Parents, Pro-Family Leaders Condemn School's Cross-Dressing Day

by Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
November 4, 2004

(AgapePress) - Parents at an Illinois school are complaining about a cross-dressing activity held during the school's "Spirit Week" leading up to homecoming. For the second year in a row, officials at the school are under fire for encouraging boys and girls to come to school attired as the other gender on an "opposite sex" dress-up day.

During Spirit Week, students at Carrier Mills-Stonefort Elementary School are given awards each day for participation. If they choose not to dress up, they can still be rewarded if they bring a canned good for a needy family in the area. The "opposite sex day" activity (its actual title has not been confirmed) was purportedly conceived in fun by a school that, according to one staffer, has no radical agenda and was only looking for "something silly" for the kids to do.

At least one parent, however, does not find the school's idea of fun amusing. Laura Stanley has an eighth grader, two fifth graders and two second graders at Carrier Mills-Stonefort and is concerned because she feels the school's "opposite sex day" activities send a message of gender confusion to kids.

"I send my children to public school because they're entitled to their free public education," Stanley says. "I expect them to get reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and science -- not to be taught that they need to question their gender."

Also, the Illinois mom feels the event sexually exploits her three daughters and other young girls who attend the school, and creates a sexually-charged atmosphere primed for harassment. She says when she came to the school to sign out her children that day, she saw a boy wearing a pink mini-skirt of indecent length. Meanwhile, some male students stuffed their shirts to create mock breasts, which led to all kinds of lewd, juvenile attempts at "humor."

All this is "as wrong as wrong can get," Stanley laments. She says the school has no business allowing "boys dressed as women with the large breasts and so on and so forth, and sometimes fondling themselves just to get a rise out of all the other kids," and to let some boys attend classes wearing skirts "that are all the way up their backside."

The alarmed parent says any young girl dressed in what many of the boys were wearing on the "opposite sex" day "would probably be suspended or receive a detention for inappropriate attire." She adds that parents who complained about the cross-dressing activity last year were given the impression that it would not happen again, and she attempted to contact school Principal Charles Parks when this year's "opposite sex" event was announced. He did not return her call.

Peter LaBarbera

Pete LaBarbera of the Illinois Family Institute shares Stanley's concerns about the school's "opposite sex" day. ""The idea that a school would be encouraging gender confusion among young people is bad enough," he says, "but in our confused society, where we have TV programs with men dressing up as women, and we have transsexuals fighting for the right to 'get married,' and with all the gender confusion that's out there, these administrators are being very irresponsible."

LaBarbera says by encouraging this kind of activity, the school is legitimizing the organized gender confusion movement in society, the very same movement that is promoting so-called "transgender rights." The pro-family spokesman says even if the school's administrators did not set out to advance a gender-confusion agenda, telling youngsters to cross dress in school of all places is "just plain dumb."

As the Illinois Family Institute notes, many homosexual men testify that they practiced or were allowed to practice gender non-conforming behavior in their youth, which may account for the high visibility of cross dressers -- sometimes referred to as transvestites or "drag queens" -- in male homosexual culture. LaBarbera says it is important that educators do not abuse their authority by modeling abnormal behavior to impressionable children.