Dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, & legal protection of individuals in the process of correcting the misalignment of their anatomical sex, & supporting their transition into society.
Founded in 1889, Barnard was the only college in New York City, and one of the few in the nation, where women could receive the same rigorous and challenging education available to men. The College was named after Frederick A.P. Barnard, then the tenth president of Columbia College. He had argued unsuccessfully for the admission of women to Columbia University.
One of the original Seven Sisters, Barnard was, from the beginning, a place that took women seriously and challenged them intellectually. Nine out of ten students live in college housing and participate in the educational programs, cultural events, and social activities of their residence halls. Barnard has become known for its distinctive academic culture.
In October 1889, the first Barnard class met in a rented brownstone at 343 Madison Avenue; there was a faculty of six and 14 students in the School of Arts. Nine years later, the college moved to its present site on Morningside Heights. In 1900 it was included in the educational system of Columbia University with provisions unique among women's colleges: it was governed by its own trustees, faculty, and dean, and was responsible for its own endowment and facilities, while sharing instruction, the library, and the degree of the university.
Barnard's current enrollment consists of 2,389 undergraduates from 48 states and 39 countries. Of that number, 13% are African-American, Latina or Native American. 17% are Asian. 68% are from outside New York State, 12% are from the western United States, 12% are from New England, 7% are from the South, and 8% are from the Midwest/Southwest.
About 90% of Barnard students live in 11 Barnard residence halls and 4 Columbia residence halls.
The Class of 2010, which includes approximately 556 students, came to Barnard with an average secondary school GPA of 3.91 on a 4.0 scale or 95.3 on a 100-point scale and median SAT scores of 690 for the critical reading section, 670 for the math section, and 690 for the writing section.
The tuition and fees for the 2006-2007 academic year were $33,078; room and board, $11,392.
Springfield, VA, USA. Four characteristics distinguish Barnard College: It is a liberal arts college with a long tradition of excellence; it is part of a great research university; it is in New York City, and it is a college for women [1]. This fall a female to male likely born with Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) enrolled at Barnard, leading to the question
Why would an HBS male want to attend Barnard?
Granted, the man in question is young and still early in transition, but why a woman's college, especially Barnard?
Barnard College is specifically designed for the education of women. Women make up over half the faculty.
Last fall, Raemond Grosz, an early transition female to male (apparently HBS), enrolled at Barnard. Moments into his first year orientation, Grosz remembers thinking:
The second I got to Barnard I was like, ‘This is not going to be okay because it’s just so girly’.
I'm struck by two things:
Grosz had uttered a very male, very patriarchal statement which seems to confirm his core sex as male.
What in the world was Grosz thinking when he enrolled in a woman's college?
Grosz's explanation of why he enrolled seems rather naïve for someone qualified to matriculate at Barnard
I guess I was expecting more of a queer community.
Or perhaps it is only a reflection of youth and a somewhat sheltered life. He enrolled at a woman's college which has history of women students who come from socially conservative and well-off families. (Barnard is not Brown, another of the seven sisters).
By the time First Year Orientation was finished, Grosz's female roommate informed him that she was uneasy about sharing a dorm room with him. Barnard College offered Grosz two alternatives:
Work things out with his current roommate, or
Find a new roommate.
Single rooms are not available for first year students at Barnard.
At the same time, Grosz was growing more uncomfortable with Barnard
These girls were all straight edge, typical Barnard students who don’t really like to party and don’t like to stay up late, who watch Grey’s Anatomy. I had nothing in common with them. I’d be better off dating them than trying to pretend we were the same gender.
Which, of course, is the point: the rest of the first year class is female, Grosz apparently is an HBS male (and a man who apparently thinks of Grey's Anatomy as a weekly chick flick).
Unable to find a new roommate, and unwilling to remain with his current one, Grosz lived off campus.
I was going to just not do college and say ‘fuck this,’ and live with my friend in her apartment because they weren’t giving me any options.
The situation was resolved when Grosz transferred to the School of General Studies at Columbia which is affiliated with Barnard.
Grosz said he was surprised by the amount of ignorance he has encountered from Columbia students, saying that he had been called a transvestite by more than one
It [HBS] has a freak status in a lot of people’s minds. When people think trans, they think drag, which is the first problem, because it’s not a performance, it’s how you are and how you go through life.
Grosz, now at Columbia, added that gay and lesbian students at Columbia seem to have a distinct place on campus that transgender students do not.
Trans people are often invisible whereas gay people are often out and fabulous, but they often get lumped together as if they’re one thing.
The confusion between cross-dressers and transgenders on one hand, and HBS men and women on the other is common, one of the fall-outs of lumping everyone under the Big T GBLT umbrella. HBS needs in transition are specific and different from transgenders and cross-dressers as Grosz quickly discovered.
His initial choice of Barnard as his college is questionable and indicative of an HBS male emerging from the transgender community in the early stages of transition. Bernard's admission policy states that a student must be physically a woman to be accepted. Grosz, in his own mind as well as his outward appearance, is male. Since his transition was not yet complete, College policy would have allowed him to remain at Bernard and graduated as a man.
Not that Grosz was comfortable during his short time at Bernard. Simple things such as the silhouettes of women on the Barnard wall, all of which have feminine hairstyles, made him feel he did not belong – he is a guy who felt out of place at a woman's college. Surprise, surprise!
The comments of some of the Barnard and Columbia students and faculty were more direct.
Why should an all-women's college have to ‘accommodate’ someone who identifies as a man? What was he doing there in the first place?
Someone identifying as a man doesn't have any business seeking accommodation at a women's college.
If I enrolled in an all-girls college, I'd expect people to view me as a girl.
Is it really surprising that a Barnard freshman would be uneasy living with someone who identified as male? Really?
If I moved into a room my freshman year at Barnard with a person who identified themselves as a man, I'd move out. If Grosze was upset by teachers referring to him as a ‘she’, then how is it fair to be offended by the Barnard roommate moving out. The roommate signed up for a woman's college, not to be placed with someone who wanted to be called a ‘he’.
I urge anyone that reads this to keep an open mind and know that what these kids are doing is not a phase. It (HBS) is a birth condition involving gender identity. Furthermore this condition is not new, it has existed throughout history. The difference is now we have the ability to help these people lead productive and happy lives in their true gender.
When we raise our children we tell them ‘It's what on the inside that counts’. Let's try to remember that when it comes to people who were born trans. [i.e., with HBS.]
Sometimes it's not about your gender identity; it's about you being a tool.
What HBS men and women need most of all is common sense. We cannot just barge into new situations, announce we are HBS, and demand that everyone and everything change to accommodate us. Sometimes the need of the many, exceed the needs of the one.
The best approach is for HBS men and women to work within the system. The radical transgressors among us are a small minority. The rest of us are men and women born with a medical condition we treat during that part of our lives we call transition.
Transition should never be a gauntlet we throw down to challenge the rest of world. If Grosz had thought things through, if he had been better prepared or farther along in transition before he applied to Barnard, all of this could have been avoided, the very proper sensibilities of the Barnard women maintained, and the glare of still another media circus gracefully sidestepped.
And, in the end, don't we all just want is to get on with our lives as men and women and avoid becoming a political cause celebre?
Barnard College website
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A person may live full time as, and simulate the presentation of, another gender. If the person has the time, place, health, and money to have SRS but chooses not to do so, they may be transgendered, but they are not transsexual.
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