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Cocopop!Rachel Vorona Cote
5/22/16 11:11pm
Aniya, I’m sorry all of the adults are being awful. You’re handling this really well, and you look great. I hope you had fun at the prom.

ADULTS- GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER SERIOUSLY. It’s super obvious that you were all freaking out that this kid might wear a suit, and you decided to handle it this way. Didn’t one person on staff have the decency to say maybe we shouldn’t do this? No? I hope you’re happy with yourselves.
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  ZeetalCocopop!
  5/22/16 11:40pm
  Women wear suits all the time in office settings — pants, oxford shirts, and blazers. All The Time. Why adults would suddenly be upset about women wearing pants, shirts and jackets is beyond me. LOL
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  jinniZeetal
  5/22/16 11:53pm
  In the 70's, even pseudo-ties! Women felt they had to dress like men to be taken seriously.... What is consistent is the constant scrutiny of that with which women adorn ourselves.
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jinniRachel Vorona Cote
5/22/16 11:11pm
On a related topic. Must read from the New Yorker, today.

Posting in full because it is exquisite. And I think important.

(Column covers parallels between North Carolina, today, and North Carolina of Jim Crow in terms of who can and cannot use restrooms and why. If it is too long for you, just scroll on by: but I think it vital)

Opening doors — Jelani Cobb

The current circumstances in North Carolina—a tableau of states’-rights populism, an embattled minority seeking equality, a conflict over who is allowed to use public facilities, and a Southern governor committed to resisting federal executive authority—warrant a reversal of a familiar adage: everything new is old again. In March, Governor Pat McCrory signed a bill, known as HB2, that requires people in North Carolina to use the public rest room that corresponds to the sex indicated on their birth certificate. The response was swift. PayPal cancelled plans to build an operations center in Charlotte. Twenty conventions pulled out of the state. Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam, among others, cancelled concerts. The governors of Connecticut, Vermont, and New York issued restrictions on state employees travelling to North Carolina on official business.

In 1960, when four students launched a sit-in to protest segregation at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, the local impact was minimal. It took the ripple of boycotts targeting Woolworth stores across the country to turn the protest into a national matter. The impact of this new law on the tiny slice of the population that it targets has yet to be determined, but it has already been remarkably successful in turning North Carolina into one long Woolworth’s counter. This element of past-as-prologue was made explicit earlier this month, when Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that the Justice Department was bringing suit against North Carolina for violating federal civil-rights law. Four days later, President Obama issued a directive to public schools to allow students to use the rest room corresponding to their gender identity.

It was not so long ago that states, including North Carolina, posted signs on rest rooms, water fountains, and other public accommodations as part of a policy to exclude people on the basis of a distinction without a difference. We have progressed beyond those dark days, but not without a constant fight. This time, states should act not out of fear and misunderstanding but out of the values of inclusion, diversity, and regard for all which truly make America great.

Consider the political implications of an African-American woman, the first to hold the office of Attorney General, informing a white governor that his state’s policy toward the transgender population is reminiscent of the days of de-facto racial discrimination. North Carolina—with its banking center in Charlotte, its substantial black middle class, and its élite universities—esteems its identity as part of a South too forward-looking to be defined by bygone bigotries. Lynch called that premise into question. She could have taken the point further: North Carolina was more than willing to countenance “all-gender” bathrooms when they served the purposes of racial segregation. Jim Crow legislation culminated in separate bathrooms for white men and white women, but only a single “colored” rest room for African-Americans, whatever their gender.

McCrory, who is locked in a close reëlection battle and hopes to galvanize social conservatives, responded to Lynch by declaring that “both the federal courts and the U.S. Congress must intercede to stop this massive executive branch overreach, which clearly oversteps constitutional authority.” Last Thursday, in the House of Representatives, when a bill prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating against L.G.B.T. Americans appeared to have enough votes to pass, Republicans mobilized to defeat it. The same day, twenty-five Republicans in the Senate sent a letter to Lynch and to the Secretary of Education, John B. King, Jr., opposing the President’s directive to public schools. Governor Greg Abbott, of Texas, tweeted that “J.F.K. wanted to send a man to the moon. Obama wants to send a man to the women’s rest room.” Phil Bryant, the governor of Mississippi, ordered his state’s schools to ignore the directive.

