On Oct. 15, the New York Times explored the experience transgender students at women’s colleges in an article titled “When Women Become Men at Wellesley.” At Wellesley, a white male student ran for a student government position that promoted diversity, which sparked an anonymous campaign against his candidacy. We sat down with government professor Sonu Bedi, who has studied the intersection between sex, gender and the law, to discuss women’s colleges in the 21st century.
TC: What do you think the response of a community like Wellesley, which like many other women’s colleges has sought to empower women in recent decades, should be to students who identify as men running for leadership positions to represent a female population?
SB: I have to think about it in terms of the actual, specific case. On one hand you could think, “Well, should that person be permitted to stay a Wellesley student, and if so, ought they be allowed to run for office?” My general thing is that if someone is a student at a school, all offices and positions should be open to them, so that seems odd that somehow there wouldn’t be positions open to them.
To say, “we’re going to permit someone to be a student but limit what they can do or what positions they can hold” would run into all kinds of issues. What we talked about in class was “what should we think about gendered spaces and colleges that are single-sex?” I think that ultimately when we’re thinking about equality, and in particular gender equality, we can think of three conceptually distinct notions of equality.
The first is a notion of anti-subordination. Anti-subordination suggests that our commitment to equality ensures that we do not subordinate particular groups and that we try to remedy subordination or historical discrimination, so under that theory we would think there should be gendered spaces for women. Not necessarily for men, precisely because women have been discriminated against, there are particular stereotypes against women and so the justification for single-sex women’s colleges can be made under that anti-subordination rationale.
The second understanding of equality is that we need to treat men and women equally, the same, so that would be a symmetric notion of equality. The law often thinks about this in that way — Title IX says that there have to be as many sports teams or activities for women as there are for men. One way to think about the separate notion of equality is basically “separate but equal.” There’s a third approach, and I think while it’s often articulated in terms of racial equality, it would be quite radical in terms of sex and gender equality.
That third approach says we should be in a sex-blind society. Under that approach, it would challenge all kinds of ways in which we differentiate and segregate on the basis of sex, not just women’s colleges. The way we segregate barracks in the military, bathrooms, fraternities and sororities — there would be a whole panoply of things.
In one sense, I think that this issue that’s arising at Wellesley is pushing up against which kind of equality we want to be committed to. You could think that a school like Wellesley is committed to the first or second notion of equality, but if you have students at that school that identify as men challenging the very notion that their gendered identity makes any difference, you’re moving into the third notion — “Well, perhaps we shouldn’t even care about someone’s sex.”
What’s going on is that various conceptions of equality are pushing up against each other, and so ultimately the question is about which kind of equality, and I think this is a really interesting example of that conflict.
TC: How should a women’s college define itself today? What’s the role of such an institution?
SB: That’s tough. I don’t have a good enough answer. On one hand, I am drawn to the anti-subordination notion of equality insofar as these spaces for women are important. On the other hand, I do realize that when we do engage in the anti-subordination notion of equality we invariably end up essentializing identity and saying “this is what it means to be a women, someone who’s biologically female.” Once we start challenging that gender-sex relationship, we move into this sex-blind approach.
In a way I think that’s where women’s colleges have to adjudicate themselves. I make this distinction between gender and sex. Sex is the biological status, and gender is the chosen attribute. Someone could be biologically female but identify as male. Wellesley seems to be using sex as the marker of who can get into the school.
Going forward they are going to have to choose whether or not to say “we’re going to permit anyone who identifies as a woman, indifferent to sex” and accept people who are biologically male. I don’t know if that means the demise of women’s colleges, but I do think that what’s good about it is that it’s forcing people to confront this idea that these categories are set in stone.
The decoupling of gender from sex is quite radical, and I think that this is a healthy tension these schools are facing.
TC: Do you think it’s possible for schools like Wellesley to reconcile those tensions?
SB: Maybe. I think they’re trying to. Imagine if someone here at Dartmouth wanted to rush a fraternity or sorority and they were transgender. What’s the relevant marker to be used?
If someone ends up self-identifying as a man even though they are biologically female, where should they rush? Do they belong in a women’s college or in a men’s college? I don’t know. It’s a good question.
I will say that I think we tend to fall into either the first or second concept of equality too quickly. A sex-blind society would look quite different than the one we have. Perhaps we ought to go that far.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
