Students at Wellesley College will vote on a nonbinding referendum asking whether admission should be open to all nonbinary and trans applicants, including trans men. Currently, the college allows admission to anyone who lives and identifies as a woman.
Wellesley College proudly proclaims itself as a place for “women who will make a difference in the world.” It boasts a long line of celebrated alumni, including Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Nora Ephron.
The activists also say that the referendum will reflect reality on campus, as there are already trans male students at the school who, for example, transitioned after admission. And an open letter signed by hundreds of faculty, staff and alumni said the college was abandoning the radicalism of its creation “by focusing on the letter, rather than the spirit, of its founding.”
Some women’s colleges have stricter policies. Sweet Briar College, a small private school in Virginia, requires a birth certificate or amended birth certificate indicating the applicant’s gender as female. One sent her a college sweatshirt with “Mount Holyoke” crossed out and wrote in blood-red ink that she was destroying Christianity. Another made a dig at her educational background, writing in a letter that if the president “hadn’t started at a community college, I’d understand what a women’s college really is,” Pasquerella said.
Students traditionally had changed “brotherhood” in the penultimate line to “sisterhood,” Rosenwald said. But now some students say “sisterhood”; others say “siblinghood.” “If you don’t think you can fit in here, then you have your pick of thousands of other coed colleges in the country or the world,” she said, adding, “We’re a women’s college. That’s the core identity of the school, and we can’t start watering that down.”
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