As with the discrimination of the past, the lines between victim and victimizer are deliberately blurred. Jim Crow was anchored in a sense of white victimhood and febrile arguments about the protection of white women from black male rapists. The historian Lisa Lindquist-Dorr writes in “White Women, Rape and the Power of Race in Virginia: 1900-1960”:

By the twentieth century, the rape myth was at its height, and it structured most white southerners’ beliefs about the consequences of allowing interaction between white women and black men. The rhetoric about black men’s propensity to rape and the corresponding need for white men to protect white women flourished both in debates about black men’s civil and political rights and in discussions about new freedoms and opportunities for white women.

Similarly, conservative opposition to Lynch’s announcement and to Obama’s directive cited the alleged potential for sexual predators to gain entry to women’s rest rooms. Ted Cruz, defending HB2, said, “If the law says that any man, if he chooses, can enter a women’s rest room, a little girl’s rest room, and stay there and he cannot be removed because he simply says at that moment he feels like a woman, you’re opening the door for predators.” But, when Chris Wallace pressed McCrory, during an appearance on Fox News, he admitted that there had not been a single conviction of anyone using transgender protections to commit sex crimes in North Carolina. The violence that McCrory fears is imaginary, but the concerns of the transgender community are not. He could have mentioned Elisha Walker, the twenty-year-old transgender woman who was killed in his state last year; or the spiking numbers of transgender murder victims nationwide and the rising violence directed at that community by rest-room vigilantes.

In 1963, Governor George Wallace stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, to declare his eternal support for segregation. Thus far, this conflict has spared us the sight of McCrory blocking a rest-room door in defense of a similar canard. The terrible commonality of sexual violence in the United States means it is not inconceivable that a woman may be victimized in a public rest room. But the cynical concern for hypothetical violence means that this is not a conversation about the relative safety of women in rest rooms; rather, it’s a means of avoiding the ongoing conversation about how unsafe women—however you consider that term—are everywhere else. ♦
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  accesscodejinni
  5/22/16 11:32pm
  Thanks for linking in.
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  jinniaccesscode
  5/22/16 11:43pm
  You are so welcome (had to go rescue laundry)!
  
  Here is the actual link! Usually I would not post an entire column but thought this one vital.💠
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notinwonderlandRachel Vorona Cote
5/22/16 11:09pm
Why do some schools care so damn much what students wear to prom??? I can't imagine my high school giving a shit and requiring girls to wear dresses
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  EBTnotinwonderland
  5/22/16 11:25pm
  Because some schools are run by crusty old shits angry they can’t beat all the children in to Stockholm Syndrome based religiosity.
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  Tequila Mockingbirdnotinwonderland
  5/22/16 11:26pm
  The Tequila Mockingbird Academy for Young Ladies and Gentlemen and Other-Gendered Persons has one dress code:
  
  Dress so you feel fabulous. Not how your friends want you to look. Not in what your parents want. Not what hides your “problem areas.” You must dress in the thing that makes you feel absolutely great to wear. It can be sleeveless, topless, pantsless, sparkly, short, fluffy, or wrinkled. But you must feel good wearing it. If you don’t have it in you that day to feel good, then at least be comfortable.
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Still Cat from MARachel Vorona Cote
5/22/16 11:14pm
A new thing that today’s cadre of gender judges needs to realize: they aren’t the only game in town or even the majority any more.

I like the way she separates her teachers, whom she admires and values, from the administration, who are the only ones who look bad.

She really does rock that suit!
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  BiturbowagonStill Cat from MA
  5/23/16 12:02am
  A new thing that today’s cadre of gender judges needs to realize: they aren’t the only game in town or even the majority any more.
  
  And they’re terrified.
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  Still Cat from MABiturbowagon
  5/23/16 12:18am
  Yes. With all the important real challenges facing humanity today, to focus fear and try to take action on something like this is such a sad waste. They should open their eyes, take their fingers out of their ears, and join the world.
  
  At least until they do so, they can no longer block others.
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ZeetalRachel Vorona Cote
5/22/16 11:37pm
There are two women here in town — one over 60 and gorgeous white hair, and one under 40 with gorgeous brown hair, both similarly cut to Aniuya’s — who wear The Most Gorgeous Suits Ever.

