You may have seen the headlines earlier this week about two young girls who were "thrown off" a United Airlines flight for wearing leggings, while a man traveling with them was allowed to wear shorts.

A bystander observing the situation tweeted about it, and what appeared to be a double standard for the girls, and it quickly became headline news.I read the outrage inducing headlines, and felt appropriately outraged.Then, I read the articles and discovered that the girls were removed because they weren't following the required dress code for the employee pass that they were traveling under.I couldn't wait to sit down at the dinner table and discuss the many lessons that this story had to teach, about the dangers of ingesting news by headline, and the necessity of following rules, especially when you're being granted a privilege.Based on previous discussions of school uniforms and the ongoing talk of "fake" news, I thought this was going to be a particularly interesting chat.As I related the tale, and my thoughts on it, I noticed the Wonderful Husband shaking his head.Excited for debate, I asked him what was wrong. His response? "Wow, I can only imagine the phone call that guy got from his wife when they landed."Suddenly, an entirely new vision of the situation popped into my head. Now, I do want to note that this is purely speculation on my part, and I have no knowledge of the actual situation other than what I read in the paper, and both the WH and I are only assuming that it was two kids traveling with their father.But, with that statement by the WH, I could suddenly see exactly what might have happened if that were my family traveling:The WH makes the announcement that a certain article or style of clothing cannot be worn on the flight. E (we'll stick with the gender roles for this scenario, and also, remember that E is a 6-year-old fashion renegade and she will fight to the death to wear whatever she pleases) selectively hears what she wants to hear and goes about her business picking out whatever she wants to wear.WH leaves for airport with E, who appears to be fully clothed and alive, not bleeding copiously or naked, thusly meeting the basic requirements for leaving the house.WH and E arrive at airport and a female employee of the airline immediately flags the clothing as inappropriate. She gives a brief explanation of why this clothing is inappropriate, which, to the WH sounds something akin to Mandarin, and to which, E makes appropriate eye rolls and sighs loudly with irritation, which attracts the attention of a bystander, who immediately blows the entire incident out of proportion.WH is still trying to figure out what exactly he messed up. Let's face it. When it comes to dressing the kids, especially girls, most dads are more than a little clueless.I think there are about 5 million Internet memes of kids dressed by dad that will back me up on this one.Recently, the WH was meeting up with us later in the day, after the weather and our plans changed. E was going to need a change of clothes that I did not anticipate, so I asked the WH to grab some play clothes for her. E, the fashion dictator that she is, had very specific demands as to the outfit he was supposed to bring. I also threw in one or two more outfit pieces that I knew were in the same drawer, to hopefully increase the odds of him bringing clothing appropriate for playing outside.What was ordered: a pair of gray leggings, that were described as looking like sweatshirt material, and a long-sleeved T-shirt that matched. What we got: metallic gold leggings that went with E's Christmas dress, a sweater dress with a heart on it, that totally did not match the leggings, and a St. Patrick's-themed T-shirt. E and I both rolled our eyes hard on that one. The WH's take away from this incident? "Hey … they were leggings, right?!"Back to our heated discussion of the incident at hand, the WH made the salient point that I did, in fact, just manage to turn the story back into one about outrage over gender stereotypes. I had to admit he was right."Besides," he said, "I can't tell the difference between sweatpants and yoga pants just like you can't tell the difference between stink bait or cut bait, or rattle trap and rapala, or a nymph or a dry fly, or jerk bait or a popper, or I could keep on going with this all day, if you want, but I think I've made my point.""Oh come on," I said. "Bait is bait!""And, pants are pants," he fired back.Like many things in our marriage, we reached the conclusion that we're going to have to agree to disagree on pants and bait, and we turned our attention to making some plans for the weekend.E and I are planning to do a little shopping and the WH and the boys are planning on doing a little fishing.I sure hope he remembers to take those nice rubber leggings with the feet in them that I got him for Christmas.Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.