(Hat tip to Womanist Musings.)
Maye showed up one day at his Niagara Falls high school in red stilettos. Not even one period into the school day, the teachers ordered him to take his high heels off. Maye refused, saying that there were many girls in heels who didn’t have to take them off, until he was threatened with suspension.
The school claims that it is non-discriminatory; according to the administration, stilettos make it difficult to escape the building in the event of a fire. However, girls regularly wear stilettos and other heels and are almost never made to take them off; Maye reports that they said his heels were “a distraction.”
Frankly, I think this story is a sign that our time is coming. The administration felt the need to claim they weren’t being discriminatory against boys in heels– as paper-thin and laughable as their defense was. And twenty supporters gathered outside the school with signs to protest that, dammit, guys should be allowed to wear heels in any circumstance in which women can wear heels. As long as they aren’t hurting anyone else, what do you care?
The one aspect I find dispiriting about this story is that Maye is openly gay. I hope that gay men like Maye can serve as the first line of the fight, and once gay men are allowed to wear heels so can straight and bi men. However, part of me worries that we’re making gay men the token men allowed to violate gender norms, and that a straight man in heels would still experience bullying and mockery, not the outpouring of support Maye has.
Nevertheless, this story gives me hope. Maye is brave and I hope he continues to stand up for the rights of everyone to dress as they like without punishment or recrimination.
I fear for this kid. I fear that he will now be the target of physical assault and intimidation, with the school administrators and the so-called people in charge doing shit all to stop it.
My advice to his family if this happens: if there was ever a situation to get litigation-happy, this is it. Take the school, take the parents of the bullies. Cost may be a factor, but don’t feel that doing so is violating some invisible contract of social harmony. Societies that condone persistent hierarchical domination don’t deserve harmony.
“I have also wondered if it puts pressure on gay men, too. Not just the femme stuff, but all of it. I doubt anyone’s trying get a new gender script written for them, and it can’t be fun to not only cop shit from people for being gay, but then get the cold shoulder from supposedly open people because you’re not the ‘fun’ kind of gay. ” If that’s the oppression a gay man is getting from straight people, that’s real progress. Two things: I doubt very many gay men get much shit for acting too straight; that’s just not… Read more »
“However, part of me worries that we’re making gay men the token men allowed to violate gender norms, and that a straight man in heels would still experience bullying and mockery, not the outpouring of support Maye has.’ That is always possible but less so these days when gay’s, at least young ones, are not marginalized thewya we were earlier. Things have really changed and I see young staright men picking up on a lot of trends that gay men start. Come to think of it it’s not so new. Goatees sure spread fast back in the early 90’s. that… Read more »
Thanks for the post, Ozy “However, part of me worries that we’re making gay men the token men allowed to violate gender norms, and that a straight man in heels would still experience bullying and mockery”. I worry about that too, sometimes. It feels small and petty, but I try to to remind myself I’m not trying to put anything on the person brave enough to be themselves as much as the stereotyping of the people who wouldn’t let a different type of person be themselves. I’ve seen pro-sex, kink friendly conversations where everyone was having a good time suddenly… Read more »
D’oh. Got my “landmark free speech cases” mixed up. I meant Tinker v. Des Moines (the “black armband” case), not Brandenburg.
I think this is one of the many sad outcomes of the long rollback we’ve seen of high school student free expression rights, including off-campus speech. We’ve come a long way from the strong protections of Brandenburg v. Ohio to the nonexistent ones of Morse v. Frederick. And as I’ve said many times, there’s a problem with framing this in terms of “identity” rights (in this case, gender identity) rather than universal rights. This case here has gotten notice from feminist, queer, and some men’s activists because the school’s power was used against a gender nonconforming youth. But why should… Read more »
Any rule regarding dress should be consistent for all students. If the issue with stilettos is safety, then no one should be permitted. High heels are not hazardous to men only. Same with rules on hair length and hygiene… Long hair is not inherently more unhygienic on men.
There was a story a while back about a boy who started wearing skirts to his uniformed school when the school outlawed shorts and argued on the fact that the girls were still allowed to wear skirts, but the boys had no warm-weather option.
I really don’t like or even understand double standards. I think the school administrators need to just get over it and stop worrying about boys in heels or dresses.
I agree, noah, that the stereotyping of gay men as femme is very problematic. Not only gay men dress femme, and not all of us dress femme to start with–I’m the butch kind.
Respect to Maye 🙂
Re: “However, part of me worries that we’re making gay men the token men allowed to violate gender norms, and that a straight man in heels would still experience bullying and mockery”.
Yes and no. You’ll always get some idiots shouting (or worse) at you, but mostly people don’t really give a shit. That said, I won’t wear heels in my own neighbourhood (village), because I’m scared (whether justifiably or not) about hassle following me to my door.
Nothing to say
I guess I’d describe myself as gender nonconforming when I was in high school. I had hair down to my shoulders, wore nail polish and eyeliner, often wore girls’ tops or trousers. It was my way of rebelling, of “othering” myself from an environment and system I hated. Naturally, I copped a lot in terms of gender policing, both from students and teachers. From teachers, it typically came in the form of uniform rules being enforced unevenly – there was a rule against students wearing excessive amounts of makeup, for example, however what constituted excessive varied between teenage boys and… Read more »
Monkey: I was talking about the thread-drift I created when I mentioned how many men I knew didn’t like Prince. Your introduction of Prince to the thread were not out of place at all in my view. I am sorry if you though I placed the thread-drift blame on you. That blame belongs to me.
@Tamen: well, I thought it made sense because Prince did in fact wear high heels.
The subject matter of most of his songs and the stories/myths about his sexual prowess firmly established his orientation. How much of that was deliberately constructed to establish that to counter-act the gay-accusation he must’ve known would come from his physical appearance would be fun to know.
This is quite a thread drift – and from an important issue as well so I’ll leave Prince be from now.
@Tamen: possibly. The funny thing was that many women found him very hot.
He really straddled the line in terms of gender. When he sang falsetto, it was a truly feminine falsetto, and yet I never thought of him as gay.
Even though I liked Prince’s music and had several of his CDs most of my male acquaintance abhorred him. I noticed that liking his music sometimes were taken as a marker of being gay. Or perhaps it was more that voicing dislike for his music were a marker for not-gay?
“However, part of me worries that we’re making gay men the token men allowed to violate gender norms, and that a straight man in heels would still experience bullying and mockery, not the outpouring of support Maye has.” Possibly, but if so, we’ll be going backwards from the 80s. It’s astounding to consider how revolutionary Prince’s gender-bending was. Bowie did it, too, but once he reinvented himself as “straight” he jettisoned all the glam acoutrements. Prince, OTOH, managed to be incredibly heterosexual and yet feminine at the same time. The guy got away with wearing lace shirts and purple panties,… Read more »
This is a very insightful observation. Sadly most likely ridicule of any straight man wearing high heels to school/work is portraying gay as something bad – thus making any victory for Maye not without a bitter aftertaste.
Does the school not have better things to do than police students choice of shoes?