There’s a battle brewing at the Seven Sisters over the growing population of transgender students. The question at its core: What kind of women’s college awards diplomas to men?
…The Seven Sisters colleges were founded in the 19th century, and famous graduates have ranged from anthropologist Margaret Mead (Barnard) to actresses Stockard Channing (Radcliffe) and Meryl Streep (Vassar) to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (Wellesley). Vassar started accepting male students in 1969, and Radcliffe officially merged with Harvard College in 1999, leaving just five sisters – Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Barnard, and Wellesley.
But the same empowerment and opportunity for self-discovery that an all-female school provides may also make survival as single-sex institutions that much harder for the remaining sisters. After all, the real challenge that transmen are forcing women’s colleges to face is an ideological one: Is it still a women’s college when some students who were female as freshmen are male by graduation day?
The term “transman†is a relatively new one. It originates from “transgender,†which generally describes people who feel that the gender they were born into is at odds with their true identity. Coined in the late 1970s, transgender is now often used in place of “transsexual,†which describes a person who has had sex reassignment surgery or who lives as a member of the opposite sex. Most transmen begin their transition with masculine dress, adopting the pronoun “he,†and taking on a male name. After counseling, some transmen start taking the hormone testosterone, known in the community as “T,†which deepens the voice, causes facial hair to grow, enlarges the clitoris, and reduces breast size. If he decides to go further, a transman may undergo a double mastectomy, hysterectomy, and ovary removal. The final frontier is penis construction surgery.
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[via Lolita Wolf]
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