Meet the Other Phone. Flexible and made to last.

Meet the Other Phone.
Flexible and made to last.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

A “historically women’s college”

4 replies

TskingSquirrel · 02/02/2019 10:19

Delurking to share an article from the U.S. Chronicle of Higher Education:

Who Is a Women’s College For? As transgender students claim their space, traditionalists see an identity crisis

www.chronicle.com/interactives/caplan-bricker

(I'm an American visiting the U.K. for a year; I came to mumsnet for advice on schools and how to live without a tumble dryer, but then stumbled on this board. In real life I work at an institution very much like this, so the discussion here has been a sharp contrast.)

OP posts:
GrinitchSpinach · 02/02/2019 12:48

Thanks for posting!

Major eye roll from me at this:

"Meanwhile, the federal government has dismantled protections for trans people and sought to define them out of existence."

Where 'define out of existence'= rescind Obama's overreach guidance that redefined 'sex' in Title IX to mean 'gender identity'; no new law, no public consultation.

The article also uses "assigned female at birth."

If there’s a dearth of safe, affirming spaces for trans students, Mount Holyoke and its fellow Seven Sisters — colleges founded, according to their own narratives, on the defiance of gender norms — seem like natural candidates to meet that need.
Of course they were natural candidates; they were the only places women had to themselves, so naturally they were the "natural" group of people who needed to budge up and make room for everyone else.

at least is offers this:
Then again, with misogyny everywhere on display, how can the idea that we no longer need women’s spaces be anything but utopian?

Here we go again, with women being positioned as an oppressor class that owes deference to the trans people they "oppress":
Just as Rachman feels responsible for how he wields his own masculinity, he believes some of his cis peers need to acknowledge their power and privilege as members of Mount Holyoke’s female majority. “The top of Mount Holyoke’s hierarchy starts with white, cis, heterosexual women,” he says.

Kijua Sanders-McMurtry, who joined Mount Holyoke in the new position of chief diversity officer last year, told me that improving the pipeline for trans women students is a top priority. Trans women and gender-nonconforming youth who were assigned male at birth may not know that the door is open to them.

Lesbian erasure at a Seven Sisters college Hmm
In conversations about the trans-inclusive policy, cis women often feel they are supposed to remain silent. Some guard their opinions more closely than ever after a viral backlash against an op-ed in the campus newspaper last spring. The piece was by a cis, lesbian student disappointed that an event billed as “Peer Led Queer Ed” focused on penetrative sex and avoided gendered words like “penis” and “vulva.”

Angry Facebook commenters accused the author of erasing trans students — or being a TERF — by implying that penetrative sex is less “queer” (which some extrapolated to mean that the author excluded trans women from the category of lesbian, and perhaps from being women at all).

For many trans and gender-nonconforming students, the op-ed was a reminder that their peers’ respect for their identities may be only surface deep. A friend can observe your change of pronouns and yet privately see you as a woman. “It’s the idea that I’m not really a man,” one student told me. “I’m the vagina-man.”
This part is so sad to me. The trans religion tells young people it is literally possible to change sex, and also that once you go through this metamorphosis, you can make others perceive, genuinely perceive, you the way you want to be perceived. None of us gets that in life... It is a damaging lie these young people are being sold.

“I think I wish people weren’t so apprehensive and felt they could talk about women’s issues without having to caveat it with, ‘and this includes trans and nonbinary students, too,’” said one cis student who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was worried about being accused of transphobia. “Those issues are very important, but … I feel like women everywhere are expected to carve out space for other people, and this is just another example of it. Yup yup.

There are enough people out there hating on the idea of women seeking community with one another. We don’t need to dismantle women’s space ourselves.”

Good find, OP.

BettyDuMonde · 02/02/2019 13:01

Can’t improve on the comment Spinach has already made, so just wanted to say, welcome and glad you de-lurked.

The US and the U.K. are culturally intertwined to the point that we won’t be able to hold the biological sex v gender identity line in law long-term if you don’t.

We have to stand together.

Hope you found a solution to the tumble dryer problem?

misscockerspaniel · 02/02/2019 13:22

Welcome. And www.lakeland.co.uk is the answer to your lack of a tumble drier problem Smile

TskingSquirrel · 03/02/2019 22:31

Thank you for the welcome!

(And I found myself a folding drying rack early on -- but was utterly flummoxed by what to do with king-size bedding! Mumsnet told me to hang it over the upstairs hallway railing, for which I will be forever grateful.)

OP posts:
New posts on this thread. Refresh page
Swipe left for the next trending thread