In this age of inclusiveness, all-women colleges are disappearing rapidly: in the mid 1960s there were 300, but that’s now down to about 30.
The rationale for the foundation and existence of these colleges is severalfold, at least as expressed by the women in the articles below in the NYT (and elsewhere). First, they allowed women to get an education at a time when they simply weren’t accepted by many colleges. Further, they provided a “safe space” at a time when women weren’t taken so seriously as students, and were often dominated in co-ed college by men. (One notable aspect of this, which I’ve seen in my own classes, is the tendency of men to talk over women, or not take their statements seriously. That degrades women’s education.)
Along with this goes the wish of women to be free of harassment from men, and to establish solidarity with other women. There are many superb women colleges—Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, and Radcliffe, to name a few—but many, like Vassar, now accept men and a group of others accept trans people, so long as they identify as women.
There remains the problem, however, about what to do with trans men and with people who consider themselves members of both sexes, or “nonbinary”. Some women’s colleges, like Wellesley, accept trans women and people who identify as women, presumably under the rubric “trans women are women”. This means they accept biological men, which puzzles me a bit because those men could still show the domineering tendencies that women don’t like. Who knows?
But the real sticking point for Wellesley College in the eponymous Massachusetts town, and the subject of these two successive NYT articles (click screenshots to read; first one is archived), is whether it will accept trans men: biological women who have decided that they identify as men and that they will live as men. As the article notes, Wellesley held a highly divisive but nonbinding student referendum this week about whether to:
a. accept trans men as students
b. accept “nonbinary” people who were “identified as male at birth” (their language), and
c. “making the college’s communications more gender inclusive — for example, using the word ‘students’ or ‘alumni’ instead of ‘women’.”
This has caused a huge furor on campus, and the college’s President, Paula Johnson, has said that this changes the mission of the college, which was founded to accept women.
The rationale for the referendum is to make Wellesley a refuge for marginalized people of all stripes. The referendum does not allow for the admission of biological men. But since, as the mantra goes, “trans men are men”, and the referendum (which passed; see below) overwhelmingly approved the admission of trans men, then Wellesley would—if the referendum became the rules—changed from a women’s college to a men’s college, at least in part. I suppose the rationale for admitting what are said by activists to be “fully men” is that trans men, while still characterized by activists to be men in every way, are still seen as marginalized because they are trans. At any rate, I have no dog in this fight, and am observing it as a spectator.
Here’s a bit about the President’s desire to hold the line against accepting trans men and nonbinary biological men, as well as the fierce desire of many to change this stand. (Note that some trans men already go to Wellesley, but they transitioned after they were admitted.):
In a message to the campus last week, Dr. Johnson described Wellesley as “a women’s college that admits cis, trans and nonbinary students — all who consistently identify as women.”
“Wellesley,” she said, “was founded on the then-radical idea that educating women of all socioeconomic backgrounds leads to progress for everyone. As a college and community, we continue to challenge the norms and power structures that too often leave women, and others of marginalized identities, behind.”
There was fierce pushback. Students held an ongoing sit-in at the administration building. The student newspaper’s editorial board wrote that “we disapprove and entirely disagree” with the president.
Departments issued statements in support of the referendum. An associate provost for equity and inclusion said the employees in her office were “deeply challenged” by the president’s email.
And an open letter, signed by hundreds of faculty, staff and alumni, said the college was abandoning the radicalism of its creation “
And the vote is in. According to this article, also by Vimal Patel but published on March 15 (the day after the piece above), gives the details:
The reason this is important, though trans students are relatively few, is that the referendum (which the College says it won’t accept) would have changed the very rationale of the college:
On Tuesday, its students supported a referendum that had polarized the campus and went straight to the heart of Wellesley’s identity as a women’s college.
The referendum, which was nonbinding, called for opening admission to all nonbinary and transgender applicants, including trans men. Currently, the college allows admission to anyone who lives and consistently identifies as a woman.
The referendum also called for making the college’s communications more gender inclusive — for example, using the word “students” or “alumni” instead of “women.”
The vote was in some ways definitional: What is the mission of a women’s college?
Supporters said that women’s colleges had always been safe havens for people facing gender discrimination, and that with trans people under attack across the country, all transgender and nonbinary applicants must be able to apply to Wellesley.
Opponents of the referendum said that if trans men or nonbinary students were admitted, Wellesley would become effectively coed.
And Wellesley’s president, Paula Johnson, said that the referendum would rewrite Wellesley’s founding mission to educate women.
After the vote, the college said it would not reconsider its opposition, according to a statement from Stacey Schmeidel, director of media relations.
The vote wasn’t disclosed, but everyone expected the referendum to pass because it was seen as more inclusive. As I said, this is Wellesley’s business, and the only thing I question is how they rationalize “trans men are men” mantra with the idea that Wellesley is still a women’s college, and in what relevant respect trans men differ from biological men (as I said, it may be the idea of oppression).
What we’ll have is a college whose very character is conceived differently by the students and by the administration, and it will be interesting to see how this shakes out. It also raises important questions, the most pressing being, “Is there still a place for women’s colleges in today’s ‘inclusive’ world?” and “Can you conceive of colleges as places of refuge for those seen as oppressed by their sexual identity?”
