In the late 19th Century, at a time when elite institutions like Harvard only admitted men, the “seven sisters” liberal arts colleges were founded on the premise that women needed their own equivalent of an ivy-league education. In 1927, when the consortium of individual schools was formally recognized as the “seven sisters,” the notion that an education for women should be at a level equivalent to that of men was indeed radical. Today, of the original seven, only five — Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, and Smith —remain single-sex.
Or so they say. Because on this anniversary of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 — the civil rights law guaranteeing sex equality in education — some women’s colleges seem to have forgotten their history, more interested in transgressive admissions policies than tradition.
Smith College is one of them.
Ten years ago, Smith College was the subject of an iron-fisted transgender public relations campaign to admit trans “women” to its all-female ranks. After debate and discord, community listening sessions and planning meetings, study committees and legal wrangling, Smith’s resolve to keep its all-women’s legacy intact, broke. In May of 2015, the College announced a new admissions policy of including transgender “women” (biological men) based on evolving “concepts of female identity” and the “diversity of women’s lived experiences.” As expected, gender-neutral bathrooms, locker rooms, and housing accommodations followed.
Yet, in a perverse twist, while the college chose to admit men who identified as female, it refused to admit women who identified as male.
Why? Because to do that — to fail to choose who could engage in the play-acting of gender, the kind that seeks to convey ontological reality by nothing more than pronoun, name, or dress — would finally, ultimately render the institution “co-ed?”
This is the kind of arbitrary line-drawing that Title IX was passed 53 years ago to prevent. And institutions like Smith might be due for a refresher.
Once the promises of voting had been fulfilled by the early suffragists, like Susan B. Anthony, the second-wave feminists turned their attention to other iterations of sex equality. The Gloria Steinems and the Bella Abzugs descended on Capitol Hill and demanded equal employment and equal pay.
But their crowning achievement was perhaps Title IX — the simple, one-paragraph federal prohibition on sex discrimination in any federally-funded education program, whether admissions, scholarships, housing accommodations, or sports. Though women had finally secured the vote, emancipated themselves from domesticity, and outlawed sex discrimination in employment, education—save for the seven sisters and a few of their ilk—remained recalcitrant in inequality. But after 250 versions of House and Senate education bills, a public pressure campaign, and a series of passionate floor debates, Title IX was born.
Fifty-three years hence, third wave feminists have failed us. The institutions once set apart for our equal education have failed us. They have sacrificed women’s equality on the altar of equity for trans-identified males. They believe gender is performative, that the coherence of gender expression is illusory, that one’s “natural sex” is transitory. These feminists — the Judith Butlers and Gloria Anzaldúas — gifted us the poison of “queer theory” and set up a battle of the sexes playing out in real time on campuses across the country.
We modern women who have held the vote for little more than 100 years, considered by many segments of male society for centuries to be little more than skin and bones — must recognize that third wave feminism has ceded the ground it took our grandmothers and great grandmothers a generation to claim. We must never cease to believe our own eyes, call out discrimination where it hides in plain sight and identify the chauvinism platformed by the fungibility of sex — something even arch feminist Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote was “not fungible.”
This past spring, in a display of its allyship to the trans community, “women’s college” Smith awarded an honorary degree and the commencement speech slot to transgender-identified man, Admiral “Rachel” Levine. Smith’s choice to platform Levine communicated an unambiguous message: this man is a woman; Title IX be damned.
Our great-grandmothers would be appalled.
So, we’ve asked the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to open an investigation to determine whether Smith College does, in fact, protect the women whose equal education was once its top priority.
Sarah Parshall Perry is the Vice President and Legal Fellow at Defending Education.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Gender Neutral bathroom. Flickr/Jeffrey Bealle)
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