Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Alissa Quart’s New York Times Magazine feature on the challenges facing transmen and genderqueers in women’s colleges is exceptional for mainstream journalism about the gender nonconforming community.  For one, Quart is clearly familiar with the community itself as well as with the theory that goes behind these identities.  Also, Quart is sympathetic with the people she’s writing about and presents their stories and opinions in a highly non-judgmental manner.  But the heart of the article – the story of a female-to-male Barnard student named Rey – raises some incredibly interesting questions about the place of transgendered people in educational environments and the purpose of women’s colleges.  It’s both odd that gender nonconformists and women’s colleges seem to mesh so well together, and also perfectly natural. 

On one hand, the women’s college is a conservative, gender essentialist institution.  Many women’s colleges – Barnard, Smith, Wellesley – were originally started as something approximating finishing schools, but also educated the most accomplished and progressive women because paucity of elite, coed higher education opportunities.   Today, however, they appear to be increasingly outdated.  After all, in the undergraduate environment, women outperform men in nearly all metrics, both in admission and in academic performance. And so these colleges are in a weird place.  Some, like Vassar and Goucher, just abandoned single sex education entirely. 

But they’ve also become destinations for people who grow up as female and then slide into gender nonconformity.  That’s because they’re safehavens from male sexual and emotional violence.  But there’s an obvious conflict here.  How are schools whose core identity and value is exclusively derived from their adherence to essentialist notions of what it means to be a woman supposed to deal with students who have very little interest in those basic definitions?  For Rey, at least, it wasn’t easy:

But as a transmale student in a sea of women at Barnard, he felt alone. He longed to be with his girlfriend, Melissa, and with transmale friends, some of whom, like Rey, were attending women’s colleges. Even as he sought to adopt a more conventionally male appearance, he wanted to maintain his ties with his former self. “I am all for not rubbing out my past as female,” he told me.

…

In the first week of September, he found out that his roommates had complained to the college’s freshman housing director about being asked to share their rooms with a man. They wanted Rey to find somewhere else to live. According to Dorothy Denburg, the dean who spoke to Rey about the situation, these young women were disturbed when Rey told them on the first day “that he was a transboy and wanted to be referred to by male pronouns.” Rey’s roommates had, after all, chosen to attend a women’s college in order to live and be educated in the company of other women.

Rey ultimately transferred to Columbia proper, but the questions his experience raises are difficult.  Should women’s colleges be expected to greet with open arms those students who don’t want to be “female?”  And is Rey right to criticize Barnard students for not accepting him fully when he clearly didn’t want to buy into the most basic principle the school is based around?

It’s certainly a tough issue, because gender and sexuality are fluid, continuous phenomena.  You’d hardly want a women’s college to not be accepting of a students who don’t present in a stereotypically feminine way, but there seems to be a difference when those who wholeheartedly reject the biological, cultural and social place of womanhood want a place in a woman’s institution.  You can’t help but smell a whiff of opportunism, as Phoebe Maltz put it, “Rey… want[s] approval, to count as …female…when it suits him, while simultaneously declaring those who believe that rules restrict who can call themselves female to be parochial, backward-minded rubes.”

So I think that the onus rests on co-ed universities to make themselves safe, welcome environments to those who have little interest in conforming to gender roles or identities.  Because otherwise, we’re in this weird situation where people want to join institutions (women’s colleges) that derive their unique value from a basic essentialism and exclusion, and yet also criticize those same institutions for not being open to people who reject what makes these places distinct.