Morehouse College, the only all-male historically black college in the US, announced that it would begin admitting transgender men next year in a new policy that the college’s board of trustees approved on Saturday. While nonbinary and gender-nonconforming students will be eligible for admission, trans women will not be, and students who transition to or begin to self-identify as female during their tenure at Morehouse will not be eligible to receive a degree from the college.



“Once admitted to the College, all students are expected to self-identify as men throughout their education at Morehouse,” the new policy states. And in an FAQ about the policy, the school confirmed that nonbinary and gender-nonconforming students are also eligible for admission.

“We are a place that’s been around for the last 152 years doing nothing but educating the minds of young men, and we are not stopping that now,” Terrance Dixon, Morehouse’s vice president for enrollment management, told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “We’ve never shied away from social issues, and it’s a time for us to be the leaders that we are … to address gender identity in our rapidly changing world.”

Morehouse, in Atlanta, Georgia, is a college with a rich history and distinguished alumni — Spike Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr among them. Its president, David Thomas, refers to it as “the West Point of black male development.”

The college's announcement is the latest in the trend of single-gender schools revisiting admissions policies for transgender students. Mills College in Oakland was the first women's college to admit transgender women in 2014. Spelman College, the all-female HBCU that shares an affiliation with Morehouse, adopted a new gender identity policy for students in 2017, and the first transgender woman graduated in 2018. But the road to colleges reversing their positions on admissions policies for trans students has rarely been smooth. Smith College in Massachusetts drew national attention and sparked student protests when it refused to admit a transgender woman in 2013, before finally agreeing to admit transgender women in 2015.

Among all-male schools, Morehouse is the first in the country to adopt a transgender policy. Still, some students and alumni say the school’s policy is not as progressive as it first looks.