Wellesley College has just become the most recent private women's school to start accepting applicants who identify as transgender.
According to the Boston Globe, the announcement came Thursday and will go into effect for the fall application cycle. The new policy was also reportedly well received from the student body and from the school's faculty and professors.
"In recent months, the trustees and campus community have engaged in a wide-ranging discussion about what it means to be a women's college in an era of a changing understanding of gender identity," the school said in its announcement. "Late yesterday afternoon, the Wellesley College Board of Trustees voted to reaffirm Wellesley's mission and clarify our admission policy."
The school will continue to not accept applications from anyone who identifies as male, but a student that no longer associates with the female gender while at Wellesley will have the opportunity to complete their education.
"We will support all the students who are at Wellesley and all of their kinds of finding themselves in all of the ways that we can," H. Kim Bottomly, Wellesley's president, told the Globe.
Wellesley is now the third Boston-area women's college to accept applications from transgender females, joining Mount Holyoke and Simmons.
Tim Chevalier, a 2001 graduate of Wellesley who now identifies as male, was among those who considered the school's new policy a little too conservative.
"[The policy] seems carefully crafted to satisfy those of us who want to see Wellesley admit all women, while leaving the college plenty of plausible deniability with which to reject trans women on the basis that they aren't 'living as women,'" he said.
CLICK HERE to read the school's FAQ page set up to assist anyone wanting to learn more about the new policy. On the page is also contact information for the school's communications officials.
