Massachusetts back-to-school season proving a challenge for LGBTIQ students.
It’s back-to-school season for most and stepping back into the scene isn’t easy for a lot of students—especially LGBTQ students.
LGBTIQ-phobias abound in the hallowed halls of higher learning and, unfortunately, we have to confront them here in Massachusetts, an A+ queer-friendly state.
I pray for LGBTIQ freshman students walking into Gordon College. Most will be totally unaware of Michael Lindsay, their college president, and his anti-gay actions.
Gordon College is a small conservative Christian college on the North Shore. It prides itself on upholding the tenets of religious freedom. And in so doing, the college tested its boundaries with the recent Supreme Court case “Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.”
With the “Hobby Lobby” case ruling that family-owned corporations citing religious objection could now opt out of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act that required employers to cover certain contraceptives for women, Gordon’s Lindsay, along with 14 influential religious leaders from across the country—asked Obama for an exemption banning discrimination in hiring on the basis of sexual orientation. (Immediately following the “Hobby Lobby decision the Supreme Court granted Wheaton College, another evangelical Christian liberal arts college outside of Chicago a temporary injunction allowing the college to refuse providing contraception.)
Lindsay and his band of homophobes framed their request to the president, by email, c/o Melissa Rogers, Executive Director, White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, under the guise of religious freedom.
The letter stated the following:
“As religious and civic leaders who seek to advance the common good, we write to urge you to include a religious exemption in your planned executive order addressing federal contractors and LGBT employment policies.This ability is essential in light of our national conversation on political and cultural issues related to sexuality…Without a robust religious exemption, like the provisions in the Senate-passed ENDA, this expansion of hiring rights will come at an unreasonable cost to the common good, national unity and religious freedom.”
The ban to discriminate against LGBTIQ people in the hiring process outraged so many alumni, students, family and friends of Gordon College that a petition was written to Lindsay to rescind his request. While there are certainly a cadre of LGBTIQ- friendly professors, administrators and students at Gordon it’s not an easy campus to be out on.
Paul Miller, a 2008 Gordon graduate and co-founder of the LGBTIQ group “One Gordon,” shared with the Boston Globe his hellish experience as to why he couldn’t come out as gay while in attendance at the college . “Lindsay has made Gordon a fortress of faith rather than a place where the doors are open to people who want to be part of a conversation about what it means to be a Christian.”
After graduation Miller worked at Gordon hoping to change things; however, depressed over the school’s unchanging homophobic attitude and edicts he eventually left not only the college but also Christianity. “I wonder, if Gordon had been affirming of LGBT people, if I’d still be a person of faith….And the reason I’m not is the place that provided the most compassionate and intellectually robust and civic-minded Christianity that I’d ever encountered told me that I couldn’t be part of their community.”
Our trans students are discovering they cannot be part of college communities they once belonged to.
Like college class reunions.
When Caleb (not his real name) drove up from South Carolina to his class reunion this year he didn’t expect the unwelcoming reception he got from both his classmates and the college. Caleb shared with me his reason for attending a women’s college as an out lesbian undergraduate in the 70’s and now returning as a transman alum in 2014, he never fathomed his transition would be the primary cause of banishment from the sisterhood that sustained and nurtured belief in himself for years after graduation.
Caleb experienced transphobia from an elite women’s liberal arts college in Massachusetts.
While it’s easy to assume that much of Caleb’s experience of inhospitality at his alma mater would point to a generational divide between women’s colleges in the 1970s to now, unfortunately that’s not the case.
In March 2013, Calliope Wong, a transwoman, hoping to be one of the 2017 incoming undergraduates at Smith College was denied consideration because her “FAFSA” — Free Application for Federal Student Aid — stated her gender as male.
Today women’s college administrators are having just as much unease and angst with the reality of gender fluidity as they did back in the day with the reality of lesbian and bisexual women on campus.
“I don’t want to get to a point where we have a row of guys in the back of the class with baseball caps on,” Smith’s vice president for enrolment told students.
In Kiera Feldman’s article “Who Are Women’s College For?” Mount Holyoke President Lynn Pasquerella replied, “In addition to academic excellence, it’s being a woman.”
Institutional transphobia is ubiquitous in many of our revered pillars in society where there’s unabashedly little to no effort to change. The one institution, however, you do not expect transphobia to rear its ugly head given its founding principle was to address gender discrimination is women’s college.
Gender has always been a social construction shaped by factors of race, class, country, sexual orientation and gender identities, to name just a few. From the biblical story of Eve to our present-day, heterosexual male-dominant societies across the globe continue to try to define us women solely by our reproductive and sex organs.
Oddly, one of the arguments for gender discrimination against transwomen and transmen being admitted at elite women’s colleges is the misogynist concept we women have fought bitterly against for centuries that states our “biology is destiny.” While some women’s college won’t admit transwomen because they are not “biologically” female others won’t admit them because they are not “legally” female.
“We don’t define what constitutes a woman — we leave that to other entities or agencies to affirm,” Smith’s vice president for enrolment wrote Feldman. Clearly, the principle concept of women empowerment that states we define ourselves for ourselves is totally missed by this female administrator.
Ironically, the other argument used against transwomen and transmen is Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination.
“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
Not surprisingly, however, given how privilege is usually doled out and executed a proviso was granted to elite private institutions like Harvard, and the Seven Sister Colleges, giving them the arbitrary and capricious decision to accept or to reject students on the basis of gender.
This past April, after long and heated deliberations on the rights of transgender students, the Department of Education finally issued new guide rules incorporating the protection of transgender students.
Title IX energized feminist activism, promoted gender equality, debunked prescribed gender roles, and finally put to rest us women as second class citizens. And there’s no reason to exclude transgender men and women from these same benefits.
While many of these women’s colleges have been perceived bastions of inclusive feminism, especially with the rise of the Second Wave Feminist Movement, unfortunately, they have primarily been an intentionally exclusive women’s country clubs that spoke to Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique of upper-crust “pumps and pearls” wearing white women.
Back in the days, when I was a Wellesley College undergraduate, women like myself—African American and/or lesbian or bisexual—were no more welcomed at these schools than men were. And transwomen, if they were in attendance, were invisible.
The battle to open these colleges’ pearly gates to women of color, and to women of various sexual orientations and gender identities is a fight that shouldn’t still be taking place.
This struggle to accept transgender students and to welcome back transgender alums—like Caleb with deep pockets—in a steady dwindling sisterhood of women’s colleges should be a no-brainer.
If we’re having this problem of accepting LGBTIQ students in Massachusetts—just think of what it must be like across the country.