The College Fix

Women’s colleges are admitting men who ‘identify’ as something they are not

Last month in England an all-women’s college began admitting “transgender” women, or men who “identify” as women. This change is part of a growing trend the likes of which has proliferated here in the United States: numerous women-only colleges in America have done the same thing, opening their doors to young men who believe they are young ladies.

There is something so quaintly bizarre about this phenomenon that, at first glance, it rather defies rational categorization. A generation ago, or even half of one, people would have scoffed at the idea that an individual of one sex could somehow, in some way, “be” a member of the other sex—much less that we should entertain or indulge such a mistaken assumption, even unto the point of allowing men into women’s colleges.

But the politics of identity seem, in the end, to be stronger than the politics of reality. In response to the perfectly reasonable objections to transgender ideology—i.e., “Men cannot be women”—activists are generally given to spouting meaningless ideological justifications for it, e.g.: “Well, who’s to say what a man or a woman really is, anyway?” Which is odd, because everyone, including women’s colleges, pretty well understood these definitions just a few short years ago.

The logical problems inherent in transgender ideology are too numerous to cite here, so it is worth just pointing out this: the single-sex colleges that have begun admitting “transgender” students cannot, in any real way, be called “single-sex” anymore. Mount Holyoke, for instance, still calls itself a women’s college, but that is, in stark and objective terms, false: it has begun to admit men, after all, and so must properly refer to itself as coeducational. To activists, that has been precisely the point.  Abolishing concrete and meaningful sex distinctions in favor of ever-more nebulous and incoherent qualifiers of “identity” has always been the end-game. The goal here is not to broaden the categories of classification that have served humanity well for thousands of years; the goal is to essentially abolish them altogether in favor of a useless kind of socio-sexual chaos.

The gradual abolishment of single-sex environments is but one front of this strange battle, but it is a particularly poignant one. To be fair, the problem may be as much with the students as with the administrations: maybe young women simply do not care if all-womens’ colleges begin admitting men. That is their prerogative, of course—but it would be admirable if everyone could just be honest about what’s going on here.

MORE: All-Female Colleges Adopt New Policies To Enroll Male ‘Transgender’ Students

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