Sweet Briar College in Virginia announced in August that, under a new admission policy, it will no longer accept transgender applicants, including females who do not “identify” as women.
“An applicant is qualified for admission if she confirms that her sex assigned at birth is female and that she consistently lives and identifies as a woman,” states the college’s current website on admissions. The new policy will not impact previously admitted students.
Sweet Briar College is a private women’s liberal arts college that was founded in 1901 through the estate of Indiana Fletcher Williams in memory of her deceased daughter, according to the college’s website. At present, there are under 500 students at the college. US News ranks Sweet Briar College as #180 in national liberal arts colleges.
According to a message to the community sent jointly by the college’s president and the chair of the board of directors, the college previously assessed applicants on a case-by-case basis and did not have “a stated admissions policy addressing applicants identifying as other genders.”
The joint statement by the college president and the chair of the board of directors argued that the new admissions policy was based on the college’s founding documents.
“The College is in a unique position as the only women’s college in the country that was founded by and governed in accordance with a will that has been codified into law by the state’s legislature,” reads the statement. “In more recent years, it was adherence to the Will that provided the legal avenue to save Sweet Briar from efforts to close it. Accordingly, the Board must honor the dictates of the Will, which imposes the requirement that the College be a place of ‘girls and young women’ – a phrase that must be interpreted as it was understood at the time the Will was written.”
The statement that the will has saved the college from closure is a reference to a legal battle beginning in 2015, when a prior president and board attempted to close and sell the college in the face of “insurmountable financial challenges.” In response, alumnae and others sued on the grounds that the college officials had no right to sell the property bequeathed in the will, eventually winning in the Virginia Supreme Court.
Faculty at Sweet Briar College passed a resolution on August 26 that condemned the new admissions policy and called for it to be rescinded.
“The definition of a woman in Williams’s founding document was intended to reflect the widely accepted scientific definition of the time: that a woman is someone assigned female at birth,” reads the faculty statement. “It is now widely accepted among members of the scientific community that neither gender nor sex, which are distinctly different, are solely determined or limited by a binary sex designation at birth.”
The faculty passed the following resolution, which will be conveyed to the college president and board of directors: “Sweet Briar College will consider for admission all applicants who identify as women or were assigned female at birth and identify as nonbinary or gender non-conforming if they feel they belong in the community of a women’s college.
The Sweet Briar College Student Government Association released a statement on August 11 condemning the new policy.
“This verbiage is alienating, unnecessary, and it reflects the rise of transphobia in our country,” reads the statement. “Admitting trans and non-binary students, only to invalidate their identities based on narrow perspectives, is beyond disheartening.”
A number of student organizations at Sweet Briar College have also released statements criticizing the new admission policy, including the Jewish Student Alliance, an LGBTQ+ student organization, a community-service club, and a Christian affinity group.