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The nation's only black-and-white university, namely transgender men, will begin hosting transgender men next year, marking a major shift for the school at a time when schools are going to be in transition. higher education countries adopt more welcoming policies for LGBT students.
The leaders of Morehouse College told the Associated Press that its board of directors had approved the policy on Saturday.
Transgender men will be allowed to enroll in school for the first time in 2020. Students who identify as women but who are born male can not register, and anyone who passes from a man to a woman will not automatically qualify for a degree from the institution.
Morehouse officials hailed this initiative as an important step towards a more inclusive campus, while affirming its mission to educate and develop men.
"I think that Morehouse has the courage to talk about the problems of masculinity in today's environment is important," said David Thomas, president of Morehouse College, at the Associated Press. "For 152 years, the world has seen Morehouse as the Western point of development for black men."
The policy also states that Morehouse "will continue to use male pronouns" which he calls "the language of fraternity".
Morehouse is an iconic college whose former students include Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., filmmaker Spike Lee and former mayor of Atlanta Maynard Jackson. It stands as the "college of choice for black men" that has instilled leadership skills to generations of African-American men.
More than 1,000 colleges and universities across the country have adopted some form of transgender policy, including about two dozen historically black colleges. An increasing number of schools are updating their admission guidelines to ensure transgender students a welcoming experience, said Human Rights Campaign spokeswoman Sarah McBride.
"Young people are incredibly supportive of LGBT equality, including transgender equality," McBride said. "Schools respond in the same way – in many ways, our university campuses look like the country we will have in 10 or 15 years, there are many reasons to hope."
Morehouse becomes the first all-male university in the country to adopt a transgender policy. At the national level, there are only two other male-only colleges, Wabash College in Indiana and Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. The St. John's University of Minnesota, which only enrolls men but shares a joint university program with the College of St. Benedict, also has a transgender policy.
Morehouse had problems with LGBT issues, including the 2002 attack of a 19-year-old student accused of beating another student with a baseball bat that he mistakenly thought make a sexual advance.
Gregory Love's skull was fractured during the beating. Aaron Price was convicted of assault and initially sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The incident was widely perceived as a reflection of a broader and more generalized attitude towards the LGBT community among African Americans.
Thomas acknowledged that black colleges and universities – primarily created after the civil war with the help of religious institutions such as the Baptist and Methodist churches – faced additional difficulties in solving gender and social problems. sexuality because of opposition in black churches.
"I can not speak on behalf of all HBCUs, but we know that in the black church, silence has been largely maintained on this issue," said Thomas. "I imagine that there may be some people who could say," Why would you even raise this issue? " "I tell these people that we are living in a time when silence on these issues is in fact not useful.For us, as a school for men, it is important for us to set clear expectations regarding what does it mean to do with this policy ".
In 2009, the college updated its dress code, in part to address a handful of students wearing women's clothing on campus. The following year, Morehouse organized its first gay pride. Morehouse offered its first LGBT course in 2013 and offers a scholarly program to Bayard Rustin, icon of civil and gay rights.
Spelman College, an all-female HBCU close to Morehouse, adopted a transgender policy in 2017 and the first transgender woman graduated in 2018.
Other HBCUs that have transgender policies include Tuskegee University, Howard University, Florida A & M University, Southern Louisiana University, Central Carolina University, and Morgan State University of Maryland.
Titi Naomi Tukes – a graduate of Morehouse in 2017 who registered as a cisgender man in 2013 but now identifies as non-binary transgender and uses the pronouns that they / they / them their – disapproved of the policy they learned in an alumni e-mail on Saturday. Tukes said the policy was hostile and exclusionary to transgender women and non-binary students, and could put students in transition in a dangerous environment when they had to leave college.
Titi Naomi Tukes – a graduate of Morehouse in 2017 who registered as a cisgender man in 2013 but now identifies as non-binary transgender and uses the pronouns that they / they / them their – disapproved of the policy they learned in an alumni e-mail on Saturday. Tukes said the policy was hostile and exclusionary to transgender women and non-binary students, and could put students in transition in a dangerous environment when they had to leave college.
"You can not control how a person feels in his body," said Tukes, today a management consultant working in New York. He added that he was ready to give his opinion on the implementation of this policy. "The college fails to address and understand the gender journey that everyone undertakes in their academic experience, spiritually, emotionally, physically and psychologically."
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Whack is the national author of the Associated Press on race and ethnicity. Follow his work on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/emarvelous.
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