BOSTON ― Women’s colleges are revisiting policies around enrolling transgender students as institutions of higher learning ― single-sex, coed and those with religious affiliations ― demonstrate varying degrees of acceptance for changing norms.
Mills College in Oakland, California, recently became the first U.S. women’s college to declare it would accept undergraduate applications from “self-identified women” and people “assigned female at birth who do not fit into the gender binary,” effective the semester that starts January 2015.
Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, followed with a similar announcement last week. Administrators at other prominent women’s colleges also are weighing changes.
The discussions are, in part, an acknowledgment that thoughts on gender are evolving. Student activists have been steadily pushing for colleges to make changes, and some schools have altered applications to allow applicants to select “transgender” as a third option for gender or given them the option to discuss their gender identity in a short essay.
“What it means to be a woman isn’t static,” says Mount Holyoke President Lynn Pasquerella, who announced the admissions policy change at the college’s convocation ceremony. “Early feminists argued that reducing women to their biological functions was a foundation of women’s oppression. We don’t want to fall back on that.”
Other institutions, however, want to place limits on those students once they arrive on campus, including what sports they can play, which bathrooms they can use and where they can live.
Simpson University, Spring Arbor University and George Fox University are among the Christian colleges that have recently received a religious exemption from Title IX, the federal law banning gender-based discrimination in education.
