Transgender Woman Can’t Be Diversity Officer Because She’s a White Man Now

I know what you are thinking. You think some woman had a sex change and now the liberals on campus have gone after the now him because of “the Patriarchy”. It is much worse.

Timothy Boatwright applied to an all-women’s school. While he checked the “female” box when he applied for the school, he identified as “masculine-of-center genderqueer” when he got there. Granted, that is rather nonsensical, but it is not the stupid part. This is:

And, by all accounts, Boatwright felt welcome on campus — until the day he announced that he wanted to run for the school’s office of multicultural affairs coordinator, whose job is to promote a “culture of diversity” on campus.

But some students thought that allowing Boatwright to have the position would just perpetuate patriarchy. They were so opposed, in fact, that when the other three candidates (all women of color) dropped out, they started an anonymous Facebook campaign encouraging people not to vote at all to keep him from winning the position.
“I thought he’d do a perfectly fine job, but it just felt inappropriate to have a white man there,” the student behind the so-called “Campaign to Abstain” said.

“It’s not just about that position either,” the student added. “Having men in elected leadership positions undermines the idea of this being a place where women are the leaders.”

The New York Times ran an in-depth article giving further insight:

Last spring, as a sophomore, Timothy decided to run for a seat on the student-government cabinet, the highest position that an openly trans student had ever sought at Wellesley. The post he sought was multicultural affairs coordinator, or “MAC,” responsible for promoting “a culture of diversity” among students and staff and faculty members. Along with Timothy, three women of color indicated their intent to run for the seat. But when they dropped out for various unrelated reasons before the race really began, he was alone on the ballot. An anonymous lobbying effort began on Facebook, pushing students to vote “abstain.” Enough “abstains” would deny Timothy the minimum number of votes Wellesley required, forcing a new election for the seat and providing an opportunity for other candidates to come forward. The “Campaign to Abstain” argument was simple: Of all the people at a multiethnic women’s college who could hold the school’s “diversity” seat, the least fitting one was a white man.

To recap, Timothy signed up for school as a female so that his mother would not discover he is “transmasculine” (as he put it in the New York Times article). Once at Wellesley, he told his fellow students to call him Timothy and refer to him with male pronouns. They did this with apparently little problem. However, when Timothy attempted to become a multiculutral affairs coordinator, the students turned on him because he is white and considers himself male.

They think Timothy, a person who is female who identifies as male, ever a minority if there were one, is unqualified to be a diversity officer because Timothy is a white female who identifies as white male.

Keep in mind that Timothy has done nothing to alter his body. His body is still female. He simply identifies as male. Yet that simple identification is enough to make his fellow students hold his perceived maleness against him, despite the likelihood that he has never experienced any “male privilege” at all.

This politically correct fail is such a thing to behold. For example, there is this:

“Sisterhood is why I chose to go to Wellesley,” said a physics major who graduated recently and asked not to be identified for fear she’d be denounced for her opinion. “A women’s college is a place to celebrate being a woman, surrounded by women. I felt empowered by that every day. You come here thinking that every single leadership position will be held by a woman: every member of the student government, every newspaper editor, every head of the Economics Council, every head of the Society of Physics. That’s an incredible thing! This is what they advertise to students. But it’s no longer true. And if all that is no longer true, the intrinsic value of a women’s college no longer holds.”

That fear is genuine. A student named Laura Bruno was interviewed, and did not go well for her when stated that having men on campus diminished the importance of having a women’s college:

The interviewer asked Laura to describe her experience at an “all-female school” and to explain how that might be diminished “by having men there.” Laura answered, “We look around and we see only women, only people like us, leading every organization on campus, contributing to every class discussion.”

Kaden, a manager of the campus student cafe who knew Laura casually, was upset by her words. He emailed Laura and said her response was “extremely disrespectful.” He continued: “I am not a woman. I am a trans man who is part of your graduating class, and you literally ignored my existence in your interview. . . . You had an opportunity to show people that Wellesley is a place that is complicating the meaning of being an ‘all women’s school,’ and you chose instead to displace a bunch of your current and past Wellesley siblings.”

Laura apologized, saying she hadn’t meant to marginalize anyone and had actually vowed beforehand not to imply that all Wellesley students were women. But she said that under pressure, she found herself in a difficult spot: How could she maintain that women’s colleges would lose something precious by including men, but at the same time argue that women’s colleges should accommodate students who identify as men?

I feel sorry for students like Laura. They want to be inclusive, yet they want their “sisterhood”. The moment someone identifies as male enters the foray, that ruins the latter possibility. The simplest solution would be to require every student to at least identify as female. That would solve the immediate problem of having females transitioning to or identifying as males on campus. However, it would cause the new problem of asking the students who identify as male to leave.

Yet I also do not feel sorry for the students. This is precisely what happens when political correctness is left to its own devices. Accommodating transgender views about sex and gender render the very concept of sex and gender moot. If you think a person can change their gender or sex, then neither two concepts are concrete. They essentially do not exist. They are simply social constructs no different than race or nationality. And if that is true, then there is little point to having an all-women college. There is no such thing as a “woman” or “female”.

Obviously most people do not believe that. Most people think there are only two sexes, male and female, and that these are biologically determined, not social constructs. I suspect that most people at Wellesley do not actually think people like Timothy are male. They simply go along with it for the sake of appearances. However, people like Timothy do not know or suspect that, so when they attempt to engage in normal school activities, they end up with Timothy’s present situation.

Perhaps the most enlightening part of this is how much this mirrors the feminist attack on men and masculinity. That is essentially the argument at play, that men, maleness, and masculinity are unwanted and bad. Even transmen attending Wellesley share that view:

Others are wary of opening Wellesley’s doors too quickly — including one of Wellesley’s trans men, who asked not to be named because he knew how unpopular his stance would be. He said that Wellesley should accept only trans women who have begun sex-changing medical treatment or have legally changed their names or sex on their driver’s licenses or birth certificates. “I know that’s a lot to ask of an 18-year-old just applying to college,” he said, “but at the same time, Wellesley needs to maintain its integrity as a safe space for women. What if someone who is male-bodied comes here genuinely identified as female, and then decides after a year or two that they identify as male — and wants to stay at Wellesley? How’s that different from admitting a biological male who identifies as a man? Trans men are a different case; we were raised female, we know what it’s like to be treated as females and we have been discriminated against as females. We get what life has been like for women.”

It is bias all around, from the students who do not want transmen in their school to the transmen who do not want transwomen in the school to those oppose men in general.