Stephens College, a private all women’s college in Missouri, has announced that it will start accepting transgender students beginning in the fall semester of 2019.
Stephens College has decided that after over 185 years, it will no longer be an all women’s college, announcing that it will begin enrolling transgender students next year.
The college recently announced that it will begin accepting individuals who are biologically male, as long as they identify as females. At the same time, the school has announced that it will also begin denying individuals who are biologically female but choose to identify as male.
“The college’s undergraduate residential women’s program will continue to admit and enroll students who are women and who live as women, just as it always has,” states the school’s policy, “It will also admit and enroll students who were not born female, but who identify and live as women.”
The college added that transgender students will need to provide “legal documentation that they are legally women or that they are transitioning to female.”
The school insists that its new admissions policy is “logically consistent,” because that the college has “expanded its definition of womanhood to include both sex and gender.”
As for women who are transitioning to be men, the college has stated that it will no longer admit or enroll students “who were born female but who now identify as men or who are transitioning from female to male,” adding that this new rule will not affect female students who have been admitted to the college prior to the policy’s change.
Stephens College clarified that its new admission policies are completely justified, because other women’s colleges are doing it, too.
“All of the nation’s women’s colleges are reconsidering their admissions policies in light of the changing cultural understandings of sex and gender,” claims the college, adding that 26 of the 39 women’s colleges that belong to the Women’s College Coalition have already begun adopting new admissions policies that recognize transgenders.
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