I wish to open this message from the heart: in no way do the issues raised hereafter intend to hurt, diminish or evoke hatred towards those who are transgender or gender non-conforming. All humans deserve love and to find belonging.
My request is this, that the Saint Mary’s College admissions board reconsider and reverse its decision to admit students who are not biologically female (or assigned female at birth, for the rare case of an intersex person).
To preface, I must make clear how we define sex and gender.
Sex is a set of primary and secondary sexual characteristics that lie on a binary. It must be acknowledged that there is variation across the binary — one can be female and have a naturally flatter chest or broader shoulders. The rare intersex person is somewhere in the middle, and their sex is, for all intents and purposes, the sex they are assigned at birth. This leaves at most three sexes: male, female and the very rare intersex, though the latter are generally assigned a sex at birth and are medically treated as such.
Gender, on the other hand, is the “socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions and identities” people may have. Gender changes through time and culture, from the homemaking women of the past to the “Rosie Riveters” of wartime, to the working women of the 1980s. Furthermore, gender expression is not simple, and cannot be divided into quantifiable categories. Women can be masculine, men can be feminine and both can still have “woman” and “man” identities. There is no consistent system for categorizing gender expression, if it is to be regarded as fluid and unique.
Having established the differences between sex and gender, this appeal looks to the past, to the establishment of the first women’s colleges. Higher education was not always accessible to women. Throughout much of human history, the female sex has been oppressed and had opportunities withheld, despite the changing expression of the “feminine” gender. This led to the establishment of women’s colleges, where biological females, throughout different phases of the female gender expression, would be able to commune with other biological females and receive an education through this lens. These criteria should not change. Biological females have always made up the student population at Saint Mary’s, even as individuality and gender expression change the social landscape.
We would like to uphold this legacy for the women who came before — an educational space for only biological women. We wish to honor the historical challenges that biological females have faced. Gender, if it is to be regarded as fluid and changing, cannot be simply determined and thus, cannot replace biological sex as a parameter for admission.
Audrey Fleming
class of 2026
Nov. 28
The views expressed in this Letter to the Editor are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
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