Hollins University, which bills itself as Virginia’s first chartered women’s college, plans to re-examine a rule that allows for the expulsion of transgender students who have taken a step toward sex reassignment but have not yet completed the process.
Patty O’Toole, dean of students, said the university’s Diversity Initiative Advisory Board had agreed to begin studying the policy at its meeting next week after “students and others” raised concerns about it during the past academic year.
“When you are presented with concerns, you say, ‘Let’s take a look at it,’” said Ms. O’Toole, who helped write the four-year-old policy.
Hollins is by no means the only single-sex institution wrestling with the question of how to properly serve women at a time when ideas about gender are no longer fixed in immutable pastels of pink and blue. In separate incidents this past spring, Smith College told a junior that he could not serve as an overnight host to prospective students, and Wellesley rejected an alum’s offer to conduct admissions interviews. Both cases involved conflicts over gender identity. But scholars and student-affairs officials agree that the Hollins policy is the strictest one they have seen at an American college.
“It just seems so unnecessarily punitive,” said Erin E. Buzuvis, a professor at the Western New England University School of Law who has written about transgender policy. By threatening transgender students with expulsion, “you’re forcing them to either uproot their life and leave school or suppress something that’s really important and significant in their life.”
The policy states: “If a degree-seeking undergraduate student initiates sex reassignment from female to male (as defined by the university below) at any point during her time at Hollins, she will not be permitted to continue attending Hollins beyond the conclusion of the term in which sex reassignment is initiated, and under no circumstances will such student be allowed to graduate from Hollins. The university considers sex reassignment to have occurred when an undergraduate student ‘self identifies’ as a male and initiates any of the following processes: 1) begins hormone therapy with the intent to transform from female to male, 2) undergoes any surgical process (procedure) to transform from female to male, or 3) changes her name legally with the intent of identifying herself as a man.”
Susan L. Thomas, director of gender and women’s studies at Hollins, blasted the policy in a document that she e-mailed to her colleagues in the arts division, which she represents as a new member of the diversity board. Last year was the first time she had heard of the policy, whose constitutionality she questioned in her critique.
“My concern was simply that Hollins is setting itself up for problems, if these are still women legally, and it kicks them out,” said Ms. Thomas. “And they are women legally.”
No one has been kicked out of Hollins, although Ms. Thomas alleged in her critique that five students had confided to her last year that they were leaving the university because of its transgender policy. One of those students, Alexander Lane, transferred with his partner over the summer to the University of Vermont. Mr. Lane, whose legal name is Alex Alford, has mixed feelings about Hollins, which he at once admires for helping him find his transgender identity and scorns for not allowing him to pursue it.
“Having to disrupt your academic career at any point is very stressful, and having to transfer solely because I could never be a man at Hollins was very upsetting and very difficult for me,” said Mr. Lane, who wants the policy changed so that other gender-variant students are not compelled to follow his path.
A Transition for Everyone
Not everyone at Hollins would welcome such a change. Elizabeth Dodd, president of the Student Government Association, said few students have problems with classmates who merely call themselves by male names and dress as men. But “we’re an all-women’s institution, and if you’re taking hormones, that doesn’t qualify you as a woman,” she said.
Mr. Lane arrived on campus as a lesbian, and came out as transgender during his sophomore year after meeting other trans students at Hollins. But the university’s policy kept him in check, he said. He was bothered that some professors and students refused to refer to him using masculine pronouns.
“There’s sort of this attitude among faculty and most students that if you’re at Hollins you are a woman, no questions asked,” he said. “I just felt like my life was going to be very stalled if I stayed at Hollins.”
Mr. Lane and others cited another transgender student, Jake Bedsaul, as a strong influence at the university. Mr. Bedsaul, a popular student whose given name was Jennifer, was vice president of the Student Government Association, head of Hollins’s gay-straight alliance, and active on several campus panels before graduating in the spring.
He praised his fellow students for the acceptance and support they gave him, and was understanding of those at Hollins who were uncomfortable with transgender students.
“Some of the professors I had a little bit of trouble with,” Mr. Bedsaul recalled. “That’s to be expected. When you’re transitioning, it’s not just a transition for yourself, it’s a transition for other people, too.”
Mr. Bedsaul’s appearance has landed him in fights on occasion, an experience shared by many transgender people. Once was at a dance that Hollins sponsored off campus.
“I had very masculine attire on, and I was going to use the women’s restroom,” he recalled. A security guard stopped him and told him to use the men’s room.
“So I walked into the men’s restroom, and this guy was coming out, and he said, ‘You can’t be in here.’”
“I moved to brush past him, and he said, ‘You can’t be in here, you fag,’ and then he hit me and left.’”
