Women’s college uses founder’s will, written 124 years ago, as excuse to bar trans students
Sweet Briar College will no longer accept trans applicants (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
A women’s college in Virginia has changed its admission policy and will no longer admit transgender women, after its founder’s will – dating back more than a century – was reinterpreted.
Sweet Briar College, a private women’s liberal arts institute in Amherst County, was established in 1900 after the death of Indiana Fletcher Williams, whose will decreed it be a place for “girls and young women”.
In a letter to the college community, officials at the university said the institution did not previously have a “stated admissions policy addressing applicants identifying as other genders, but instead addressed applicants on a case-by-case basis”.
Following updates to the gender categories of the Common Application, under which students apply to schools on one standardised form, and which is recognised by more than 1,000 colleges, the officials said the changes present “a challenge both for students applying for admission and administrators and staff making admissions decisions”.
The letter goes on to say: “Sweet Briar College’s board of directors deliberated on this issue for several months thoughtfully, respectfully, with sensitivity to its fiduciary obligations, and in consultation with legal advisors and the administration. The board and administration reviewed the policies of all women’s colleges and made an informed decision based on the founding documents that they are bound by law to follow.”
The college is in a “unique position” as the only women’s college in the US which was “founded by and governed in accordance with a will that has been codified into law by the state’s legislature”, the directors pointed out.
“Accordingly, the board must honour the dictates of the will, which imposes the requirement that the college be a place of ‘girls and young women’, a phrase that must be interpreted as it was understood at the time the will was written.”
Following the announcement, the application page for admissions now says an applicant is qualified only if “she confirms that her sex assigned at birth is female and that she consistently lives and identifies as a woman”.
The change has angered students and staff, with one professor labelling the interpretation of the will – which was formerly understood to educate only white students – as absurd.
“Williams also wouldn’t have entertained the notion that somebody who was disabled would be a potential student,” English professor and faculty senate chairman John Gregory Brown said, according to The Independent.
He added that the faculty voted 48-4 to call on the board to rescind the new policy.
In August, the Sweet Briar College Student Government Association described the policy as “alienating, unnecessary, and it reflects the rise of transphobia in our country”.
Association president Isabella Paul, a senior who identifies as non-binary, told the Associated Press that a number of current students would not fit into the university’s new definition of womanhood.
“And there are allies here who may identify as women but have friends and lovers and family members who are non-binary, genderqueer and transgender,” Paul added. “So, this is also affecting their pride in their institution.”
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