Mind-numbing.

Via Seattle Times:

For as long as anyone at Franklin High School can remember, young men and women have marched in pairs into the school’s graduation ceremony.

The band strikes the first note of a processional song. Then come the students two by two — girls draped in green robes, boys in black. For the whole event, the girls sit separate from the boys on opposite sides of a wide aisle.

Five other Seattle high schools graduate in a similar way, with gender-specific gowns. At least one school in Shoreline and two in the Lake Washington School District do, too.

But Franklin will start a new tradition this year, one in which transgender students and others who don’t fit the typical male and female roles won’t have to pick a side.

The school’s instructional council voted last month to switch to a more gender-neutral ceremony. While the details are still being ironed out, the students and teachers who pushed for the change see it as a victory.

Male-female seating arrangements can put some students in a tough spot, said Lennae Varlinsky, a mental-health counselor at Franklin who helped students in the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance lobby for the change.

Some students are forced to sit uncomfortably with a gender they don’t identify with, or switch sides and reveal something about themselves that their family may not know.

Not everyone is ready to make such a bold statement, Varlinsky said, especially not on graduation day.

The students see the tradition as a vestige of a bygone era where gender norms went unquestioned.

The old traditions were “just really pointless,” said Ami Diouf, 15, a member of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. “Like, why? I mean, who cares? How about if you don’t identify as a girl, (and) you want to wear black instead?”

HT: Jennifer Burke