<p>I’d make a distinction between a high school senior who was born female, but who was already transitioning, and a high school senior who was questioning. The first one has decided that he is a man. Fine, but Wellesley is a woman’s college. He says he’s a man. We should take him at his word. Yes, he has had a female experience, but now he’s a man, and should not be admitted to a college that only admits women. </p>
<p>The second one is exploring where she might end up. Wellesley could be a good place for that exploration.</p>
<p>I would grandfather in students who became transmen while at Wellesley, but if a transman student started getting shirty about “sisterhood” and “alumnae” I’d suggest that he consider transferring to a coed school instead of a woman’s college.</p>
<p>I disagree with some posters about whether 17-year-olds who will end up as transmen have already begun transitioning. I know only one such, the child of a good friend. Throughout this person’s college experience, they were exploring their gender identity. Only after they graduated from college did they begin transitioning to becoming a man. (This particular transman prefers that one use “they” as a singular pronoun when referring to them.)</p>
<p>“I would grandfather in students who became transmen while at Wellesley, but if a transman student started getting shirty about “sisterhood” and “alumnae” I’d suggest that he consider transferring to a coed school instead of a woman’s college.”</p>
<p>That’s precisely what’s going on, though – the demands of the transmen (and those who are sympathetic to them) to not use “sisterhood” and “alumnae” and “women’s college” as descriptors of or ways to address the entire student body. There is very little resistance or issue on campus with the notion of grandfathering them in and letting them complete their college careers with their friends.</p>
<p>I’m sorry, Pizzagirl, are you saying that Wellesley is encouraging the transmen who are getting shirty about “sisterhood” to transfer? Or that some transmen are getting shirty about “sisterhood”? The article says the latter, but (unless I read it wrong) not the former.</p>
<p>Sorry if I wasn’t clear. Both the administration and the students are generally open to the notion of letting the transmen “stay in place.” However, what is happening on campus now is that the transmen and their allies are getting shirty (not quite sure what that means, but I can guess) about the use of “sisterhood,” “alumnae,” “women’s college.” The administration is responding by starting a task force to reflect on what it means to be a woman in 2014 and what the implications are: a) for admittance (does W start to admit transwomen? to my knowledge, they haven’t to date), b) for letting transmen stay in place (no one really expects that to change), and c) the mission of the entire school, which reverberates into how it’s described.</p>
<p>So, yes, some transmen are getting shirty about “sisterhood.” AFAIK, there have not been any moves from the administration encouraging such students to transfer to a co-ed school. It is possible that individual students may feel that way, but there’s nothing to suggest the administration is actively engaging in such efforts or that there is a widespread belief on campus that such students should leave. That <em>may</em>, however, change, if it’s felt that keeping language so inclusive of the “newly minted males” runs the risk of diluting what a women’s college is all about, and that’s what they’re working on.</p>
<p>Anecdata only - but D told me - as she sat at the convocation speech with her friends, the speech I posted excerpts from above – the moment that Pres B started talking about W’s unique place as a women’s college, she (D) knew it was going to be controversial. FWIW, D doesn’t see a darn thing wrong with the speech and believes that (as annoying as it may be to a straight girl who would like some guys around!) W is a women’s college and you know what you sign up for when you go there. </p>
<p>" the moment that Pres B started talking about W’s unique place as a women’s college, she (D) knew it was going to be controversial."</p>
<p>Quoting myself now - and that’s the very issue of identity that’s being talked about. </p>
<p>It shouldn’t be in the least bit “controversial” for the president of the nation’s premier women’s college to start off the school year with a speech about the importance of women’s colleges and Wellesley’s stature and accomplishments within that world and the importance of the Wellesley sisterhood. It was a standard, boilerplate speech. </p>
<p>Pizzagirl, you never really answered the question I posed above (and of course it’s OK if you don’t know the answer). It’s about who, exactly is “getting shirty” about this stuff. I speculated that the people who are fully committed to living as men – the people with the surgeries and the hormones, and the facial hair – are not really the people who are vocal and confrontational about these issues. In the article, I thought they all acknowledged how anomalous their presence was at Wellesley, how easily they could be excluded, and they seemed grateful to be permitted to remain and not anxious to be a PITA to everyone. Although, certainly, they liked to be acknowledged as men, no question about that. But there is another group, significantly larger I think, who are not getting mastectomies or shooting up testosterone. Their goal is not to become men, but to engage in a kind of permanent, ongoing performance art in which they critique gender conventions and construct a queer or trans identity that involves constant fiddling with gender signifiers.</p>
