Trans Women Offer Women's Colleges A New Way To Support An Old Mission
Recently, Mills College in California and Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts modified admission policies to include transgender women regardless of the gender listed on official documents or completed medical procedures. The pressure is now on other women’s colleges to produce comprehensive admission policies for trans women or clarify current policies.
Recent trans women students are more likely to have an understanding of their identity during the university application process versus previous generations. Along with older trans women looking to start as non-traditional or graduate students, trans women finishing high school now are much more likely to have a handle on how to speak about their own lived experiences. Many are publicly living their lives as bright young women.
Women’s colleges have largely been out of reach to the majority of trans women, just as they historically have been for many young women. These institutions have already spent much of the last few decades grappling with intersectional issues of race and class. On the issue of economic diversity, the Women’s College Coalition reports, “94% of women’s college first-year full-time students receive some form of financial aid, 48% are eligible for Pell Grants, the average annual institutional aid is over $15,000.” And women’s colleges have also pursued increasing ethnic diversity. In the late 1990s, Beverly Guy-Sheftall of Spelman, a historically black women’s college, released a report on “Diversity and Women’s Colleges” where she addressed the racial make up of women’s colleges.
Black women students are the largest number of minority students at all women’s colleges, but it is important to point out that Asian students are the largest minority (ranging from 95 to 634) at several women’s colleges (Barnard [587], Bryn Mawr, Smith, Wellesley [634], Mills, Scripps and Wells). Similarly Hispanic students are in the largest minority (over 100) at two women’s colleges (College of Saint Elizabeth and Mount Saint Mary’s College) and are in somewhat respectable numbers, relative to other women of color, at the College of New Rochelle (684), Texas Woman’s University, Mills, Alverno, Leslie, Marymount, Marymount Manhattan, Wellesley and Smith. American Indian women continue to be seriously underrepresented, though at Trinity (VT), they outnumber (8) other minorities, since there were only 3 Hispanic and Asian students and 2 Black students in 1993; they are also fairly well represented, relatively speaking, at Stephens College (10)….Not surprisingly, in 1997 there are only two women’s colleges (other than Spelman and Bennett) with black female college presidents (Texas Woman’s University and Smith College) and none with Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian women.
Fifteen years later, how do these institutions stack up in terms of ethnic diversity? Very well. Wellesley is less than half white, is a quarter Asian, and Latina and African-American women are well represented. At Mount Holyoke, one in three students is a woman of color. Texas Woman’s University was ranked in the top 15 ethnically diverse institutions in 2010, when less than half of students were white, a fifth were African-American, less than a fifth were Latina/Latino, slightly less than a tenth were Asian. Other women’s colleges have similar diversity records concerning race and ethnicity.
Diversity includes sexuality, and a running joke is that women’s colleges have a large number of queer students, but the joke is not without its basis in fact. Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Scripps, Simmons, and Smith are all included in Autostraddle’s The Lesbian Insider’s Guide to 40 LGBT-Friendly College Campuses. In addition to sexuality, many schools have been dealing with the issue of trans men at women’s colleges for at least a decade. Being female assigned at birth and somewhere on the LGBT+ spectrum is another form of diversity at women’s colleges.
The inclusion of trans women and their lived experiences is the next step in the process of realising a women-centric educational environment respecting the lived experiences of all women. In its new admission policy on trans women students, Mount Holyoke points to this historic mission of diverse women’s colleges to help explain why they’ve made the policy shift.
Diversity and inclusion is about understanding our multiple identities through the lens of social justice education, ally development, and identity development. We embrace the intersectionality of race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, age, national origin, and religious/spiritual identities and the ways in which those identities move us to greater connection and communication.
The intersections of gender identity with race/ethnicity and class have been the primary roadblocks for trans women pursuing admission to women’s colleges. Many of these institutions will allow trans women to be admitted if they have modified their legal documents and if they have had sex reassignment. In most cases, sex reassignment means genital surgery. According to Chronicle of Higher Education, Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia has a policy that “will consider transgender females for admission if they have already undergone sex reassignment and have legally changed their gender marker.”
That’s asking an awful lot from 17, 18, or 19 year old trans women, even those from a middle class or upper class background. Changing documents can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on what one changes, and possibly require letters from physicians, psychiatrists, or other healthcare professionals. And if sex reassignment refers to surgery, in addition to needed recovery time, the surgery itself can cost tens of thousands of dollars. If the trans woman in question is of a lower income level, as many trans women of color are, then the possibility of meeting these admission standards becomes remote if not non-existent.
When informed of Hollins University’s policy on trans women, alumna Sarah Anderson expressed her disappointment. Supportive of including trans women at Hollins, she pointed out “there was never much public discussion regarding the enrollment of trans women.”
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