A 17-year-old transgender girl missed her graduation at Harrison Central High School on Saturday after a federal judge allowed the school to prohibit her from wearing a dress under her gown and ordered her to wear traditional male attire instead.
The Gulfport teen, identified only by the initials “L.B.” in court documents, told CNN on Sunday that she skipped her graduation rather than “show up and be forced to wear something that’s totally different from myself—my character.”
“It was detrimental to know that I won’t be able to experience my graduation the way I had envisioned it and planned it for so many years—and I’ve been going to this school actively being me with my teachers, my peers, the other students in my class,” she said.
The lawsuit, which L.B’s parents Henry Brown and Samantha Brown filed with the support of the ACLU of Mississippi last week, said school officials told L.B. on May 9 that she must abide by “the HCHS gender-based dress code policy for graduation, which provides that girls must wear a white dress and dress shoes and that boys must wear a white button-down shirt, black dress pants, black dress shoes, and a tie or bowtie.” During a hearing last Friday, the district noted that L.B. and her mother had previously signed a form agreeing to abide by the graduation dress code.
“She identifies as female, so we went by the female dress code,” L.B.’s mother Samantha Brown told CNN. “We felt like we were abiding by the dress code.”
But on May 10, L.B.’s mother called Superintendent Mitchell King “to request clarification on the School District’s dress code policy for graduation,” the complaint said.
“During this call, Defendant King said that L.B. ‘is still a boy’ and that ‘he needs to wear pants, socks, and shoes, like a boy.’ Ms. Brown asked what would happen if L.B. wore a dress to the ceremony, and Defendant King stated that she would not be allowed to participate,” the document continued.
In a complaint on May 18, 2023, the ACLU said Superintendent Mitchell King, pictured, called Samantha Brown
Read original article by clicking here.