Women's college in Virginia bars transgender students based on founder's will from 1900

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Women’s college in Virginia bars transgender students based on founder’s will from 1900

The Associated Press
August 30, 2024, 6:45 PM

Sweet Briar College in Virginia has instituted an admissions policy that bars transgender women next school year, making the school an outlier among the nation’s diminishing number of women’s colleges.

The private women’s liberal arts school said the policy stems from the legally binding will of its founder, Indiana Fletcher Williams, who died in 1900. Sweet Briar’s leadership said the document requires it to “be a place of ‘girls and young women.’”

The phrase “must be interpreted as it was understood at the time the Will was written,” Sweet Briar’s president and board chair wrote in a letter earlier this month to the college community. … The new policy requires an applicant to “confirm that her sex assigned at birth is female, and that she consistently lives and identifies as a woman.”

“Sweet Briar College believes that single-sex education is not only our tradition, but also a unique cultural and social resource,” President Mary Pope Hutson said in a statement to The Associated Press.

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