Events App: Conditionally Hide Description

I understand that the events app, being an older app, isn't fully under template control, so this may not be possible. Some events do not have a description, i.e. regular meetings, so rather than writing 'No description' every time, my client would prefer to leave the field blank, and have it hidden with a <perch:if> tag.

However, the event description field is required, so it cannot be left blank. So I thought I could hide the description in the template if the event's category matched 'meeting' for example. But that doesn't seem to work either.

What I had for that was:

<perch:if id="category_names" match="eq" value="meeting">
<div><perch:events id="eventDescHTML" type="textarea" label="Description"/></div>
</perch:if>