NORTHAMPTON — Margot Audero, a senior at Smith College, remembers the first time she ever saw a transgender person: Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2015. “I thought it was gross,” she said, “because that was what society had taught me to believe.”
An adolescent boy at the time who had long wanted to be a girl, Audero hadn’t realized changing her gender was even possible until that moment. Her dawning awareness came at a critical moment when women’s colleges were going through their own identity transitions.
The same year Jenner brought trans visibility to the mainstream, Smith revised its undergraduate admission policy to include self-identified transgender women, among a number of policy changes women’s colleges adopted during the decade. And just as consequential were the cultural ones that ushered in a new era of gender inclusion.
Now, a decade later, pronoun buttons and gender-neutral bathrooms are so normal on campuses as to be unremarkable. But the culture of acceptance they represent is also anathema to a president who in his war against diversity, equity, and inclusion has particularly singled out transgender people and the institutions that support them.
With the White House confronting universities over DEI policies, some women’s colleges are using the moment to reassert their core values, even adopting a posture of defiance — especially those that have healthy endowments. “DEI is not just in our DNA, it is specifically who we are,” said Mount Holyoke president Danielle Holley.
And President Trump’s crusade against it “is absolutely an attack on groups in our country that have been historically marginalized, women and LGBTQ people being at the top of that list,” she added. “So for us, it’s very important that we stand on our values, because without our values, we don’t exist.”
On his first day back in office, Trump pledged to “defend women’s rights” by recognizing sex as immutable and binary — biologically male or female — and ordered federal agencies to “ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology.”
In the spring, Smith drew the glare of conservative websites for inviting former US assistant secretary for health Admiral Rachel L. Levine, a transgender woman, to speak at commencement that May. The next month, a conservative watchdog group filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Education against Smith, alleging its admissions policy violates Title IX, which prohibits sexual discrimination in educational programs receiving federal financial assistance.
In a recent interview, Smith president Sarah Willie-LeBreton said the school has not heard from the DOE and she wasn’t prepared to “offer legitimacy” to the complaint by commenting on it.
“Our admissions policies are firmly within the law, and we’re very proud of those policies,” she said.
Still, some now fear the White House could try to target women’s colleges whose admissions policies don’t align with its conservative orthodoxy. Trump last week asked nine universities to sign a “compact” agreeing to commit to strict definitions of gender, among other demands, in order to receive priority for federal funding.
“I worry Trump is going to put women’s colleges in an impossible position: either lose your accreditation, for example, or rescind your policies,” said Heron Greenesmith, deputy director of policy at the Transgender Law Center. “Not supporting trans students doesn’t mean that trans students disappear. It means that trans women will not be able to enter, and trans men will be punished for coming out.”
In Massachusetts, there are five women’s colleges, including undergraduate programs at Simmons University and Bay Path University, the most of any state, according to Pew Research Center.
Willie-LeBreton said that in the past three years Smith has seen the highest numbers of applicants in its history.
When the college opened 150 years ago, she added, its founders “might have imagined that Smith would not still be standing or still be relevant now,” with the hope that women would have achieved equality by 2025. And while there has been great progress, “it’s also very clear that we have a long way to go.”
Smith just announced its Next 150 Pledge, which starting next fall will make tuition free for undergraduates whose families earn $150,000 or less. Willie-LeBreton called it “a next natural progression” in the school’s devotion to expanding educational access.
Wellesley College also celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. However, many other women’s colleges have gone the way of white gloves or the girdle — that is, out of vogue if not entirely extinct. In 1960 there were around 230, according to the Women’s College Coalition; now there are around 30. Others have tried to change with the times, merging with men’s institutions or going coed, like Radcliffe and Vassar.
Founded in 1837, Mount Holyoke bills itself as “a women’s college that is gender diverse” and invites applications from anyone who’s not a cisgender man (both born and identifying as male). Wellesley and Smith consider anyone who self-identifies as female, but do not admit transgender men (born female but identifying as male).
