Learning beyond boundaries
Mount Holyoke College wants to have it both ways.
At Mount Holyoke College, the leading gender-diverse women’s college, students learn beyond boundaries, explore interests across disciplines and build skills and connections for a lifetime of purposeful leadership.
What thee helll is a gender-diverse women’s college?
Nothing, that’s what. A contradiction in terms. You can be a women’s something or you can be a gender-diverse something, but you can’t be both.
Its second most recent post is about “a vibrant community space dedicated to supporting LGBTQIA+ students, staff and faculty.” So they have gay male students and male students who are trans or queer or asexual or plus? But then they’re not a women’s college.
You have to pick one. You can’t do both, not because it’s not allowed, but because it’s not possible.
Maybe I am being irritatingly literal-minded, but could not (in principle) a “gender-diverse women’s college” be one which restricted its membership to females some of whom might consider themselves a different gender? The problem of the intrusion of men in a women’s space would not then arise: all those enrolled would be women – that some of them were transgender would be no more significant than their being marxists or creationists.
One might hope that was the case, but has any institution that has
been swallowed byembraced “gender identity” ever followed this path?@Alan,
That would certainly be possible, and logically consistent, but it raises a question and a danger. The question is: how would it differ from every women’s college ever? And the danger, of course, is that TRAs would focus their ire on said institution.
Considering that in the last few days I’ve seen one person identify as a ‘non-binary transwoman’, another as an ‘aromantic pansexual non-binary lesbian’, and another who’s pronouns are listed as ‘she/him/they’ complain about being misgendered, it isn’t that they want it both ways – they want it all ways.
I do vaguely recall some controversy at the beginning of “gender ideology” regarding women who decided to identify as men, and whether they could continue their studies at the women’s college or if they would have to drop out. I think the decision at one college was that they could continue, but the college wasn’t going to admit women-who-claimed-to-be-men, nor were they admitting men-who-claimed-to-be-women. I think; vague memory.
The Wikipedia article on the history of transgender admissions policies at women’s colleges does not seem to have an instances that matches all those details, so maybe I misremembered part of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_admissions_policies_at_women%27s_colleges