I have no answers of my own. Nellie Bowles, giving her weekly snarky take on the news at the Free Press,sees this a presaging the end of women’s colleges in America:
→ Wellesley student body votes to abolish itself as a women’s college: The Wellesley student government voted this week to abolish all language of being a women’s college—and to use gender-neutral terms like students or alumni instead of women. Also: to scrap all women’s specific admission criteria and open instead to all gender nonconforming peoples. Yes, they voted to open admissions to transmen. Now, if transmen are men (full stop) as the activists argue, then this doesn’t really make much sense, but no matter.
They make an interesting argument that basically the school should be a place for all people who have trouble with their gender (i.e., anyone who is not a male currently wearing pants). Here’s Ailie Wood, class of 2024, who helped author the proposal: “Wellesley was founded as a women’s college because they wanted to create a safe and supportive learning environment for people who were marginalized based on gender. Such a place should welcome and support trans women, trans men and nonbinary people as well. Past, present and future trans and nonbinary students at Wellesley should feel like the College has their back, acknowledges their identity, and supports their access to a Wellesley education.”
The referendum is nonbinding (I will not make a chest binder joke here, as my outrageous copy editor just suggested). But it’s a sign of what is to come, which is the end of women’s colleges in America.
h/t: Jez
Yes, it’s oppression. Wokeism always divided everyone into “oppressors” and “oppressed”. Hence “whites” versus everyone else (“BIPOC”).
In this case the oppression axis is “cis males” oppressing everyone else. Hence both trans men and trans women qualify, along with women, in the “oppressed” category and so can be admitted.
Very strange. Wellesley, a women’s college, accepts men who wear dresses but baulks at admitting women with large clitorises. I honestly wish I could make sense of this to give them helpful advice but I just can’t. Does Wellesley think that college women feel more threatened by the latter than by the former?
Transwomen are women. So they’re in.
Transmen are men. So they’re out.
Notice how, assuming Wellesley is competitively selective, women get screwed both ways from Sunday.
Again.
Really? Aren’t women screwing over themselves? What man is responsible for this decision except maybe a tiny minority of men who transitioned to women and seek admission to (or are faculty at) Wellesley? Are you suggesting that the women of this school are being unfairly victimized? By whom? Surely it’s not really men in this case, surely.
The women who run Wellesley seem to be happy to screw over other women. Don’t ask me why. Maybe they are afraid of Antifa, who have taken an interest in trans activism of late.
I’m with you though. It’s unfortunate when women themselves become their own enemy (as when men do it). I think women and men should be able to have their own private schools and inclusivity can take a back seat. It just goes to show that any large demographic will have a wide diversity of opinion and it doesn’t get much larger than half the human race (male/female).
A little retcon [retroactive continuity] there. I am pretty sure that Wellesley was founded for marginalized women based on their sex. Is this the end of women’s colleges?
“… with trans people under attack across the country…” Have there been pogroms against trans individuals across the country? Police round-ups? Lynchings? Denial of voting rights? Somehow, we all missed news of these universal “attacks”. So like those “harms” that imaginary students suffer when exposed to microaggressive strings of letters.
Now we know what leftists mean when they talk quite seriously among themselves of ‘heightening the contradictions’ of capitalism.
“…people who consider themselves members of both sexes, or ‘nonbinary’.” – J. Coyne
According to woke gender terminology, identifying as both male and female is only one way of being “nonbinary” among others:
“Non-binary people may identify as an intermediate or separate third gender, identify with more than one gender, no gender, or have a fluctuating gender identity.” (Wikipedia)
Have a look at the New Discourses translations from the wokish : in particular, “agender”.
Cake gender.
https://www.lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/Cakegender
I mean, it just makes sense.
[…. thinks it out a bit….]
At some level.
I went to a women’s college (not Wellesley). In theory, I don’t have a problem with trans women attending my alma mater. I don’t know about trans men. I’m also not sure why a trans man would want to attend a traditionally women’s college, except for safety. One of my classmates actually came out as trans after graduating and has told me he now regrets attending our alma mater since he essentially outs himself every time he posts his resume, which is not something he’s comfortable with.
That’s an interesting point.
It always amazes me that transmen choose to become pregnant and give birth, arguably the most female-only thing that it is possible to do. They then insist on rewriting the language for biological women because “breast feeding” is exclusionary and harmful. What a world we live in.
If it’s really all about “safety,” why wouldn’t gay men be admitted? They absolutely face discrimination and threats of violence, even today, just as (some) trans people do.
I’m just done with all the slicing and dicing by the identitarians. I’m tempted to make up bumper stickers reading, “F**k your identity. Just be you.”
My granddaughter is a student at Wellesley, so I will be watching this situation with considerable interest. I hope they stick to their original vision.
And here’s yet another case of where the confusion between sex and gender comes in. Yes, women’s colleges were founded for women facing sex discrimination — and until recently “gender” would have been considered a synonym for “sex.” And women are a subset of people. So it would be fair to say they were indeed “founded for people facing gender discrimination.”
