Wellesley Students Vote For Admitting Trans Men

A nonbinding referendum at a women’s college is bringing attention to the different approaches to including trans men within intersectional feminism, and being predictably mocked by the Washington Examiner.

by Evan Urquhart

Earlier this week the New York Times published a lengthy story about the effort by students at Wellesley, a prestigious Massachussetts women’s college, to advocate for more gender neutral language and for the admission of transgender men. Anti-trans tabloid the Washington Examiner today ran an opinion column skewering the idea that a women’s college might be struggling with this.

Wellesley and other women’s colleges have included trans women for years, and the sky doesn’t seem to have fallen yet. But the question of transgender male students has been around even longer, because some students admitted as women have transitioned while at school. The stories of several trans men at Wellesley appeared in a lengthy story about the topic in New York Times in 2014. At the time, Wellesley had not opened their admissions to trans women, but there were enough trans people at Wellesley to have an on-campus group for students who did not identify as women. The Times wrote, in 2014, that student government and many teachers had begin removing references to women to be inclusive of the students who weren’t.

Why do young people feel that trans men belong in women’s colleges? In a nutshell, it’s because trans men experience vulnerability and discrimination based on their gender and their birth-assigned sex. Rather than seeing a women’s college as a place for cis women, or even for cis and trans women, they see its core mission as providing a safe place for people whose gender is a source of marginalization. This alternative way of looking at sexism, feminism, and women’s rights provides an avenue for people who want to talk about oppression based in gender in a trans inclusive way. It also reflects reality: Trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people of all sorts report an elevated incidence of domestic violence and sexual assault, which have in the past been viewed through the lens of violence against women. Trans people of all genders experience higher poverty, struggle with a healthcare access, and face discrimination in housing and employment based on their gender. For students who have grown up around more expansive ideas about gender identity, singling out trans men for exclusion from a gender-safe space doesn’t compute.

To the Washington Examiner, of course, this is all just fodder for their scoffing, reactionary stance. “When no one knows what a woman is, who gets to decide who goes to women’s colleges?” the first sentence of the piece by Madeline Fry Schultz asks. This is the overall tone, not of honest inquiry, but of kneejerk rejection not only of the inclusion of transgender people in women’s college, but of the feminism that gave rise to the colleges as well.

screenshot from the Washington Examiner

Women’s colleges came about because women weren’t allowed to attend college at all. While there’s a bit of a mixed history with finishing schools, true women’s colleges have always been a hotbed of feminism and advocacy for women’s rights. This is because woman was not just a biological sex, but a legal category subject to numerous restrictions and burdens that were never imposed on men. If womanhood was not, at least partially, about oppression, there would have been no need for women’s colleges at all.