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Female-only School Accused of Sexism against Women Who Think They’re Men
“That’s a man, baby!”
Famously liberal Wellesley College has a serious problem on its hands. The female-only alma mater of Hillary Clinton has long been on the bleeding edge of feminist theory, but recent developments in the gender wars threaten their PC cred.
Recently, a matriculating young woman decided to define herself as a man. Technically “Timothy Boatwright” calls herself a “masculine-of-center genderqueer” (whatever that means) but insists that everyone on campus treat her like a dude. Wellesley’s staff and student body sheepishly complied as they have with other similarly confused undergrads.
Of course, if Boatwright really thought of herself as a guy she wouldn’t have chosen a school that forbids them, but Wellesley doesn’t award any points for logical consistency. I suspect a kid can self-identify as a chicken quesadilla as long as her parents fork over the private school’s exorbitant tuition.
Problems arose when Boatwright decided to run for student government. She vied for the position of Multicultural Affairs Coordinator (MAC), which enforces a “culture of diversity” on campus. The other candidates dropped out of the race, making Boatright a shoo-in. Until…
An anonymous lobbying effort began on Facebook, pushing students to vote “abstain.” Enough “abstains” would deny Timothy the minimum number of votes Wellesley required, forcing a new election for the seat and providing an opportunity for other candidates to come forward. The “Campaign to Abstain” argument was simple: Of all the people at a multiethnic women’s college who could hold the school’s “diversity” seat, the least fitting one was a white man.
“It wasn’t about Timothy,” the student behind the Abstain campaign told me. “I thought he’d do a perfectly fine job, but it just felt inappropriate to have a white man there. It’s not just about that position either. Having men in elected leadership positions undermines the idea of this being a place where women are the leaders.”
I asked Timothy what he thought about that argument, as we sat on a bench overlooking the tranquil lake on campus during orientation. He pointed out that he has important contributions to make to the MAC position. After all, at Wellesley, masculine-of-center students are cultural minorities; by numbers alone, they’re about as minor as a minority can be. And yet Timothy said he felt conflicted about taking a leadership spot. “The patriarchy is alive and well,” he said. “I don’t want to perpetuate it.”
As I’ve often noted, the 21st Century is exhausting. At least Wellesley’s latest moral panic illustrates the Oppression Index I posted yesterday. I’d recommend that Boatright and her detractors compare scores, but she eventually assumed the mantle of MAC without my help.
However, the recent acceptance of trans students has created a new problem at Wellesley:
Another difficult conversation about trans students touches on the disproportionate attention they receive on campus. “The female-identified students somehow place more value on those students,” said Rose Layton, a lesbian who said she views trans students as competitors in the campus dating scene. “They flirt with them, hook up with them. And it’s not just the hetero women, but even people in the queer community. The trans men are always getting this extra bit of acknowledgment. Even though we’re in a women’s college, the fact is men and masculinity get more attention and more value in this social dynamic than women do.”
Down with the transpatriarchy!
Kaden Mohamed said he felt downright objectified when he returned from summer break last year, after five months of testosterone had lowered his voice, defined his arm muscles and reshaped his torso. It was attention that he had never experienced before he transitioned. But as his body changed, students he didn’t even know would run their hands over his biceps. Once at the school pub, an intoxicated Wellesley woman even grabbed his crotch and that of another trans man.
“It’s this very bizarre reversal of what happens in the real world,” Kaden said. “In the real world, it’s women who get fetishized, catcalled, sexually harassed, grabbed. At Wellesley, it’s trans men who do. If I were to go up to someone I just met and touch her body, I’d get grief from the entire Wellesley community, because they’d say it’s assault — and it is. But for some reason, when it’s done to trans men here, it doesn’t get read the same way. It’s like a free pass, that suddenly it’s O.K. to talk about or touch someone’s body as long as they’re not a woman.”
Please note that a bachelor(ette)’s degree from this certifiably insane institution will set you back about a quarter million dollars. Perhaps Professor Rahe can include a pitch for Hillsdale College in the comments.
Published in General
“Recently, a matriculating young woman decided to define herself as a man. ”
Patriculating, you insensitive clod.
Since this is a female only school, at the time she redefined herself as a man, why was she not asked to leave since she no longer fit its criteria?
The Citadel and VMI were state supported schools. Wesley, Hampden Sydney, Sweet Briar and others are private and may do as they wish. Government money counts.
This story, and so many others over the past thirty years from Wellesley, is really sad to me. My grandmother went to that college. And a great-great aunt taught chemistry there. It was once an outstanding school. And the campus is truly beautiful. I don’t know what happened. A terrible tragedy.
Radcliffe couldn’t cut it financially and was absorbed finally by Harvard. The rest of the Seven Sisters have admitted men and developed specialities, in the arts mostly. They have gotten weird, but not as weird as Wellesley.
