‘Transgender men’ will be admitted to the single-sex school
The historically black all-male Morehouse College will soon begin accepting women who identify themselves as men, a major shift in the school’s more-than-150-year-long history.
“The school’s gender identity policy…will continue to ban from enrollment anyone who identifies as a woman,” The New York Times reports. The school’s president, David Thomas, “said the decision was driven by a greater awareness of gender identity and the college’s need to have a clear policy.”
“Transgender men” are women who believe they are men. Many such individuals outwardly present themselves as men, while others undertake more extreme measures such as testosterone regimes and surgical procedures such as hysterectomies.
Morehouse changed its single-sex admissions policy in part due to repeated inquires from prospective applicants, Thomas said:
“We found that when our admission representatives were going out, oftentimes people would ask them, ‘Does Morehouse admit transgender people?’” he said on Sunday.
The new policy states that “once admitted, students are expected to continue to self-identify as men throughout their matriculation.”
Morehouse is not the first all-male institution in the country to change its policy to allow transgender men. In 2016, St. John’s University, an all-male school in Collegeville, Minn., changed its policy to consider “applicants who consistently live and identify as men, regardless of the gender assigned to them at birth.”
A Morehouse student, Marquintas Oldham, 21, who identifies as “queer, non-binary” and who prefers to use the pronouns “they” and “their,” instead of singular pronouns, said their existence was being erased. Students such as Mx. Oldham said they identified as men when they were initially enrolled but no longer do.
“Who I am on this campus, they are trying to kind of like remove me from self-identifying myself,” Mx. Oldham said. “They said in their policy that they are going to still use male-gendered language and that affects me. Sometimes I do dress as a feminine, non-binary person, so when I dress the way I want to dress and it’s a problem, that affects me.”
“Under the policy, a student who transitions from male to female would no longer be eligible to matriculate at Morehouse. It was unclear how many students might be in transition,” The Times reports.
MORE: Women’s college will now admit ‘trans women,’ reject ‘trans men’
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