I talked to the younger one once, telling her that I LOVED seeing her in her suits and how awesome she looked, and I got the name of her tailor. I had one of my husband’s old suits tailored in for me, and man, that tailor did a GOOD job. I only wear it to semi-formals, because that’s where it suits, my work doesn’t lend to wearing a suit. :)

I love women in suits. I think it looks fantastic. Aniya looks great. :)
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  FateStayNiteZeetal
  5/23/16 4:18am
  Can we talk about how she upped her “swag” though... Her original suit was bomb, but this navy suit is ridic, YSL chicness. Somewhere Marlene Dietrich is screaming yasssssassssss!
  
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  $7CoffeeFateStayNite
  5/23/16 9:46am
  When Katherine Hepburn was told by a studio exec that her pants were inappropriate to wear around the male crew, she took them off and walked around in her underwear. These women were the original slay queens.
  
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anisa-typesRachel Vorona Cote
5/22/16 11:35pm
The website where I first read about this neglected to mention that Wolf was the only one who got the amended dress code and that it was amended right before prom and I still thought the school was full of shit.

Two years ago, an 8 year old girl was kicked out of her school for her ‘tomboy’ (ie pixie) haircut. I don’t know if gender policing is actually increasing or if it’s just getting more notice but discriminating against groups of children is absolute bullshit. People like to pretend that bullying is mostly caused by children, but children absolutely get their behavioral cues from adults. Stories like this make that abundantly clear.
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  Dodie Goldneyanisa-types
  5/23/16 12:47am
  It must be increasing ‘cause I had a pixie cut when I was 8 and nobody said boo. And that was 1976.
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  Maxine Floeffler, Super DelegateDodie Goldney
  5/23/16 7:28am
  The 70s were the Golden Age of “sure, give it a shot!” hairstyles, clothes, music, intoxicants. I’m about your age and I don’t think my (public) schools were particularly liberal but you could wear and look like whatever you wanted to. When I look at my high school yearbook I think, “What were we thinking? What were our parents thinking?”
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AntisocialJusticeWarrior is not Anti-SJWRachel Vorona Cote
5/22/16 11:16pm
I suspect that a girl choosing to wear a suit to her prom would have flown under the radar in the past, but nowadays there is so much conservative Christian/Catholic backlash against anything that isn’t heteronormative because of the progress being made by us as a society. It’s like the Newton’s Third Law of gender policing.

Anyway. I’m glad this rad young lady got to look dapper as hell at another prom. And good for her for speaking up!!
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  iElvis is Now Funded by Peter ThielAntisocialJusticeWarrior is not Anti-SJW
  5/23/16 10:47am
  That’s exactly what it is. You get the greatest backlash when the group in control feels like it’s losing that control.
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GrumpyEagleRachel Vorona Cote
5/23/16 12:03am
What’s heartening is what I hear from my kids - every dance seems to include at least one kid (in a school of 500) who does the gender-alternative route. And the kids really don’t make as big a deal of it as the adults do. They don’t always agree with it, or understand it, but the fact that they tolerate it is positive. (Or it gets treated no more badly than any other kid who dares to break through the conformity.)

A couple of years ago, my son’s crusty, cranky, 30-year swim coach made this comment (or words to this effect) at the annual banquet: “We hear a lot about the ‘greatest generation’, but I really think this term should also apply to these kids. Never before have I seen kids more willing to accept extreme differences in their classmates. Kids that would have been beaten up or ostracized - they’re now able to walk freely and do their thing. I’m so hopeful about a generation that takes these kinds of things in stride.”
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  jinniGrumpyEagle
  5/23/16 12:12am
  What a beautiful and apt description from your son’s coach! ⭐️
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fortheloveofbeetsRachel Vorona Cote
5/23/16 9:42am
I’m a straight, cis woman who wore pants to my high school prom like a decade ago, and nobody batted an eye. I looked amazing. Turns out, pants don’t actually have the power to turn anyone queer, and dresses don’t have the power to prevent it. Like the anti-trans bathroom bills, these are made-up rules that only exist to make life more difficult for queer and trans people. Certain people have decided that, since they’re not allowed to force queer people to become straight, if they just shame and inconvenience them enough, maybe they’ll just stop existing.

Turns out the joke’s on them, because (just like shaming fat people out of existence, or regulating abortion out of existence) it doesn’t actually work that way.
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ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ : Riot GRRR is RUNNING WILDRachel Vorona Cote
5/23/16 1:34am
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Opening doors — Jelani Cobb