Ms. O’Toole said she knew nothing about that episode, but according to Mr. Bedsaul, when word of what had happened circulated among Hollins administrators., they tracked down the aggressor, who was eventually expelled from a local military academy for his action.
“Hollins definitely took a step up,” said Mr. Bedsaul. “The guy had socked me right in the cheek. I had a black eye.”
One of the benefits of attending a women’s college, Mr. Lane said, is the absence of hate crimes such as that one.
Still, back on the Hollins campus, Mr. Bedsaul and Mr. Lane were told to stay out of the men’s rooms and instead use one of university’s few unisex handicap restrooms.
“When I was in a classroom, I had to be excused for five to 10 minutes so I could run across campus just to use the handicap restroom,” Mr. Bedsaul recalled. “I didn’t understand what the big deal was about me taking a pee in a certain toilet.”
Mr. Lane gave a darker interpretation: “I was very frustrated being treated like my gender identity was a handicap.”
The bathroom issue raised awareness among students about the existence of the controversial transgender policy, Mr. Bedsaul said.
The policy originated, Ms. O’Toole said, when two transgender students, whose names she could not remember, had requested written guidance. The diversity committee developed the policy with students, faculty members, and members of the president’s cabinet.
But Mr. Bedsaul, who was a freshman the year that the Board of Trustees ratified the policy, said Hollins administrators had worded it to suit the individual circumstances of one of the transgender students who helped with its formation.
“They thought that having that one student on the board while writing the policy” would validate it, Mr. Bedsaul said.
Jenny Kurtz, director of LBGTQ programs for the Center for Social Justice Education and LGBT Communities at Rutgers University, said Hollins’s policy was the first one she had heard of that mentions surgery, hormones, and potential repercussions.
“Any medical decision should be really private,” she said, adding that she nonetheless commended Hollins for establishing a written policy. “But they should make sure that whatever’s in writing is supportive and inclusive.”
‘Policy’ in Quotation Marks
Susan B. Marine, an assistant professor and program director in higher education at Merrimack College, interviewed student-affairs administrators at five women’s colleges for her 2009 dissertation about how they perceived and worked with transgender students. She said all of her respondents told her, “We don’t really have a policy on paper, but here’s what we do.”
Among some 30 respondents, she said, all but one were supportive of transgender students at women’s colleges.
“She felt that it wasn’t necessarily appropriate, because the college was intended to be a place for the empowerment and development of women,” Ms. Marine said. “At one point in my study she said, ‘Every space that’s taken up by a male student is one less space for a woman ... once they are male identified.’”
That woman’s observation, Ms. Marine said, suggests a nuance in people’s views on transgender students at women’s colleges. “In my opinion, what they’re saying is it’s the maleness that is the problem. It’s not the trans-ness.”
That idea might resonate with Jace Hanner, a transgender sophomore who plans to leave Hollins at the end of the semester to attend Winthrop University, in his native South Carolina. He cites a variety of reasons: the $41,000 sticker price at Hollins, his interest in computer science, and his desire to proceed with his transition into a man.
“Even if they changed the policy, I probably wouldn’t stay,” said Mr. Hanner, whose given name is Mary. “I would feel like I’m intruding a bit. Since I don’t identify as a woman, I don’t identify with Hollins.”
A Work in Progress
Scholars for decades have challenged the notion that gender is rigid and fixed. Perhaps most notable among them is the University of California at Berkeley philosopher Judith Butler. Her landmark 1990 book, Gender Trouble, developed the idea of gender as “performative,” an idea that Ms. Marine echoed, saying she believes it is constructed and reconstructed each day.
“This current generation of students has a lot of agency and empowerment around that idea,” she said. “They get that if they’re a man, they don’t have to wake up and dress a certain way and be a certain way. They’re more open, and they’re more fluid in their understanding of gender, and they’re more creative in how they want to express their own gender.”
Women’s colleges, Ms. Marine said, encourage students to think critically about what gender is and how it operates in society. “So I think it’s only natural that making a space for those kinds of questions invites people to consider and possibly reconceive of their own gender,” she said. “To me it doesn’t seem at all either surprising or troubling that that happens at women’s colleges. I think it’s a strength of the institutions.”
Ms. Marine believes there is an argument to be made for the presence at women’s colleges of men who started life as female.
“Trans students, like women, experience gender oppression,” she said. “We’re all kind of fighting the same battle against a system that tries to make us feel less than, because we do not conform to gender expectations.”
Several of the Hollins students independently pointed out that while Smith College admits only female applicants, it doesn’t pay attention to which gender they are when they graduate.
