November 1, 2014
By Mishalle Kolakowska
South Hadley, MA- Tuesday, September 2, will be a day that the students of Mount Holyoke College will not soon forget. The school’s president, Lynn Pasquerella, approached the center of the annual commencement ceremony amphitheater stage dressed in a floor length, “MoHo” blue robe. Before her typical congratulatory speech to students, Pasquerella wanted to address a serious change in the school’s admissions policy.
“We recognize that what it means to be a woman is not static,” she began, “so our new policy formally welcomes applications from any qualified student who is female or who identifies as a woman.” The entire stadium was quick to give Pasquerella a standing ovation, chanting in celebration as she proudly stood.
Mount Holyoke is now the second of 199 single-sex colleges in the United States to admit transgender students without federal confirmation of their gender identity. Sister schools, such as Smith and Wellesley College, have received criticism in the past for their strict admissions policies in regards to the admission of transgender students. According to each of the school’s transgender policies, located on their admissions pages, both require proof of name change, federal documents consistent with their gender identity, and letters of recommendations that identify the student with her female name and gender.
Though Mount Holyoke had once enforced those same policies, students may now, with no formal documentation, be considered for admission who were biologically born male and identify as female, as well as those who do not identify within the female-male binary.
Pasquerella stated that, though the administration developed an inclusionary LGBT task force in 2010, the sudden change in policy was in response to the exclusion of single-sex, on-campus living to a male-identifying student at George Fox University. She defended her change in response to GFU: “While we’ve looked at applicants on a case-by-case basis in the past, we wanted to make sure that we weren’t further burdening an already marginalized population.”
Image Copyright © 2008 The Human Rights Campaign
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