Free Dress Day at my son’s local government primary school is never free. It costs. It costs a gold coin donation, and for that small fee, you can dress as you like. So on Free Dress Day we see footy jumpers, netball outfits, onesies, the funky outfits kids usually reserve for parties. That sort of thing.
Free Dress Day is a day to be free, and the feeling in the school yard as I drop my son off is exactly that: a freedom that displays itself in heady exuberance, much as it does on those windy mornings at school when kids seem to go all loco.
An Ideological Price-Hike
This year, next Friday to be precise, the last day of term, the cost of Free Dress Day has suddenly jumped through the roof. The price for participating in Free Dress Day next Friday is now a price I am not willing to pay.
Free Dress Day at my son’s local government primary school next week is now Cross Dressing day. It’s Free Dress Day all right, but only for those boys that come dressed as girls and those girls that come dressed as boys. You can leave the onesie, the footy jumper and the hip new party outfit in the cupboard, or swap it with your sibling.
For some reason, the school has decided that it is going to remove the spontaneous fun of that day and organise it around the sexual agenda that is front and centre of the rights movement in the West at the moment.
Policy on the Run
My guess is that there is a growing number of kids at the school who now identify as transgender, and the school does not want them to feel uncomfortable or alienated. Neither do I. But neither do I believe that the way to do this is to make others feel uncomfortable and alienated by such a decision.
I am not sure they are even thinking this through. If it’s like other snap decisions in government schools this one is being made to head off a perceived crisis that probably doesn’t exist, or if it does exist it exists at a painful personal level for some parents and their children. Is this truly the way to solve it?
What amazes me is how quickly this whole thing is moving. Just last year I was noting to someone that this local area is socially conservative, working-class, footy and beer, mums working in the local supermarket. It’s not inner Sydney. It’s outer Perth. And that may as well be outer space as far as inner Sydney is concerned. Yet less than a year later here we are. It confirms the adage “You may not be interested in the culture wars, but the culture wars are interested in you.” It is sniffing us out.
Dilemma
What will I do about it? Should I talk to the staff? My high school aged daughter, who went to that same primary school and loved every day of it, is adamant I should not say a word. She was in tears today because “They’ll hate you for mentioning it.” That’s significant. Already at fifteen, she is learning that her life in the future is going to have to be one of keeping your head down; not saying a word about this—because if you pop your head up and dissent you will get it cut off.
So how does my son feel about it? He was the one who came home and told me and then stated: “I’m not going to school.” No cajoling from me, no coaching by me. He’s not going to do it.
I’m reading Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option at the moment. It’s interesting watching the social changes he writes about—and which many regard as scaremongering—unfolding before our eyes. It puts to rest the claim that Christians should shut up about sex and gender because that’s all they are obsessed with.
Worshipping Ourselves
Our culture is obsessed with itself. It believes that sexual expression is the greatest good and that gender identity is our foundational reality. Individual expression is the culture’s highest good. It defines everything about us. Hence it no longer sees it as slightly odd, or even a step towards sexualising our young children, to ask parents to send their five to eleven-year-olds to cross dress for primary school for Free Dress Day.
I’d be interested to know how Christian critics who dismiss concerns about this issue see this playing out in the future. Often such voices belong to the 45-60 year age bracket who are in settled employment and looking to their retirement packages.
For me, their words are much like those of King Hezekiah in 2Kings 20, who after being told that the very Babylon he has shown the riches of Jerusalem to will steal them away in years to come states: “At least there will be peace and security in my lifetime.”
I thought I would get my son through primary school in time before this issue would raise its head or be a problem. I thought I had a clear run, at least in his government school lifetime, and certainly in my social demographic. Clearly not.
Hard Days Ahead
So keeping my son at home from school for the day will not make all of this stuff somehow go away. Neither is it doing him any favours. As if somehow we can stick our heads—and his—into the sand. He’s destined to grow up in a world in which he cannot hide if he does not sign up to the sex-and-gender identity theories. It won’t just be cross-dressing at school. He will likely be locked out of certain occupations and professions that require complete consent and sign-off on the new morality. Before he has children he will have to carefully negotiate his way through an increasingly difficult public square.
Free Dress Day now has a cost. And next Friday at my son’s local government primary school the price is thirty pieces of silver. And that’s just a price we’re not willing to pay.
Photo: Simon James, flickr