<p>This second group, I speculated, was far more likely to make an issue of Wellesley’s woman-centered rhetoric, because that’s the whole point of what they are doing. They are not saying “I always thought I was a boy in the wrong body.” This group (or some of them) is saying, “We hate the tyranny of binary gender analysis. Let’s do away with that and then people can be whoever they are and love whomever they love without getting hung up on what is male or female.” Many of this group may call themselves transmen, and I am certain that they speak in the name of transmen frequently, but they are women by any definition Wellesley would adopt, and intending to stay that way. They are just uniquely and fundamentally hostile to the idea that Wellesley should be a college exclusively for people who are both biological women and social women (although I think they are OK with excluding people who are both biological and social men).</p>
<p>Of course, there probably really aren’t two defined groups. I’m sure it’s a spectrum, and I’m sure there are other variations in the queer/trans community for whom the foregoing descriptions are completely irrelevant or downright wrong.</p>
<p>But I do think the article was being a little sloppy in conflating the small number of people who become men while at Wellesley – who make great press, and take great pictures: that scruffy beard! those biceps! – and the larger number of people who warm the seats and the rhetoric in Queer Theory classes.</p>
<p>@JHS : I think you’ve nailed it! (I went to a very liberal-in-every-sense school (Swat) in the 80s and I think what you’ve said is much more what is going on. All part of the “question authority” thing (which I truly believe is a valuable part of the growing process but annoys the hell out of our elders)</p>
<p>If you want to do away with the gender binary, you need to start somewhere else, and end with Wellesley. You’d have to change the rest of society first, in order for Wellesley’s mission to become irrelevant. </p>
<p>I think that’s a fair hypothesis; I did ask D, and she doesn’t really know that she can provide insight on which of the two groups it is, because her observation is that they tend to travel in tightly aligned packs anyway. In other words, she wouldn’t necessarily agree that the gender-as-performance-art clan is agitating and the now-I-am-really-a-man clan is pushing back and saying, “No, shhh! It’s ok - I know I’m a guest here!” But, I’m sure other people on campus would have differing perspectives. To her, this is a distraction; to others, this is their raison d’etre (or devenir, I suppose). </p>
<p>“They are just uniquely and fundamentally hostile to the idea that Wellesley should be a college exclusively for people who are both biological women and social women (although I think they are OK with excluding people who are both biological and social men).”</p>
<p>Right, but something about a community of all-women (even women playing with gender presentation) had to have been attractive or at least not unattractive, as it is hardly as though there aren’t a slew of similar quaint little New England LACs offering similar caliber educations in a co-ed environment where one would be equally as able to play with gender presentation. I mean, it is not as though the “we’re a women’s college” rhetoric was all of a sudden sprung on them when they moved in. </p>
<p>It is interesting to me that at least on W campus, the discussion is more about “how do we accommodate the transmen in our language” and less about “do we admit transwomen” (like MH and Mills are doing).</p>
<p>It’s interesting, because one <em>could</em> make the case (and I’m not making it, but saying that it’s a make-able case) that if it’s about social identity vs biologic, the priority should be to welcome / encourage / admit transwomen, and throw the transmen under the bus if need be. </p>
<p>And arguments like that from the perspective of many transgender people is just another example of how women and the feminist movement are continuing the oppressive marginalization as demonstrated by early feminists like Mary Daly. </p>
<p>And a reason why the transgender students and their allies are protesting to to annoyance/inconvenience of alums and more conventionally thinking W students. </p>
<p>Throwing under the bus…wonderfully inclusive progressive language indeed. </p>
<p>“And arguments like that from the perspective of many transgender people is just another example of how women and the feminist movement are continuing the oppressive marginalization as demonstrated by early feminists like Mary Daly.”</p>
<p>Yes, a women’s college wishes to have an identity structured around women. How oppressive and marginalizing! Those poor dear oppressed men who can’t join in on the fun! </p>