Except that the word “gender” now kinda sorta means something else, such as 1.) gender, the social stereotypes about being a woman, and 2.) gender identity, the inexpressible, untestable, inchoate state of experiencing the mental state of being a woman. This mucks up previously clear concepts very nicely.
It now turns a refuge originally aimed at females into one where, technically, a male cross-dresser may seek safety. If a person who wears a dress is treated differently depending on whether they’re male or female, that’s legally considered “gender discrimination.” The vocabulary creep also technically throws females out of women’s college for being the “wrong kind” of female. They’re not real women anymore. How judgey.
Given that this isn’t what I consider a real fight — keeping women’s colleges for actual women (females) — I don’t particularly care how the remaining Critical Social Justicists work this one out. Women who reject womanhood might end up finding out it’s an inconvenience when they want to dip a toe back in. As for the non-binary, who are stunned into exceptionalism by the fact that, just like everyone else, they don’t fit neatly into sex stereotypes — well, I’ve said enough.
I agree with you: I don’t care too much how wealthy people decide to exclude some but not all other wealthy people from their private college. I thought the fun part might come when they decide to start admitting some masculine people (trans men) in addition to males (who identify as trans women), because the college may get sued for rejecting admission to people who are both masculine and male. A sort of anti-intersectionality.
At the risk of being labelled a fascist, I like this take on the whole trans-bully insanity: https://twitter.com/salltweets/status/1636966573629149184
The administration stood by their position that transmen are not welcome. See this press release: https://www.wellesley.edu/news/journalists/releases/content/node/202056
But since “transwomen are women”, those males are still welcome.
This means they accept biological men, which puzzles me a bit because those men could still show the domineering tendencies that women don’t like. Who knows?
Yes, I expect that those domineering tendencies survive transition. After all, transwomen continue to exhibit male patterns of criminality, including for violent and sex offences.
The fight about allowing trans men is part of an ongoing fight at Wellesley about its being a women’s college. The editorial staff of the Wellesley News would like to see references to the college as a women’s college disappear. They regard such references as a use of “gendered language” which should be eschewed. The insistence by the President that the college is a women’s college is a refusal to go along with this kind of erasure of talk of women as women. Compare JK Rowling’s criticism of trans activists talking of “menstruators” where one might have thought the word for what they were talking about was “women”. See Wellesley News, May 13, 2021 for the Wellesley News staff objecting to official references to the college as a women’s college.
Here’s an archived copy of that issue of Wellesley News: https://archive.ph/wk1km
I imagine that certain military academies will see if they can use this in reverse. If a school can be cis-male exclusive, there immediately becomes an argument (whether it works or not is another story) for exclusively-cis-male.
There’s probably a witticism to be had here as well regarding Mitt Romney’s goofball claim during the second 2012 presidential debate that he had “binders full of women” who’d sought jobs in his administration during his term as Massachusetts governor — but damned if I wanna take the time on a fine Sunday afternoon to figure out what it is.
Reckon Romney’s one of my favorite old-school Republicans nowadays, given that he’s among the few to stand their ground rather than flee into the closet for moderates following Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP base. There’s something almost endearing these days about ol’ Mitt’s squarer-than-Lawrence-Welk 1950s persona.
a. accept trans men as students
I don’t know, why would a biological female, identifying as a male, would want to join a college that is explicitly for women?Are the deep inside their minds still female?
b. accept “nonbinary” people who were “identified as male at birth” (their language), and
I haven’t a clue what non-binary even means, and I suspect they don’t even know themselves. I think the best definition would be those that don’t identify as either male or female. Since the college is explicitly meant for women, females, not for non-binaries. Hence no.
c. “making the college’s communications more gender inclusive — for example, using the word ‘students’ or ‘alumni’ instead of ‘women’.”
This idiotic idea that words define the world. There is nothing wrong with ‘women’ . Some of the people I loved most were women, from my mother to my beloved late wife (who sadly died young). It would be an insult to them to deny them womanhood.
So:
a: no
b: no
c: no
“I haven’t a clue what non-binary even means, and I suspect they don’t even know themselves. I think the best definition would be those that don’t identify as either male or female.” – Nicky
Right, and in Wokespeak not identifying as either male or female means identifying as both male and female, as neither male nor female, as having a third gender x beyond male and female, as having at least three genders (male+female+x+…, or x+y+z+…), or as having at least two “fluctuating” genders.
By the way, the American Heritage Dictionary defines the verb “to identify as” as “to believe or assert that one belongs to a certain group or class.” So “gender identity” qua subjective gender identification is actually “gender belief” or “gender assertion”. For example, to identify as male is to believe (and assert) that one is male. Of course, beliefs and assertions can be false (unless what is believed or asserted is a necessary truth).
I forgot to mention being “agender” as yet another way of being “nonbinary”: To identify as agender is to believe (and assert) that one is absolutely genderless, i.e. that one is not only neither male nor female, but neither female, male, *nor x*, with “x” standing for some gender beyond male and female.
The most shocking issue is that gender specific colleges even exist in the 21st century. An easy fix to this situation is to just accept everyone.