A women’s college in Virginia has instituted an admissions policy that bars transgender women next school year because of a new interpretation of the founder’s will.
Sweet Briar College, a private women’s liberal arts school, said the policy stems from the legally binding will of its founder, Indiana Fletcher Williams, who died in 1900. Sweet Briar’s leadership said the document requires it to “be a place of ‘girls and young women.’”
The phrase “must be interpreted as it was understood at the time the Will was written,” Sweet Briar’s president and board chair wrote in a letter earlier this month to the college community.
The new policy requires an applicant to “confirm that her sex assigned at birth is female, and that she consistently lives and identifies as a woman.”
“Sweet Briar College believes that single-sex education is not only our tradition, but also a unique cultural and social resource,” President Mary Pope Hutson said in a statement to The Associated Press.
The new guidelines are facing criticism from some students and most faculty. They warn the politically fraught policy could repel potential students — not just transgender women — when women’s colleges have been closing, going co-ed or merging with other schools. Sweet Briar nearly shuttered in 2015.
Critics also question the board’s originalist interpretation of a will that explicitly excluded non-white students.
Williams’ will said the school was to be a place “for the education of white girls and young women.” The college had to get permission from a federal judge to accept Black students after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
John Gregory Brown, an English professor and faculty senate chair, said the reasoning for the transgender policy is “absurd.”
“Williams also wouldn’t have entertained the notion that somebody who was disabled would be a potential student,” Brown added.
On Monday night, the faculty voted 48 to 4, with one abstention, to call on the board to rescind the policy, Brown said.
Sweet Briar has about 460 students —- known as Vixens — and was established in 1901 on Williams’ estate, a former plantation in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
On Aug. 10, the Sweet Briar College Student Government Association stated the policy was “alienating, unnecessary, and it reflects the rise of transphobia in our country.”
Association President Isabella Paul, a senior who identifies as nonbinary, told the AP that at least 10% of students use different pronouns and wouldn’t fit in the policy’s description of women.
“And there are allies here who may identify as women but have friends and lovers and family members who are nonbinary, genderqueer and transgender,” Paul said. “So this is also affecting their pride in their institution.”
It’s unclear how the policy will affect current students. When asked, Sweet Briar’s president said the school tries “to ensure that all of our students feel welcome on campus.”
Hutson acknowledged that a board member has resigned over the policy and that alumnae on both sides “care deeply about the future of our college.”
“Many want Sweet Briar to remain a place where women can thrive, and they believe that a broader policy is a slippery slope toward co-education,” Hutson said. “They strongly support this policy.”
Women’s colleges in the U.S. began to admit transgender women about 10 years ago, including Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and Spelman College, a historically Black school in Atlanta.
