A posh girls only school... a dinner dance... the girls are meant to bring a "guest". No-one says "male" or "boy", but everyone takes that to be the meaning.
Almost everyone...
One says she will bring another girl.
She is told "no".
Again and again and again.
She screams "homophobia!". The school claims it was for year 11s and year 10s are not allowed. Someone points out year 10 boys were allowed to be there... THEY just weren't asked for proof of age.
To be fair the school management might not have meant anything overtly homophobic.
The problem is, prejudice is subtle sometimes, and you're not going to get away with it in an educational institution in the most progressive part of the most progressive state in Australia. Not in this day and age.
Seriously anyone could have seen a freight train of potential claims of discrimination coming their way and worked something out, especially when they were having multiple meetings with the girl's parents. But they clearly believed they could bulldoze this.
And now that girl is going to another school where same sex couples at school formals is expressly permitted.
By the way... the taller girl in the photo is actually the one in year 10.
As it happens, if I - lil' ole Magpie - had been born just ONE day later, I would have been in the next grade down at school...
What difference does it make?
Now that school management looks like...
well....
A bunch of dicks.
Sounds like Mississippi in Australia.
ReplyDeleteI thought of that comparison.
ReplyDeleteI've never been to Mississippi, but I'm pretty confident that Melbourne is nothing like it though.
The school did not explicitly do it on the grounds of homophobic intend, they’ve just ended up there by default.
I mentioned the school is posh, and they tend to a confident rigidity of policy. That’s what tripped them – not real homophobic intent, but authoritarianism, which Australians and especially teenagers despise above all other things.