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ChristianKl comments on Stupid Questions May 2015 - Less Wrong
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What is the LessWrong-like answer to whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female? Relevant to my life because of this. I'm likely to be asked about this if for no other reason than students seeing how I handle such a question.
For the purposes of a all women college you have to ask yourself about the purpose of limiting the college to women.
Maybe there a perception out there that math isn't a women's subject. In mixed-gender classes woman are more likely to spent effort into signalling their strong femininity. The are spending more effort into engaging in actions that signal high mating market value when suitable mates are around.
Do transwomen trigger the same behavior? I don't think that the gender that's assigned at birth matters. On the other hand "identifies" is a complex word. Just checking a checkbox isn't enough to stop being seen as a potential mating partner. The transwomen who spends enough effort on looking female that strangers easily identify them as being female on the other hand is unlikely to trigger mating market behavior.
Another reason to limit the college to women is about women being a minority that's discriminated against. Transwomen do get discriminated against them and don't get included in old boys networks. From that perspective it also seems fine to accept transwomen.
Maybe you can also think of other reasons for the policy of being all-women. Check whether those reasons matter for transwomen.
There seem to be strong laws against gender discrimination in the US, how does your college avoid getting sued for discrimination?
I'm not sure, but no one seems concerned that the courts will force us to admit men.
Why wouldn't it? Or rather the important feature is possession of a Y chromosome, which in almost all cases is the same thing as the "gender assigned at birth" given how the procedure tends to work. However, the phrase "gender assigned at birth" is highly misleading since it seems to imply that the feature is based on the choices of the hospital staff and/or parents rather then the chromosomes of the child.
It's notable that the second highest paid "female" CEO would appear to be a trans-"woman". Who fathered a number of children before "realizing" this. And if I may dispense with the currently fashionable charade of pretending trans-"woman" were really women trapped in men's bodies, appears to me a masculine man with an autogynephilia fetish.
I wonder about this also. First, there is a supreme court case from 1982, Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, which held that admitting only women violated the Equal Protection clause of the constitution. This seems to have not had much impact on college admissions.
For one, they held that when checking the if a law violates Equal Protection by discriminating against women, it is only subject to "intermediate scrutiny", as opposed to discrimination by race, which is subject to "strict scrutiny". So the state interest that has to be served by a law in order to outweigh the discrimination against women does not have to be as compelling as for race. A concurrence also noted that "the Court's holding today is limited to the context of a professional nursing school. Ante at 723, n. 7, 727. Since the Court's opinion relies heavily on its finding that women have traditionally dominated the nursing profession, see ante at 729-731, it suggests that a State might well be justified in maintaining, for example, the option of an all-women's business school or liberal arts program." Maybe that's indeed what happened later.
It seems that the strongest law against sex discrimination in education is not the constitution, but Title IX. However, Title IX explicitly grandfathered in existing single-sex colleges: "in regard to admissions this section shall not apply to any public institution of undergraduate higher education which is an institution that traditionally and continually from its establishment has had a policy of admitting only students of one sex."
MUW is a public school.