News flash: if you admit males who idennify as females to an all-female college then you no longer have an all-female college.
Today, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened an investigation into Smith College, one of the nation’s largest all-women’s colleges, for admitting biological men and granting them access to women-only spaces, including dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams. OCR will determine whether the college violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) by allowing biological males into women’s intimate spaces.
Title IX contains a single-sex exception that allows colleges to enroll all-male or all-female student bodies—but the exception applies on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity. An all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX.
The two are not interchangeable. They do not mean the same thing. They are in fact opposed. Males who profess a vague non-tangible spirichooal idenniny are still males and thus do not belong in colleges that call themselves all-female. It’s very simple, yet constantly denied.
When an institution holds itself out as being an all-women’s college, it is not just promising to deliver female-only dorms and bathrooms, and single-sex athletics; it is also committing to maintain a student body that makes possible a particular form of sorority and camaraderie.
And even solidarity. I don’t expect the Trump administration to call it that, but that’s what it is. It makes as much sense to insert males into that as it would to insert billionaires into a miners’ strike.
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