It seems to me Wellesley is being awfully hypocritical:
The entire premise of the gender-free movement is that your gender is what you think it is now, not which genitals you happened to be born with.
Wellesley still defines itself as all-women. Yet the college apparently accepts women-to-men transgendered and even allows them to stay if they get a sex change. At the same time, there was no mention of men-to-women transgender students.
In other words, this womens’ college is using the old-fashioned definition of “woman” as “having been born with a vagina” – exactly what the gender-free movement has been fighting against. Shouldn’t their more forward-thinking students being agitating for more women-with-penises on campus?
These white privileged Wellesley females are nuts.
These are the critical issues on campus? We need to send their senior class on a field trip to a couple of spots in Africa so they’ll really understand what oppression and loss truly mean, and maybe they’d spend less time worrying about the acceptable terminologies for sexual orientation/gender identify and more time worrying about getting their homework done so they can build something useful and worthwhile for the world once they get out.
Otherwise we’re left with a bunch of chicks with degrees and an education so questionable that if I were the hiring manager, I’d throw out every application with “Wellesley” listed on it.
Our schools, not all of them, but the bulk of them, have become laugh factories.
Gee, thanks Jon. I am now thoroughly wiped out.
Sort of, the challenge was filed in Federal court and hinged upon Federal dollars. As folks going to Hillsdale know, even accepting a student with a federal loan is accepting federal dollars and triggers all sorts of Title 9 scrutiny. I just wonder why some guy hasn’t filed to admission to Wellesly. But if a trans-woman would file that would top out the schadenfreude, particularly if was-he-id-fem were homosexual.
Here’s a fellow who has something to say on this topic. While he will certainly be viewed by the Left as just another hysterical Right-Wing Nutjob, it appears to me that he has some street creds:
I agree. What say you?
Ah-yup.
I agree, too. If someone felt that he was incomplete unless his arm was amputated, and he found a quack that would do it, we’d put the man in treatment and charge the quack with malpractice. Change it from “arm” to “penis” and we’re supposed to celebrate the act as something liberating and fulfilling.
Yes, the 21st century is exhausting.
it’s all about the plumbing to get into Wellesley?
new slogan?
Wellesley Weird, that’s what we’re know for.
I can just imagine some “onion” writer reading this article, cursing aloud, and crumpling up the draft he had been working on for the past few days…
You can’t write better parody than life itself sometimes gives you.
Drew,
I think the Catholic Church has made an error in calling gays “Objectively Disordered”. This is way to vague. I think “Sexually Schizophrenic” would be much more accurate.
Maybe we can slam the time machine into reverse. I hate rooting for the Morlocks.
Regards,
Jim
Very wise man. I recommend this essay to anyone who wants to hear more from Dr. Hugh.
Why didn’t he declare himself Native American or African American? Problem solved, election assured.
Thanks for this link. I’ll just say that, from my extensive experience, as a reasonably intelligent lay person, trying to navigate the system with, and on behalf of, a seriously mentally ill family member, the idea of the ‘experts’ “cooperating with a mental illness” isn’t confined just to those who suffer from gender confusion.
It’s the basis of what makes it possible for my chronically, devastatingly ill, family member to continue a pattern of self-destructive behavior, and it is what gives him the power to make his family’s life difficult, and sometimes frightening, while insuring that we can do nothing to help him or protect ourselves.
I believe it’s all of a piece. At some point, in the 1980s, I think, someone (?) decided that the mentally ill were generally off-limits, that they were in charge of their own outcomes, and that the rest of us just had to like it or lump it.
This is what allows the mind bending spectacle of a mentally incompetent paranoid schizophrenic being committed to the hospital against his will and in his best interests, at which point he, this lunatic, immediately becomes the director of his own medical care and can shut out his parents and siblings, who are the only people who can rationally relay to the medical personnel what is actually going on. Don’t worry. I’m not bitter.
And while the original goal (stopping abuse of the defenseless) might have been noble, we are now dealing with the inevitable outcomes of this social experiment, not only with the sexually schizophrenic (H/T James Gawron), but also with many other forms of mental illness.
They’re not better off. And neither are their families.
Academically, yes, these elite schools are luring the brightest of our 18 year-olds into their clutches. And that really is a shame because they aren’t educating them.
After four years and thousands of dollars of debt, all these young people will be left with is a sense of entitlement and a completely warped understanding of human relations.
Billy,
100%. These tenured lunatics are affecting education all the way down to kindergarten. They are affecting the news media, the bureaucracy, and the cultural media. They not only take the best and the brightest students, they extort massive dollars from their parents, place the students in huge debt, gain huge amounts of capital from taxpayer funds and private endowments. Then as you say all the students get is a sense of entitlement and a completely warped understanding of human relations.
In short the university system is starting to make the Mafia pushing Heroin look like amateurs.
Regards,
Jim