The American academic landscape includes many different kinds of institutions. You’ve got vast private universities, you’ve got the big state funded universities, you have land grant universities, you have small colleges, community colleges, private colleges. You also have the so-called Seven Sisters.
The Seven Sisters are a system of very elite women’s colleges in the United States. It’s actually a very interesting history, and what’s going on right now means that all seven of the Seven Sisters are really at the center of a massive controversy. Because the Seven Sisters are very liberal sisters as you think about these liberal arts colleges, and they’re doing their dead level best with very liberal faculty and probably even more exceedingly liberal students to keep up with the liberal movement, the wave of liberal or progressivism.
But when it comes to the LGBTQ revolution, well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out, we had a head-on collision here. You can have a women’s college, but only if you know who a woman is. But of course, those are extremely liberal colleges. They have been for about a century now, and they are also intending to be, and they’re recruiting students who want to be on the leading edge of all this cultural change. And that means the sexual and gender revolution. And of course it means the LGBTQ revolution. But that leads to one of the most interesting questions of our modern time, and that is how do you have a women’s college if you really don’t know who a woman is? And that’s where the story gets a lot more interesting, and it does so really fast.
If you go back into about the middle point of the last decade. So we’re not going back a century, just going back the last decade. One of the interesting issues was that you already had this form of LGBTQ activism on these historic women’s college campuses, and the demand was made we got to find a way to be an enthusiastic champion for all of this, LGBTQ, and of course now IA plus mark and all the rest. But here’s the problem, you can understand how the L and the G and the B might work out with the idea of a women’s college. But what do you do at T, not just transgender, but the non-binary when it comes to gender and all the rest? What in the world do you do with this? And of course, you’re a school, you’ve got to make decisions. Who can and can’t apply to your school, who may and may not be admitted to your school. How does the campus culture work?
And just to point out the obvious, if you define yourself historically, and I don’t think it’s the wrong word to say here aggressively as a women’s college, then at the very least you have to define your student body by being women. Otherwise, you’re not a women’s college anymore. And trust me, they intend to be women’s colleges. As a matter of fact, as you look back to the 20th century, one of the issues in many of these colleges, especially the late part of the 20th century, was that there was the argument of gender feminism, not just the argument of say, first wave feminism about equality. You had the second wave feminist argument on these campuses, which was about creating special, safe place for women and indeed creating what was declared to be the necessity of a women only form of environment for education because the presence of men would be itself threatening.
So the idea of a woman’s college, particularly with the ideology of second wave feminism, was to privilege or protect the distinctively female or women, it was claimed ways of knowing, ways of teaching, ways of living on a campus. But at this point, if you want to know where the controversy’s headed, all you have to say is J. K. Rowling or say Martina Navratilova. Because what you have here is the inevitable collision between feminism, which after all is based upon knowing who a female is and the non-binary revolution. But if you’re on the left, you can’t say no to any aspect of the revolution. That’s the big insight of what happens when you watch the left. By definition, the left has no natural limit. So that is to say the argument is going to be going further and further and further. You say, well, the same thing’s true on the right. No, that’s not true.
The conservative argument in its essence is about conserving something real and that means objectively real. So at least in theory, the conservative argument should be pretty much the same argument throughout time. We need to conserve what God has created, what God has given us, the categories that God has created and has revealed to us, and the structures of existence that lead to human flourishing, human happiness, and good government, to state the very obvious minimum. But as you’re thinking about the left, the left says no boundaries. So there are no boundaries. There are no limitations upon where this is going to go. That’s why, as I’ve often said, the most scared person on the planet has to be a professor on one of these campuses because he or she can’t possibly keep up with the even more liberal students showing up on the campus, they become a part of the problem really, really quickly.
Where were we? Well, these historic women’s colleges were trying to say we’re pro-LGBTQ and yes, that means T and non-binary, and that requires a redefinition of our admissions policies and of our campus housing policies. You just go down the whole thing including the very identity of a women’s college. So you have to come up with all kinds of, let’s just say complicated definitions. For example. What are the possibilities here? Well, I’m going to use the language that is common to that environment.
The language is this. You have biological males identifying as male, biological males identifying as female, biological males identifying as non-binary. You have biological females identifying as women. You have biological females identifying as men. You have biological females identifying as non-binary. Now, there are all kinds of permutations you could come up with even beyond that. But the bottom line is there are at least six categories there. So two of them are recognizable throughout all of human history, biological males identifying as men and biological females identifying as women. But that’s so old school when it comes to these cutting edge colleges. And their commitment to feminism is now a commitment to the transgender revolution, but not without limitations.
So Wellesley College. Wellesley is one of the most famous of the Seven Sisters. It’s also one of the most wealthy. It includes among its alumni, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Madeline Albright. It has been on the front lines of many culture wars throughout the 20th century and beyond. Founded in 1870, Wellesley on the cutting edge represents a commitment to values, and this appears on its current website. The values are intellectual discovery and excellence, gender equality, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Listen to this, we affirm that diversity is essential to educational excellence and we are committed to being a community in which each member thrives. Empowerment and social change, connection and community integrity and academic freedom. Those are the listed values.
But here’s where you understand these values run into a direct conflict. If you’re talking about the word equity itself, a very controversial word these days because it generally is now an ideological replacement for equality, and that’s very much a part of the thinking of the left. If you’re going to talk about equity, the question is equity for whom, and the entire point of Wellesley College was that it was equity for women, but who exactly is a woman? If you go back about five years ago, most of the Seven Sisters, these most famous of American women’s colleges, very historic, very wealthy, very influential, excepting only women for the entirety of their history, they decided that they would accept just about anyone except a biological male identifying as a male or even a biological female identifying as a male.
In other words, they basically came to the consensus that you could be admitted to and a part of one of these historic women’s colleges, so long as you did not identify in any way as a male. So they have these two goals they have established, at least in theory, one of them is the old historic understandable goal of being a woman’s college. But the other is the very modern leftist progressivist goal of being on the cutting edge of the LGBTQ revolution.
Again, you can have one, you can’t have the other. It’s going to get complicated. But in these historic women’s colleges, as I say, by the time you get to the end of the last decade, it’s basically anyone can apply and be admitted and be a part of the campus so long as you are not either a biological male identifying as a male or a biological female identifying as a male. If you identify as a male right now, guess what? No admission, no acceptance, no being on the campus. But that is until this week.
Some of the other, among the colleges, these Seven Sisters were a bit ahead of Wellesley on this, but Wellesley’s the most influential and the student body at Wellesley was pushing for change further along the LGBTQ continuum. So in other words, if you just think about the old policy, you can be anything but a biological male identifying as a man or a biological female identifying as a man. The great sin there is identifying as a man. But it turns out that if you are going to be on the cutting edge of the sexual revolution, you may now be against anyone who is biologically male identifying as a man. But otherwise, you got to say yes to everything else. You have to say yes. Even now, if you’re going to follow the transgender revolution, you’re going to have to say yes to biological females identifying as a male.
So are you an historic women’s college? If you have a so-called man on campus, if you’re living by the fiction that this biological female is a male, here’s where you see all of this begin to fall apart and it falls apart in a way you would think would be humiliating and embarrassing to those who are pushing the LGBTQ revolution.
You would think that the sheer insanity of this would be so obvious that everyone would back up and say, “What in the world are we doing here? What are we trying to communicate? How is this a women’s college, if we’re saying that you can be anything but a man identifying as a man,” because even now, if you’re a woman identifying as a man, hey, you’re all in. We even go so far in our extreme commitment to the LGBTQ logic that we say you actually are a man, but there can’t be any men on campus. Well, except transgender men, I guess you’re welcome.