A Trans Admission Advantage?

Depending on your point of view, I had either the good fortune or the misfortune to live in a swing state during this election year. In an Electoral College world, my vote actually counted for something, unlike those of Republicans living in blue states or Democrats living in red states. The price I had to pay is the number of campaign ads I had to watch every time I turned on my TV.

In recent weeks, I noticed that Trump campaign ads increasingly focused on two issues as “threats” to America, immigration and transgender issues, finding creative ways to interweave the two. Based on the ads, you might very well come to believe that a Harris administration would have moved the Statue of Liberty from New York’s harbor to the Rio Grande and changed the inscription to “Give me your insane, your criminals, your huddled masses seeking a new gender.” Apparently, if elected, Vice President Kamala Harris would have invited undocumented immigrants to storm across the border to picnic on pets and overrun our cities and small towns. Those imprisoned would be able to get free gender-affirming surgery so they could use your child’s bathroom and play on your daughter’s sports teams when they were released.

And now there’s more. According to comments made by Vice President–elect JD Vance late last month on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, becoming trans may be the new strategy for getting into Ivy League colleges.

“Think about the incentives,” Vance told Rogan, “if you are a, you know, middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent and the only thing you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale; like, obviously, that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle-class kids, but the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans. And is there a dynamic that’s going on where, if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege.”

Vance, of course, provided no evidence to support that claim, probably because there is none. And given that both Rogan and his audience love conspiracy theories, he didn’t need to.

I’m less interested in the politics associated with Vance’s claim and more interested in the assumptions and broader questions underlying it.

The Common Application has a required question about a student’s “legal sex” as listed on their government identification documents like birth certificates and driver’s licenses. It’s required due to state reporting requirements, with some states mandating that colleges report students using the binary male or female designation.

Gender identity, not necessarily the same thing as legal sex, is an optional question on the Common Application, with the following options:

• Female
• Male
• Nonbinary
• Add another gender

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System began collecting data on gender beginning with the 2023–24 academic cycle.

One’s legal sex is not a choice. But what about gender identity? Implicit in Vance’s claim that becoming transgender may be a college admission strategy is the assumption that individuals can change their gender identity like they change hair color. A fundamental principle of ethics is that we shouldn’t pass moral judgment on someone over a characteristic or behavior they didn’t freely choose, so those who want to demonize transgender individuals have to believe that gender identity is a choice.

I don’t claim to be an expert on gender identity and formation, but I have worked with several transgender students and read accounts of those who found themselves trapped in a gender identity that didn’t fit them, and those accounts all involve struggle and guilt as they try to come to grips with who they really are. Even if being transgender provided an Ivy League admission advantage, it is hard to imagine that someone would falsely present as transgender given the bullying and other obstacles that transgender students face.

A second assumption worth examining is Vance’s contention that “turning trans” is an issue just for upper-middle-class white families. He argues that “the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.”

There is a lot to unpack in that statement, beginning with the suggestion that colleges and other institutions are run by a DEI bureaucracy. The MAGA movement has seized on DEI as a powerful, malevolent force.

Colleges certainly value diversity as an important priority for a couple of reasons. In the 1978 Bakke case, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell argued that increasing diversity in the classroom was a compelling state interest and the only justification for race-based affirmative action. It is clear that being exposed to students with a diverse set of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives is educationally enriching.

But is diversity an end in itself or a means to an end, competing with other values? It is certainly possible to have a diverse student body where there is little interaction among different groups in the classroom or at the lunch table. There are elements in the DEI movement that I find extreme, but the notion that there is a “DEI bureaucracy” is a classic straw man argument.

I am also not sure that children from upper-middle-class white families are as disadvantaged in the Ivy admission process as Vance seems to assume. In a landscape where one in 10 or one in 20 applicants are admitted, the odds for every applicant are slim, but wealthy white applicants continue to benefit from legacy preferences at many elite colleges. They benefit even more from preferences for recruited athletes in “country club” sports, where the overwhelming number of participants are white and grow up in families with the means to pay for travel teams and personalized coaching and instruction.

Even if Vance is right about becoming trans being an Ivy League admissions strategy, why should that apply only to upper-middle-class white applicants? The currency of selective admission has always been uniqueness. The rarer any talent or quality, the more valuable, and vice versa. The more applicants playing “the trans card,” the less successful it is likely to be as a strategy. But wouldn’t a Black or Asian or Latino applicant who is also trans be even more attractive as an applicant, bringing multiple kinds of diversity?

Vance sees “becoming” trans as a way for young people to reject their privilege. I don’t think colleges are looking for applicants from privileged backgrounds to reject privilege as much as to acknowledge their privilege. That raises a question about whether privilege is one of those things one doesn’t choose and shouldn’t be judged for. I remember one of my students writing an essay about facing adversity during a dysentery-filled family trip to Machu Picchu. It was a well-written essay that answered the question, but an admission officer commented that if the family could afford to go to Machu Picchu, the student didn’t know what adversity was. I thought that was harsh.

Finally, Vance’s comments shed new light on a claim made by his running mate throughout the campaign. Donald Trump has stated without evidence or a single example that schools are doing gender-affirming surgery during the school day, such that a child goes to school as a boy and returns as a girl. Based on Vance’s hypothesis, if that were happening, all the schools would be doing is trying to improve their students’ college outcomes.

We need to support young people who question and struggle with their gender identity, and for some of them there are good reasons for embracing a gender identity other than that on their birth certificate or seeking gender-affirming health care. Getting into Harvard and Yale are not among them.