Sunday, July 2, 2023
About this Event
While the first archival documents about lesbians (and later bisexuals) at Mount Holyoke College are dated from the 1960s, women who love other women have been a part of the community for a very long time. President Mary Woolley and Professor Jeannette Marks, for example, had a long and loving partnership throughout the whole first half of the twentieth century. It is also very likely that people of numerous gender identities (who we might call transgender today) have gone to MHC. Again, the Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections has few documents that speak explicitly about trans people until the late 1980s. This is a gap we are actively trying to fill, especially with our LGBTQ alum oral history project.
From the Mount Holyoke College Archive and Special Collections: Photograph from the Open Gates Pangy Day photo campaign of Ymani Monét, April 2014. Photograph courtesy of Femmepowered. Femmepowered was “an LBTGQA+ org that seeks to dismantle misogyny on campus by creating space and visibility for femme-identified people in the queer community,” founded in 2012. This image is from a campaign to fully support trans women on campus after the admissions policy began allowing trans students to apply.
From the Mount Holyoke College Archive and Special Collections: A flyer for a panel discussing transgender issues in 1997, hosted by Spectrum, a student organization dedicated to educating the Mount Holyoke community about “prejudice against lesbian and bisexual women.” According to the archives, “This panel is the first archival evidence we have about discussions regarding trans identities on campus. It's almost definite that these conversations happened prior to this panel, but were not archived. The panel was comprised of five transgender people who talked about their experiences in the Pioneer Valley and beyond. A trans man from South Hadley emphasized that gender identity is very different from sexuality and two of the trans women on the panel said they risked their lives and relationships by coming out as transgender.”
Attend one of the following in-person or virtual events:
Visit the resources created by the Mount Holyoke College Archive and Special Collections/LITS at Mount Holyoke:
Watch and reflect upon one of the recent DEI program videos:
Join us in reading and working through:
Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More by Janet Mock
For young adults and children:
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