Camouflage was in and cross-dressing was out at a rural East Texas school district Wednesday after a Christian legal group complained that a long-standing school tradition of reversing social roles for a day would promote homosexuality.
Students in Spurger, Texas, were encouraged by school officials to wear camouflage hunting gear to class after they called off their annual “TWIRP Day” in which boys dressed as girls and vice versa.
The cross-dressing tradition began some years back as a kind of Sadie Hawkins Day where girls ask boys to go out on dates.
TWIRP stands for “The Woman Is Requested To Pay.”
But Delana Davies, who has two children in the Spurger school, complained this year that the tradition could promote homosexuality and got the Liberty Legal Institute, a right-wing Christian legal group, to take up the cause.
“It might be fun today to dress up like a little girl — kids think it’s cute and things like that. And you start playing around with it and, like drugs, you do a little here and there [and] eventually it gets you,” Davies told reporters.
“It is outrageous that a school in a small town in east Texas would encourage their 4-year-olds to be cross-dressers,” institute litigation director Hiram Sasser said.
He sought and obtained permission from the district for the woman’s children to stay out of school for the the day.
School attorney Tanner Hunt said the Liberty group misrepresented TWIRP Day and made it sound sinister when it has always been innocent fun.
“I guarantee you nobody on the school board or in the administration ever had that cross their minds,” Hunt said of the “cross-dressing” reference.
Sasser said it was not his intent to disparage the school.
“The district gets mad every time I say ‘cross-dress,’ but I don’t know what other way to describe it,” he said.
Because of the controversy, school officials decided to change Wednesday from TWIRP Day to Camouflage Day, in what Hunt described as a reference to the clothing hunters wear during deer-hunting season, which is going on now and is enormously popular in rural Texas.
Despite the change from TWIRP Day, Hunt said some of the students stuck to the old tradition and wore clothes of the opposite sex.
“I understand from the superintendent that some of the boys dressed in pink shorts anyway,” he said.