<p>Hey, cobrat, it’s great that you know who Mary Daly is, and her writing is an ever-reliable source of provocative quotes, but she’s hardly the standard-bearer for suspicion of transgendered people. She had – and continues to have – lots of company in that regard. And, as this whole discussion shows, it’s not simply a relic of unenlightened, old-fashioned thinking, much less “oppressive marginalization.” From the standpoint of the radical feminism of the 70s – and way over-simplifying here – transmen and transwomen alike are reaffirming traditional patriarchal structures in opposition to attempts to build a specific women’s consciousness and community. (It’s also probably relevant that at the time surgical reconstruction and hormone therapy were much more primitive and largely limited to the wealthy or their protegees. People did not have any kind of practical option to change their sex.)</p>
<p>The gender binary is absolutely fundamental to that strain of feminist thought, and there was a collective rejection of “androgyny” in the mid-70s. You can compare two perfectly beautiful poems by Adrienne Rich, 1973’s “Diving Into The Wreck” in which she presents herself as both a mermaid and an merman, and 1977’s “Natural Resources,” where she says “These are words I can never choose again: humanism, androgyny.” I can’t remember all the others, but Daly was one of the crowd, not particularly an instigator on this. Queer consciousness did not show up as a concept for another decade or two.</p>
<p>Wellesley was a first-wave feminist institution from the get-go, and powerfully influenced – and indeed preserved – by second-wave feminism. To question whether there is value in specifically a women’s community is to question whether it should exist at all. I suppose it might be possible to modulate that into “a community of people who are not men,” but in many ways that’s a lot more negative, and weaker. If you are trying to be a women’s institution, you kind of have to start with the premise that “woman” is something important.</p>
<p>Of course, that hardly means that Wellesley can’t agree that transpeople deserve recognition, acknowledgment, acceptance, encouragement, and inclusion. But working out how the various principles interweave is the hard part. Not so much for genderqueer 20 year-olds, but hard for lots of others.</p>
<p>^If I were queen, that the way I’d lean. Logically it seems like transwomen should be allowed at W. Since to me, W is about supporting young women who are going out into the world to be women.</p>
<p>I just remembered something that happened when I was an undergrad. Thomas Berger (author of Little Big Man) was on campus, giving a reading from his new book, “Regiment of Women.” This novel despcribes a society in which men and women have reversed places, and it opens with its male protagonist, cinched into women’s clothes–a virtual compendium of every negative idea about what it feels like to inhabit a female body–receiving “therapy” that involves being anally raped by a dildo-wearing female therapist. (Interestingly, Berger didn’t read that part, skipping over it saying that George underwent a cruel/violent/unpleasant–can’t recall the word he used–form of therapy. I happened to know what it was because I had read part of the book. What a coward! ) So it came to the question/comment time, and I piped up, rather nervously, and commented that he seemed to have an extremely negative view of what it feels like to be a woman. Some other people agreed. Berger got all huffy and said that he had gotten excellent reviews from various female writers. David Ferry, who was sitting behind me, said, “It seems to me that you are being reviewed by a number of women right now.”</p>
<p>THAT is what the male professors at Wellesley were like.</p>
<p>“the standpoint of the radical feminism of the 70s – and way over-simplifying here – transmen and transwomen alike are reaffirming traditional patriarchal structures in opposition to attempts to build a specific women’s consciousness and community.”</p>
<p>Yes, thank you. </p>
<p>Cobrat, no matter how much you might wish to imagine this as stuck-up handkerchief-clutching old ladies all aflutter because they’ve discovered to their horror that girls will be boys and boys will be girls and it’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world, these are real issues surrounding the role of institutions that serve to empower women and what that means and how it’s best accomplished. And progressive people of good faith can be on either side. This isn’t Rosa Parks and the back of the bus, here, where the right answer is self-evident.</p>
<p>It’s worth noting that this whole issue looks completely different from the perspective of Oberlin or Wesleyan than it does at Wellesley. There’s a difference between being a college for women and being a college for everyone. It’s not just marketing.</p>
) So it came to the question/comment time, and I piped up, rather nervously, and commented that he seemed to have an extremely negative view of what it feels like to be a woman. Some other people agreed. Berger got all huffy and said that he had gotten excellent reviews from various female writers. David Ferry, who was sitting behind me, said, “It seems to me that you are being reviewed by a number of women right now.”</p>