It was Audero’s father who suggested she apply to a women’s college on the East Coast — thousands of miles away from home in Orange County, Calif. — and she enrolled in fall 2022. With long curly red hair, she’s a walking emblem of the self-determination that’s long defined women’s colleges: On campus, she’s known for wearing a large trans pride flag as a cape, a statement to herself as much as to the outside world: “I’m not going to hide who I am, or back down.”
Some women’s colleges are taking a similar stance. Amid rolled-back abortion rights, proliferating anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, and surging book bans, Mount Holyoke is publicly embracing its founding ideals, as well as using them as a recruitment tool in the Midwest and the South, “where women’s rights are most impacted,” Holley said.
She is expecting “an uptick” in applications from students “who want to study in a censorship-free space,” noting the recent resignation of the president of Texas A&M after a professor was accused of teaching “gender ideology” and fired.
“Why should a woman go to college in Texas,” she said, “when she can come to a place like Mount Holyoke and not have what she learns restricted by the government?”
Holley likes to say Mount Holyoke was “forged in dissent.” Indeed, similar schools founded in the 19th century connected young women to the world of ideas at a time when providing higher education to future homemakers was considered pointless, even dangerous — a threat to their domestic roles and reproductive health.
The first women’s colleges helped show the world that a woman was as intellectually capable as a man, even as they catered to her physical differences — in some cases getting it all wrong. In Smith’s early years, classes were kept to the first floor so women wouldn’t have to climb stairs and risk exhausting themselves.
Even now, Hillary Connor, a senior and member of Smith’s cross country and track teams, pointed to a “radically different” sports culture at the college, where the athletic department is “centered around specific needs of women and female athletes.” In the weight room, she noted, “the circumference of the bars is smaller to better fit women’s hands.”
In glossy brochures, schools advertise a feminist utopia. There are leadership hubs such as the Hillary Rodham Clinton Center at Wellesley, and there’s a world-class archive of women’s history at Smith. There are health and wellness services offering gender-affirming care (one school has a garment library with chest binders and tucking underwear), and stately residence halls.
Less advertised is what students don’t get at a women’s college.
At Wellesley, “women are not marginalized [or] discriminated against,” said Erica Zhang, a third-year student from Shanghai.
And on campus, she added, “you feel so safe.”
Sexual assault survivors may choose women’s schools for the same reason, said Carrie Baker, a Smith professor of the study of women and gender. “It’s a different environment,” she said, where a woman can assume she will be treated as “a first-class citizen.”
Loretta Ross, a Smith professor who teaches a class on white supremacy in the age of Trump, compared women’s colleges to HBCUs, saying, “You don’t have to justify your presence there.”
Still, gaining acceptance is different from gaining admittance. In 2013, Smith found itself in the national spotlight for refusing to consider the application of a female transgender student, who later changed her name to Rose Wong.
Wong chronicled the ordeal online, provoking heated debate. Smith students soon mounted their own campaign to welcome transgender students, but other stakeholders argued expanding the policy would go against the college’s founding mission. Some felt it would “undermine the institution and make it a less safe space for cis women,” said Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
After a yearlong review, Smith changed its policy — “and,” Beemyn said, “the institution hasn’t crumbled.”
Audero credits Wong’s activism for opening the door for her at Smith, even though she knows “the situation for trans people is likely going to get worse in the US,” she said.
Still, she tries to remain hopeful and find points of connection. Whenever she meets people who haven’t encountered a trans woman before, she thinks back to the day she cringed at seeing Jenner on Vanity Fair. “I feel like I can never be mad at them for not understanding what being trans is,” she said, “because I was like that, too.”
After she graduates this spring, Audero is thinking of applying to law school and maybe running for office someday.
For now, she’s grateful to have found community at Smith among other women who share so much in common, with the occasional difference. “For example,” she said, “when people in class are talking about periods or pregnancies, usually everyone has a personal experience, except me.”
“I think this was the first year that I was not the only trans woman in the room,” she said.
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.