a fucking idiot that shouldn't be trusted with a burned out match.

#12 - You didn't know someone named "Claudetteia" was black? Really?

I didn't know about the principal's race, but I thought the phrases "man up" and "big boy pants" were misguided attempts to question the principal's masculinity. If they don't want the school to behave in a sexist manner, they shouldn't be using sexist language either.

I always cringe when adults use expressions like "big boy pants" or "blah blah....and guess what?...blah blah

It's a real stretch to complain about this use of "boy" being racial. That's like freaking out over "niggling."