Bizarre trans situation at Hilary Clinton's ex college

This is happening near me and is in the news. Basically they already admit anyone non-binary and transwomen but they don't admit transmen because apparently identity trumps biology. Quite why a transman would want to attend a women's only college when they "are" a man is beyond me but then many transmen want to get pregnant, deliver a baby, breastfeed and still be some idea of a man.

The president rightly sees that if you admit both sides of the trans then you are basically admitting men and women and the idea of being a women's college is gone. I think it is gone to be honest.

Of all the things the trans debate has thrown up, I care the least about this. More worried about irreversible medical procedures on children, men in women's jails/shelters/rape crisis groups/bathrooms, eradication of women's experiences and lives and even history. But yeah, in the end Wellesley had a unique focus on women's education and experience and that is on its way out.

"That is fascinating. The students want to return to an all-women campus and it is the staff who are resisting!"

Do they? It sounds like they just want to add transmen and NB to the college. Not remove transwomen.

So if transmen are out but non-binary are in, what about the trans non-binary FtMs?

Brilliantly put.

Funny how these young transmen despise women having anything for themselves as much as some men do.

How much of a narcissist do you have to be to attend a women's college then whine because they centre women.

Seriously, if you want to pretend you are a man, fuck off and get your validation elsewhere rather than destroy things for women that want and need the single sex environment.

Female only colleges are absolutely necessary while there are still girls whose parents will not allow them to be in a mixed college.

Nonbinary is very much have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too choice, for both sexes, but more so for female people as there is less cake for them to begin with.

The latter can demand all female reproductive rights to apply to them, too AND they can also demand that the group which can fall pregnant must not be called 'women and girls' as they don't hold with the sexist stereotypes about women which they posit us ordinary women adore.

It's like a private contract with the patriarchy, asking special dispensation from sexism and misogyny, yet keeping all the benefits feminism has won the female sex. It's not a contract that would be honoured, of course, but even pretending this option exists is doing harm to the rest of us by obliterating our embodied identities and by making feminism so much harder.

I expect there's some issue with the funding of the college which means that there is some token effort to exclude "men".
Non binary is such a win win choice, isn't it?

I would very much want to learn how inclusiveness guarantees that 'everyone can thrive', given that I have never seen it used for the vast majority of people but always for tiny minorities. The null hypothesis is that the rest of us do not matter at all.

Examples of this are myriad. Girls should be comfortable undressing with males in dressing rooms, women should not mind sharing prison cells with male prisoners, women should not mind female grants going to male people etc. None of us is allowed to mind the theft of our spaces, rights, and words. If we do mind, we are to be excluded.

The college wants to use the gender identity religion to define who is a woman, so it won't admit people who don't believe that they possess an abstract, inner feminine identity. You can be either sex, but you must believe in feminine people needing their own college (where the parts of femininity, i.e., submissiveness, passivity, emotionalism and nurturing are apparently accepted as defining the suitable student body).

The students who dislike this want the college to include everyone who does not have a male identity AND also does not possess a male body.

This is incoherent, of course, but is in tone with how feminism online is now. The only group to be excluded is male people who don't want to be called something else than 'men', because if that group, too, would be included, then feminism would cease to exist altogether.

Coherence by the students here would require excluding all non-binary people and all trans men if the gender identity religion is used to define 'woman', and excluding all male people however they identify if sex is the basis for defining 'woman.'

I think that 'inclusiveness' is the actual new underlying value in much of this new feminism which is a tremendous problem as it means 'practically now boundaries ever', and also would assign feminism all the problems in the whole world without any resources to address them.

It is interesting that there seems to be no actual debate about the theoretical bases for feminism. Probably the #nodebate rules? But thinking is an important aspect of being human, too.

The NYT article was fairly clear. It sounds like they already have lots of female students who start to identify as male while at college, and they are allowed to stay, so I suppose allowing trans-men to apply as new students is sort of logical. But allowing anyone (male or female) who identifies as trans or non-binary does rather make a mockery of the 'women's college' label, in my view.

I was interested in the quote from a trans academic at the end of the NYT article - it sounds like even people fully invested in the gender stuff are getting a bit fed up of it:

"Kaleb Goldschmitt is a music professor who transitioned while at Wellesley. The college culture is becoming more welcoming to gender diversity, but not as quickly as many students would like, said Professor Goldschmitt, who identifies as transmasculine.
Still, Professor Goldschmitt questioned the outsize attention that students were paying to the debate.
“I definitely want the trans and nonbinary and questioning students to feel welcome and loved and supported and encouraged to explore,” the professor said, “but my goodness, do I wish they would rally like this for disabled students or for other things.” "

Sadly, no. The students want TW, TM and NB students to be admitted.

The faculty's position at least has a (mad) internal logic. If you pretend that people can change sex, and that men can become women, so be admitted to a women's college, logically it follows that a woman who has become a man is not eligible for that college.

Wellesley are also probably worried about being sued by (non-trans) men if they admit some people who are being categorised as men, i.e. transmen.

