Middlebury Statement on Transgender

President Laurie Patton and Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernández emailed the following statement to the Middlebury community on Friday, October 26.

You may have heard this week that, according to the New York Times, the Department of Health and Human Services is proposing to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance. The proposal calls for narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth. Many see this as a way of the government eradicating federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who identify as a gender other than the one they were born into.

Chief Diversity Officer