Women's Colleges and Transgender Students

There are two schools of thought on this (admitting transgender students to women’s colleges) as would be expected on most issues but this one captured my interest. Apparently women's colleges are revisiting policies around enrolling transgender students as are many institutions of higher learning, single-sex, coed and those with religious affiliations, and showing varying degrees of acceptance for changing norms. Recently, Mills College in Oakland, California, recently became the first women's college in the U.S. 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. Other prominent women's colleges also are weighing changes. At these colleges it appears like in many other places in our society that thoughts on gender are evolving. On the flip side of the issue, some Christian colleges have recently sought and received religious exemption from Title IX, the federal law banning gender-based discrimination in education so they can keep transgender students out, acceptable behavior for them in line with their ultra conservative religious beliefs.

I’m more in agreement with early feminists who argued that reducing women to their biological functions was a foundation of women's oppression (my biological functions aren't the only things that define me) and so I tend to side with the all-women’s schools with acceptance for transgender students, those allowing them to apply and attend. There isn't much privacy in the information age in which we live and yet I am still not all that interested in the details of the biological functions of others. I believe in tolerance and a good place to practice tolerance is in education.