by Margot Heffernan
“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
― Virginia Woolf
Sweet Briar College. It’s a unique place. Inimitable, really. Rich in women’s history. The College was built on the will of its founder, Indiana Fletcher Williams, in memory of her deceased 16-year-old daughter. Indeed, it’s a women’s college in the most integral sense.
Over the past decade, though, this small women’s college located in Amherst, Virginia, has been afflicted. Plagued by the same blight that has spread through virtually every province of society.
Gender ideology. It has settled in at Sweet Briar where large segments of the student body stand in defense of admitting the “gender diverse,” including men who think they are women. In fact, many faculty and board members have been swindled into thinking that people can change sex. That men who imagine themselves women should receive special empathy. That we should give into their delusions and call them “women” because they tell us to.
Women must be gracious. Isn’t this what we have been told since antiquity? Be kind, dear! And isn’t this the same admonition we are given now, in tacit and overt fashion when a man or boy claims womanhood? Be kind, dear, be kind!
He can’t help it!
He was born this way!
The boy was born in the wrong body!
We have heard it all. But the message circles back to this: We must perpetually empathize with male “distress,” this time over feeling innately female, a condition that has been enshrined in the medical literature with diagnoses like “gender dysphoria” and treatments referred to as “gender affirming care.” “Be kind” is the all-too common mantra we now apply to men with fantasies of womanhood.
Mary Pope Hutson, though, is a determined woman. Gifted with insight; spirited with grit. Maybe it’s her background as alumnus of the school she now presides over that drives her passion. A passion to make things right. To reject the bunkum and codswallop of “transgenderism” and maintain the integrity of Sweet Briar as a women’s college.
“There’s a place for women’s colleges in America that are free from misogyny, that teach women to find their voice,” she said in defense of the all-women’s institution.
Hutson put those words into action last August with a new college admissions policy which holds that an applicant must confirm “that her sex assigned at birth is female and that she consistently lives and identifies as a woman.”
Oh, but the blowback would be fierce.
It was several weeks after Hutson announced the new admissions policy change, that another familiar Virginia body chimed in. Another body that enjoins the “be kind to transwomen” philosophy. The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) is a renowned residential artist community that is closely affiliated with Sweet Briar. In fact, it is among the few artist residencies in the country affiliated with a college or university. According to the VCCA website, “Fellows in residence have full access to the recreational and cultural opportunities provided by the College, and indeed, the artists themselves often provide cultural opportunities to students and the Sweet Briar community.”
In 2020, VCCA purchased the 410-acre estate that they had leased from the college for 42 years, while continuing the long held and deep artistic relationship.
This long and enduring relationship between the VCCA and Sweet Briar, however, was “paused” on September 16th, when a letter was addressed to Hutson and Mason Bennett, Sweet Briar board chair. It states that “Sweet Briar’s new policy is in direct conflict with VCCA’s values.” As a result, the VCCA would “pause” its activities with Sweet Briar “as long as this new policy is in place.” That “new policy,” of course, states that only women are to be admitted to the college.
Is it a surprise that the two signatories on this letter are men? Have Steve Slaughter, VCCA Board President, and Kevin O’Halloran, Executive Director, overlooked the irony of two powerful men inserting themselves into the business of eliminating an all-women’s educational experience?
The outspoken John Gregory Brown, an English professor and chair of the Sweet Briar faculty senate, told the AP that the policy “really excludes any student who would be offended by those positions … who doesn’t want to be in a place where discrimination is codified in this way.” His tangled rhetoric is meant to spool us around, disengage us from our sense of biological reality, confound our sense of what’s right and wrong by insisting we should be upset over a man in a dress who cannot worm his way into the private women’s sphere. Brown essentially shames women who have the gall to dismiss men from female spaces. To say, “No we have had enough.”
The truth, though, is that we have had enough. And we are not afraid to form the words. Words that ratify a foundational truth.
Womanhood is not negotiable.
Brown was also cc’d on the VCCA’s board letter. He has been particularly unrestrained in his condemnation of Hutson’s policy to maintain itself as a woman’s college. He opined to Inside Higher Ed that the new policy was “morally repugnant.”
Morally repugnant. Let that sink in. Have we reached a point in time wherein a women’s college is “morally repugnant” for wishing to maintain its all-women status? Dangerous thinking, indeed, as this logic easily leads us to the conclusion that it is also “morally repugnant” to disallow “trans women” from joining sororities. And “morally repugnant” to exclude men from women’s sports, from private spaces like bathrooms, changing areas and lesbian bars. Morally repugnant for daring to prevent grown men from injuring women in our own sports like volleyball, or for pummeling female Olympic boxers on the world stage.
Is it not too far off to imagine that the overall condition of the female state itself is morally repugnant? That we must roll over and dutifully accept that any man, full-bodied or “transitioned” who asserts his “womanhood” should be considered female? That without such “inclusion,” womanhood is not true and complete? That to decline to do so is somehow unacceptable, objectionable? And yes, “repugnant?”
And one wonders, if it is a strange or familiar world we live in when the female president of a women’s college is publicly admonished, even chastised by three men for trying to maintain the solemn legacy of an historically women’s institution of higher learning. Indeed, chastised and humiliated for daring to defend her own?
But there is a lesson here for women. For all of us, really, if we disentangle the spool of lies that bind us to the trans scam.
It’s in the soft underbelly of the animal. The slightest chink in the human armor. We have always been prone to this, we humans. To a breakdown of our senses under pressure; a need to conform to the nonsense of a deluded crowd. In this era of “inclusivity,” we have been further moved to believe in madness; here, a madness pushed by a pathological empathy that distorts reality and denies our corporeal forms. Then, a pathological empathy that requires us to respond with “kindness” to all sorts of things, including the depravity of men wanting to be women.
But the pushback is here. As we lean into the well of our own history, women gather – regardless of political affiliation, race or religion – and align. To understand that we are fixed in this shared history, a history that is imbedded in each of us.
There’s a payoff. In the here and now. A victory for the legacy of Sweet Briar. Indeed, a victory for the return of reality in Virginia; a vindication of women’s rights, a well-earned legacy in a state where suffrage has a profound history. In December of 2024, an Amherst County judge approved a joint agreement between Sweet Briar College and the Virginia attorney general’s office that will allow the private, all-women college’s decision to bar transgender students from attending. It was a narrow interpretation reaffirming founder Indiana Fletcher William’s will which envisioned Sweet Briar as an educational institute for “individuals who were born female and who live as women.”
Now, let’s take this lesson and hold it near: It is time to stand behind women who will not give in to the raucous mob; to the outrageous demands that women and girls must stand down once again to the demands of a culture that prioritizes the male will. Let’s echo the voices of women who are not afraid to call bollocks on the entire gender behemoth.
And let’s remember Indiana Fletcher William’s intention that Sweet Briar be a “perpetual memorial” to her daughter. What a fitting tribute to womanhood moving forward.
So, plaudits to President Hutson for her unwavering advocacy of Sweet Briar College as a women’s college. For carrying the torch that was handed to her. For showing her grit. For reminding us that we are each indomitable.
Each of us women of mettle and strength.
For reminding us that womanhood really is nonnegotiable.
Margot Heffernan is board vice president at Women’s Liberation Front.
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