Amen to this.

There were a couple of threads I read recently about a girls' school in Oxford which is moving to a co-ed intake to all year groups. It gave minimal notice of this massive change in ethos to current students and families, many of whom had chosen it specifically because it was a girls' school. If I understood what parents were saying, the school management have said that they are effectively co-ed already because they have so many transboys, so admitting male pupils won't make that much difference!

I assume Sam Brinton wil be applying. I expect there to be some very top drawers luggage there. Rich pickings.

I never understand the exceptional selfishness that marks someone who sees an all female institution, serving hundreds of females, and thinks 'I'm going to fuck over that, and all those females, and make it all about me'.

There is no need for any male person to be there regardless of identity, there is no need for any female person who has chosen to deny their femalehood to be there, the country is chock full of mixed sex institutions where they can identify however they choose without affecting others' opportunities and provisions.

But no. It's got to always be all about the TQ destroying stuff for women. Always.

Let's say Wellesley decides to let in all students except males with a male identity. It would be interesting to see if there could be a potential discrimination claim. After all, Wellesley is letting in male bodied students with non male/female 'identities', and female bodied students with male/non female identities. So there's no problem with male bodied students per se, and there's no problem with male identities per se...so why would a male bodied student with a male identity be a problem? It seems entirely arbitrary to exclude them. What could possibly be the reason?

This is what happens when they dick about with the meaning of words.

Language as a political weapon, and a very clever one!

This is crazy - it's a single sex college, not a single gender one. They should never have allowed transwomen in in the first place but if you believe that transwomen are women, you can't then say that transmen can attend a women's college. Because if transwomen are women, then transmen are men. Not women.

Don't even get me started on the cognitive dissonance of non-binary, the very definition of which requires the existence of a binary.

I have a family member who attended Wellesley, worked in their admissions office, and is still involved in some alumnae recruitment efforts. She would say that Wellesley is culturally a women's college, and committed to staying that way, regardless of the biology of the individual students.

Under the current admissions policy, prospective students are told that as an historic women's college, Wellesley has traditions, language, history, etc. that centre women with no apologies. That's written into their "gender inclusion" policy. As long as that policy has existed, there's been pushback from and "on behalf of" transmen & NBs who say that they're excluded/their existence denied. There's been ongoing bullying of faculty, staff, and students who want to keep the school woman-focused.

For now, Wellesley doesn't accept applications from transmen but does accept non binary people "assigned female at birth". They accept transwomen "living consistently as women" and reserve the right to check up on that in various ways. (There's some secrecy around this as they rightly don't want to draw attention to individual students or compromise their privacy and safety, and they also don't want to advertise the situation too much to parents, alumnae, doners, etc. who might disapprove or be concerned.)

Wellesley allows transmen who'd transitioned after they'd enrolled to stay if they want, but also helps them transfer to another school if the individual student prefers. There were/are some issues with students who transitioned FtM, particularly in cases where the student took a few years off to transition and returned to the college as male, and was with a new group of students who had not known him pre-transition. According to my relative, this is where many of the issues came in: the newly-out/newly-transitioned transmen were, for the most part, unhappy for women to be centred. And the other women students championed the transmen in what might be described as a similar way to the way women in a patriarchal society often illogically back, well, men.

Slight tangent: the situation in US higher education - where there's a tradition of independent, historically all-female liberal arts colleges - is variable. Every one has had to declare a new "inclusion" policy of some kind in the past ten to fifteen years. Some accept any trans or non-binary people (on the basis that women-only colleges exist to help people discriminated against on the basis of "gender"). Others welcome transwomen but not transmen, and they’re all over the map with non-binary. And many of course simply went fully co-ed, often long before the current wave of gender ideology - e.g., original "Seven Sisters" school Vassar began admitting men in the late 1960s.

Unfortunately, I think that schools like Wellesley will be forced to submit and will lose what makes them special, and the women they once attracted from around the world for that reason will go elsewhere. There’s a good chance more schools will end up going fully and openly co-ed just to survive financially.

This is fucking hilarious. So they accept WOMEN and TW but not natal born women such as TM! Oh and of course non binary blokes too!!
So men are in but some women are excluded.

Slow handclap for Wellesley!

The whole situation. Not any PPs!

Nope. None the wiser!
What a mess

I saw the headline ‘Wellesley College students vote to include transmen’ and was really heartened - they are recognising them as women no matter how they identify.

But no, it’s not like that at all. The staff want to restrict admittance to anyone who identifies as a woman (sex irrelevant, gender everything); the students want it open to anyone who doesn’t both identify as a male and also is male - because trans people of either sex and whatever gender are somehow gender minorities and the college should not be for women but for all gender minorities. So both sex and gender somehow count but not in the sense of seeing that male people do not belong in a woman’s college.

The NYT was a bit clearer:

www.nytimes.com/2023/03/14/us/wellesley-college-trans-nonbinary.html?smid=url-share