Bizarre trans situation at Hilary Clinton's ex college

[flyingbuttress43]

Students at the female-only college attended by Hilary Clinton (Wellesley College) are at odds with staff after they voted to let transgender men attend the institution.

www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/03/15/womens-wellesley-college-accused-co-ed-accept-transgender-men/

(Sorry, quoting as I don't seem to be able to make a share token. Can anyone help?)

The students voted in favour of accepting applications from transgender men and non-binary, regardless of their "assigned" gender at birth.

But the non-binding vote has been resisted by college president Paula Johnson, who said their are no plans to change current policy.

So what is so bizarre? Only the fact that the women-only college rules that transmen i.e. women are not eligible but that transwomen i.e. men are eligible.

Ms Johnson said that the referendum would mean rewriting Wellesley's founding mission to education women, which the college had no plans to do.

"Although there is no plan to revisit the admissions policy, the college will continue to engage all students, including transgender male and non-binary students in the important work of building an inclusive academic community where everyone feels they belong."

Some students have been holding a sit-in at the administration building and their student newspaper's editorial board wrote that "we disapprove and entirely disagree" with the president.

Ms Johnson said the debate had become unhealthy and that there was enormous social pressure for students to support the referendum.

I've been personally boed at public gatherings where I've referred to Wellesley as a women's college, which it is," she said.

Except of course it no longer is, if it is accepting transwomen, and refusing transmen.

You couldn't make it up. Except you can apparently.

I completely missed the part about transwomen being welcome 😮

Transmen sounds reasonable since they're biologically female 🤔
Although if they're 'men' I don't know why they'd want to be at a women's college, surely a recipe for dysphoria.

I think the article I read was confused, it centred on the college admitting 'transwomen' (by which they meant transmen, I think) and the debates and sit-ins it was causing. No mention of transmen.

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

It is the students who have to live with whichever cohort are allowed in. I wonder whether they are currently suffering from an excess of male students. I could imagine even a few would quickly make their presence felt.

Well done to those young women for making themselves heard. There must be a good reason for them to reject the status quo. I hope that the staff stop virtue signaling and start to listen properly.

No one really knows what to do about this do they?

Can we re-programme the word "transwoman" to mean 'person, born female, who would now like to be given the advantages traditionally reserved for men'?

I cannot make head or tail of this situation. Is it that students want to accept transmen (I.e. female students identifying as men) but not transwomen (I.e. male students identifying as women) but the college doesn't? Or is it vice versa?

Gosh remember how much easier it used to be when words had accepted meanings....

Does it say anywhere that students only want biologically female people to be eligible? That seems very unlikely in the current climate. Probably students want to add transmen to the group that can apply.

Actually, I managed to read it and it is unclear whether the students want to stop male students attending. They want FtM transitioners to be included and also all “non-binary” people, male and female. So it may be that they want all people who claim they are trans or non-binary to be able to attend, regardless of their sex. It is utterly ironic, however, that the college is still insisting it’s a women’s college when they are allowing men who claim they are women access.

Does it mean that the students want to allow women and trans identified people of both sexes? But the college only recognises gender identity, not sex?

It's so mad.

Does this work?

digitaleditions.telegraph.co.uk/data/1283/reader/reader.html?social#!preferred/0/package/1283/pub/1283/page/59/article/NaN

You can't have it both ways.

If ran the college I admit I'd probably be doing this on purpose to rile the people who'd made me admit transwomen in the first place, but I am petty.

No one has a fucking clue what anyone means anymore. Which illustrates nicely why biological female should be the only admissions to a women's college and why the word 'woman' is so bloody important!

Took me a few reads to get my head around that.
So the college allows self identity and freely admits men identifying as women and sees no conflict with their founding principles.
Students want to extend this to a definition that includes sex as well as gender, but the college is resisting.
I can see some twisted logic to this. If you restrict something to women (or men) only you have to decide how you define that term.
So - born women or identifying as women..
Students want both.
This is the same definition that Girl Guides have had to resolve. They too have plumped for identity but do still accept anyone born female too, albeit grudgingly. The line seeming to be 'this is for girls and if you're not a girl you're probably not interested in us'

The NYT was a bit clearer:

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

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.

Nope. None the wiser!
What a mess

The whole situation. Not any PPs!

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!

Thanks for the share token ResisterRex. This is so Orwellian - the only way I could think of describing it is bizarre.

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 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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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!

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.