The Common Application and the Universal College Application — a pair of companies which together administer the gateway to 671 American colleges and universities — have announced that they will now offer free response boxes so transgender applicants can carefully explain that they don’t identify as male or female but instead feel they have special, gender-nonconforming identities.
The Common Application, Inc., a nonprofit which manages applications for 625 schools, will offer a free response box after a question that will be phrased as “sex assigned at birth,” reports Inside Higher Ed.
The Universal College Application, a for-profit company out of Baltimore which manages applications for 46 schools, will ask applicants their “legal sex.” The possible answers will be “man,” “woman” or “self-identify.” Applicants who choose “self-identify” will then be able to use a free response box to describe their unique transgender characteristics.
The Common App and the Universal College Application administer applications for over a million college applicants.
A very large number of applicants are still in high school when they apply.
Campus Pride, a group which claims to represent lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students at America’s colleges, has been pushing for the application language change since 2010.
Shane Windmeyer, Campus Pride’s executive director, said he remains unsatisfied because the college application clearinghouses aren’t specifically demanding to know if would-be students are gay or straight.
Windmeyer added that he believes the Obama administration’s quest to placate gay and transgender students — under its radical interpretation of Title IX — will lead college administrators to keep data on transgender students and sexual orientation.
“This information is vital,” he told Inside Higher Ed.
“Young people today are far ahead of administrators when it comes to transgender issues,” Windmeyer also said.
Both the Common Application and the Universal College Application issued statements celebrating their new free response boxes.
“We want to make sure that all students have the ability to express themselves in the ways in which they feel most comfortable,” Common App chairman Gil Villanueva said, according to Inside Higher Ed.
Jonathan Burdick of the Universal College Application suggested that the new free response boxes for high school seniors is part of a world-historical social transformation that will redefine life on earth.
“If I read the signs right on college campuses, our entire concept of gender might be at the start of a historic shift,” Burdick said. “I think it might even eventually force us to adjust our pronouns and other language constructs. That’s kind of exciting, I think, to be living in a society on the cusp of a new, more sophisticated degree of understanding about what it means to be a human being.”
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