Musical Theatre

Weeks into his senior year of high school in Texas, Max Hightower earned a key male role for his campus’s production of Oklahoma! the musical. But the trans teen’s principal has since stripped the teen of the part, citing a new policy requiring students to only portray characters who align with the gender identity assigned to them when they were born.

Hightower and his family are now appealing the administrator’s decision to the school board while the play is put on hold pending a review.

The 17-year-old child’s ordeal offers up one of the latest disputes illustrating the hostile climate with which members of LGBTQ+ communities must grapple in politically conservative areas of the US, particularly in the US south.

“I had only seen stuff like this on the news,” Hightower told the Washington Post in a report published on Friday. “And I didn’t think it would happen in our school because nothing had happened before.”

As his family separately recounted to the Texas television news station KXAS, for four years, Hightower had excelled in the choir and theater programs offered up at Sherman high school, about 75 miles north of Dallas.

Hightower’s gender identity had never been an impediment. And the trans boy believed it would stay that way as recently as last month, when he landed the role of male character Ali Hakim for the production of Oklahoma! that Sherman was supposed to stage for three days beginning on 8 December.

Hakim is a love interest of one of the play’s female leads.

However, about two weeks later, Hightower and his parents received news that was devastating to them. Sherman’s principal said to the family that Hightower would actually lose out on the Ali Hakim role because of a new policy.

“Only males can play males, and only females can play females,” Max’s father, Phillip Hightower, recalled being told by the principal, according to KXAS.

Other students – cisgender and transgender alike – also learned that their roles would either be changing or eliminated because of the same policy, Max Hightower told the Post. Hightower described how many of those students were driven to tears, having spent weeks rehearsing songs, memorizing lines and erecting the set.

“It’s not fair,” he said.

The parents of Hightower and some of the other affected students resolved to turn to the local school board to pursue a reversal of the Sherman school’s decision.

“I’m not an activist – I’m not highly political. I have both liberal and conservative beliefs,” Phillip Hightower said. “I’m just a dad that wants to fight for his kid.

In a statement provided to various media outlets, officials of the school district governing Sherman high school said Oklahoma! would be under review until at least the middle of January because they had been alerted to the production’s “mature adult themes, profane language and sexual content”.

The statement claimed “there is no policy on how students are assigned to roles”.

“As it relates to this particular production, the sex of the role as identified in the script will be used when casting,” said the statement from the district, whose governing board next meets on Monday. “Because the nature and subject matter of productions vary, the district is not inclined to apply this criteria to all future productions.”

Phillip Hightower said the media statement was not consistent with the “kind of odd” policy outline that Sherman high’s principal communicated to his family. He added that, despite the school district’s stance, many in the local community rallied behind Max and his schoolmates after word of their dilemma spread.

A local college theater department had even invited Max to attend a special event over the weekend. “I didn’t see any hate in any of that,” Phillip Hightower told KXAS.

The Sherman high controversy unfolds despite stage theater’s long history of actors playing roles that don’t align with the gender they were assigned at birth. For instance, in William Shakespeare’s plays, boys and young men often portrayed characters who were women.

In September, a Texas law banning drag performances in front of youth took effect. Laws prohibiting minors from receiving gender-affirming care and mandating that college athletes compete on teams aligning with their birth-assigned gender also went into effect.

State-level lawmakers around the US weighed hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ during legislative sessions this year, with nearly half of them in the south. Dozens passed, though in some cases their implementation has been at least delayed by court challenges.