If you ever dare to become an audacious transsexual like me, you may have been confronted with a litany of in-group terminology online: “nonbinary amab”, “birthday boy” (referring to a particularly petulant kind of trans man), “AGP”. Some of these are used with a wry smile, such as “AGP”, which was originally conceived of by someone, Ray Blanchard, attempting to explain trans womanhood in a particularly tasteless manner, and “AGP” was his term for a trans woman attracted to her own femininity. The first term, “nonbinary amab”, elicits deep anger from some, as it implies a real suspicion of non-binary people who seem not to be doing androgyny correctly; labelling them by their sex assigned at birth seems to suggest that they are still fundamentally male in some way. The point is, however, we have these terms because some understand gender to be what one makes of it. It is because gender is so multifaceted, so open to individual manipulation, that gender-segregated colleges would flatten an otherwise multidimensional facet of our lives.
It is for this reason that I am suspicious of the idea of segregating genders from each other, and feel it ought to be reserved for only the most severe and necessary circumstances, such as, arguably, crisis centres for victims of sexual assault. As a trans woman (pulling the card here) who went to an all-boys’ school, I feel especially qualified to tell you: the patriarchy exists, and it affects men too, and people are very good at reinforcing patriarchal standards without any evident bloke in the room to keep the male gaze ticking over. Current dialogues about “single-sex spaces” avoid the hard truth that we are all responsible for combatting patriarchal standards by rendering the patriarchy into a ‘Thing Men Do’.
Many women can attest that they have experienced being silenced by men. History is filled with examples of men stealing women’s ideas; it seems that men underpay and often step in the way of women when possible. But these behaviours are not a rank smell emanating from their genitals. These behaviours are rooted in a complex set of factors which hover around their masculinity. It is possible for women to do all of these things to other women, and some indeed do: some are quite terrible to other women (see: Ellen DeGeneres’ treatment of her staff as one example, or some of my friends have cited the cruelty they experienced, often based on judgements levied at their body, at the hands of other young women during sex-segregated PE lessons). To treat patriarchy as a cut-and-dry problem one can escape by escaping men, or, as the zeitgeist seems to be, anyone with a penis, one refuses the nuances around gender and socialisation.
Let me express an unwoke opinion: the episode of The IT Crowd in which Douglas Reynholm dates a trans woman appeals to a part of me. I recognise the argument for it being transphobic: it does portray the one example of a trans woman on the show as a beer-guzzling darts player who can deck a man with a single punch. And there is no doubt that the writer, Graham Linehan, was basing this characterisation on his own prejudices. Yet I love it. I want to be a beer-guzzling trans woman who could, if necessary, deck a full-grown man. This does not make me any less of a woman: in fact, we should celebrate the beer-guzzling, punch-happy women in our lives. We should not treat femininity as divine, meek and mild, governed by what Nietzsche would probably call a ‘slave ideology’. All-women’s colleges suggest otherwise: that women’s existence would be somehow corrupted or threatened by men themselves, rather than being threatened more broadly by patriarchy.
If one therefore treats femininity as tainted by male company, one ends up with a horribly flat image of men based on their gender. In the last year, there has been a flurry of discussion around heterosexual women avoiding dating because men are just so much baggage emotionally. I get it. I dated someone who is probably best described as an incapable manchild (another example of gender’s nuances: we have no better term than ‘manchild’ to describe this dynamic, yet they are undeniably non-binary). I do not begrudge anyone for hating men, disliking them, or actually needing to not be around them, although this latter option implies traumatic circumstances which call for proper attention and care, which is not, per se, best handled by the establishment of women’s colleges alone.
What I do begrudge, though, is believing that a personal preference warrants a donor paying out the wazoo to found a women’s-only college.
Gender- (or, probably, sex-) segregated colleges are the bane of good taste. They will worsen gender relations. They turn the other gender(s) into unidentified other(s) without a face, and by consequence, lead to an inability to treat those who are not women or men as fully-formed humans. They will be treated on the basis of their gender alone. If, for example, you do indeed hate men, which is a fine and fair position to hold, given how awfully some of them dress, or how often some of them go to the gym, then your criticisms should at least be well-founded, and, even better, humorous, which is only achieved – to adapt a T.S Eliot quote – with realism. Men, it is true, can be awful, but they are also awfully varied as a group. You cannot ignore this.
So, no, you do not deserve a women’s-only college. You do not deserve a women’s-only college on the basis of an inability to recognise what the rest of us, transsexuals, transgenders, nonbinary amabs, birthday boys, AGPs, all of us, have long accepted: gender is complex. So do something interesting with it.
, “AGP”.){kind=link}