Barnard: Redefining A Women’s College in the 21st Century
By Danielle Fox
Independent producer Danielle Fox reached out to Youth Radio with her work on Barnard College’s shift to accepting transgender women. What follows are excerpts from her long-form audio documentary, which you can find below.
On June 4, 2015, Barnard College announced that it will be opening its doors to transgender women. Leading up to this historic decision, I interviewed students of different sentiments. Some are in the camp that this decision was a ‘no-brainer’; Barnard is an all women’s college, trans-women are women. Others were more hesitant; accepting students assigned male at birth cools Barnard’s reputation as a strictly female college.
Conversations that began with the initial: “Should the College admit trans-women for admission”, quickly escalated to questions much murkier, questions too grainy to be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Questions like, “In a world of evolving gender identities, what does it mean to identify as a women’s college?”
“At the time when Barnard was created, it was important that women had a voice and that they were the top priority, and they were not going to have to constantly fight to be seen as intelligent or as equal, and in 2015 that is exactly the same position that trans-women are in.” — Rowan Hepps Keeney, BC (Class of 2018)
“For me, as long as we change the admissions so that someone who’s born a male, who can put down male, and can just simply write that they identify as a female, I think that absolutely changes the power of Barnard’s name.” — Ava Kingsley, BC (Class of 2017)
“I think people come into these conversations with a lot of those things that they’ve been fed, and they have these ideas that it’s just a man in a dress.” — Caleb LoSchiavo, BC (Class of 2015)
“The world is not the binary gender place that I was brought up to recognize, and I think it’s really important that all of us embrace the huge complexity of human existence.” — Rita Auerbach (Class of 1965)
“We need to have an education policy, or some kind of, at least, conversation around destigmatizing differences in womanhood.” — Lauren Melotra Gaudet (Class of 2015)
There’s a lot more being said about this on campus. I produced the following audio documentary about changing gender policies at Barnard, one of the 45 women’s colleges and universities left in the United States.
Producer Danielle Fox is a part of Barnard College’s Class of 2017. She invites discussion via email.
