Sweet Briar College bans transgender women from admission

A small Virginia women's liberal-arts college will only admit biological women, the school announced this week.

Sweet Briar College said that "women" must be interpreted in accord with the intent of its founding documents, which understood women in biological terms, not according to current gender-identity ideas.

According to a report in Inside Higher Ed, the Amherst County college never answered the "what is a woman" question directly before now, though it had admitted some transgender women on an individual basis.

But now applicants must tell the school “that her sex assigned at birth is female and that she consistently lives and identifies as a woman,” Sweet Briar’s website now states.

According to Inside Higher Ed, college officials said in a statement to media outlets that “political and other influences” have called “the meaning of the term ‘woman’ into question,” but the board “understands the term in its historic and traditional way consistent with the intentions of our founder.”

Indiana Fletcher Williams, who died in 1901 and owned the Sweet Briar Plantation, stated that the land should be turned into a college to educate “girls and young women.”

“As the founding document, the language of the will is the starting point for the college’s leadership in making decisions about the college and its mission,” Sweet Briar president Mary Pope Hutson told Inside Higher Ed.