Wellesley students to trans people: Welcome
But opponents pan nonbinding results at women’s college
Wellesley College proudly proclaims itself as a place for “women who will make a difference in the world.”
It boasts a long line of celebrated alumni, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Nora Ephron.
This week, its students supported a referendum that had polarized the Massachusetts campus and went straight to the heart of Wellesley’s identity as a women’s college.
The referendum, which was nonbinding, called for opening admission to all nonbinary and transgender applicants, including trans men. Currently, the college allows admission to anyone who lives and consistently identifies as a woman.
The referendum also called for making the college’s communications more gender-inclusive — for example, using the word “students” or “alumni” instead of “women.”
The vote was in some ways definitional: What is the mission of a women’s college?
Supporters said women’s colleges had always been safe havens for people facing gender discrimination, and with trans people under attack, all transgender and nonbinary applicants must be able to apply to Wellesley.
Opponents of the referendum said if trans men or nonbinary students were admitted, Wellesley would become effectively coed.
And Wellesley’s president, Paula Johnson, said the referendum would rewrite Wellesley’s founding mission to educate women.
In a statement after Tuesday’s vote, a spokesperson for Johnson said the college would not reconsider its opposition.
“The college will continue to engage all students, including transgender male and nonbinary students, in the important work of building an inclusive academic community where everyone feels they belong,” the statement said.
The college, which is in the Boston suburbs and has roughly 2,500 students, has no data on the number of students who identify as trans or nonbinary.
In a message to the campus last week, Johnson described Wellesley as “a women’s college that admits cis, trans and nonbinary students — all who consistently identify as women.”
“Wellesley,” she said, “was founded on the then-radical idea that educating women of all socioeconomic backgrounds leads to progress for everyone. As a college and community, we continue to challenge the norms and power structures that too often leave women, and others of marginalized identities, behind.”
There was fierce pushback.
Students held an ongoing sit-in at the administration building.
The student newspaper’s editorial board wrote that “we disapprove and entirely disagree” with the president.
Departments issued statements in support of the referendum.
An associate provost for equity and inclusion said the employees in her office were “deeply challenged” by the president’s email.
And an open letter signed by hundreds of faculty, staff and alumni said the college was abandoning the radicalism of its creation “by focusing on the letter, rather than the spirit, of its founding.”
Alexandra Brooks, the student body president, said before the vote that the referendum, which was voted on anonymously, demonstrated just how many students supported such a change and that it reflected today’s reality.
“We’re just asking the administration to put on paper what’s already true of the student body,” she said. “Trans men go to Wellesley, nonbinary people go to Wellesley, and they kind of always have.”
A new policy, she said, “would not in any way change the culture of the school.”
“It’s still, and always will be, a school to educate people who are of marginalized genders,” she said.
Women’s colleges have grappled with trans issues over the last several years.
In 2015, Wellesley College announced a policy that allowed admission to any student “who lives as a woman and consistently identifies as a woman,” opening the door to trans women applicants.
Some women’s colleges have stricter policies.
Sweet Briar College, a small private school in Virginia, requires a birth certificate or amended birth certificate indicating the applicant’s gender as female.
The college’s president, Meredith Jung-En Woo, said Sweet Briar welcomes trans students if they meet the admissions policy. She has not received much pushback, she said.
Mount Holyoke has among the most open of admissions policies, accepting applications from all female, trans and nonbinary students.
But when Mount Holyoke changed its admissions standards in 2014, many alumnae voiced concerns, sometimes in a vitriolic and personal way, said Lynn Pasquerella, the president at the time.
One sent her a college sweatshirt with “Mount Holyoke” crossed out and wrote in blood-red ink that Pasquerella was destroying Christianity. Another made a dig at her educational background, writing in a letter that if the president “hadn’t started at a community college, I’d understand what a women’s college really is,” Pasquerella said.
Even so, she said, the support for the policy change among current students was enthusiastic.
Women’s colleges have reputations for being a refuge for transgender students, including transgender men, said Genny Beemyn, the director of the Stonewall Center at University of Massachusetts Amherst. The schools tend to have very progressive student bodies and large numbers of lesbian and bisexual students, who can be more welcoming to transgender students, Beemyn said.
“For people who are gender nonconforming,” Beemyn added, “they may feel more comfortable in an environment that doesn’t have men in it” because there is less likelihood of experiencing harassment.
But opponents of the referendum worry about the erosion of the institution’s mission at a time when the number of women’s colleges is dwindling. There are roughly 30 left, from a peak of nearly 300 in the mid-1960s.
Elizabeth Um, a senior and president of the campus’s anti-abortion group, Wellesley for Life, said she chose to attend Wellesley because she wanted to stay close to home, and because she wanted to attend a women’s college.
“If you don’t think you can fit in here, then you have your pick of thousands of other coed colleges in the country or the world,” she said. “We’re a women’s college. That’s the core identity of the school, and we can’t start watering that down.”
But Um did not actively oppose the referendum, partly because it was destined to pass, she said, and because pushing against it on campus would be akin to “social suicide.”