I woke up last Tuesday to a deluge of emails, many from students who took my "Introduction to Trans Studies" class at Yale last semester, all pointing me to a New Republic article by Monica Potts: “Why Women’s Colleges Still Matter in the Age of Trans Activism.” Potts bemoans Bryn Mawr College’s recent decision to change its application policies such that feminine-identified or genderqueer applicants (trans and cisgendered women, and intersex people) are now eligible to apply. She describes efforts to make women’s spaces safe and accessible for trans people, and especially trans women, as having the effect of “pushing women’s champions out of the picture,” which, she argues, “will hardly go far in fighting any type of discrimination, but it will go a long way in setting back the fight against misogyny.”

As someone who has found a home in dyke and queer communities since I was a teenager, I found Potts’s piece offensive but not particularly surprising. Debates about the relationship of trans people—especially trans women—to women’s spaces have raged at least since Janice Raymond's smear campaign in the early '70s against Sandy Stone, a trans woman, for Stone’s important work at Olivia Records, a lesbian-feminist music label. Women’s colleges, women’s studies classes, women’s music festivals—nary a women’s space has existed that has not, at some point, been importantly challenged on how it defines “women” and why, and trans people are frequently unfairly blamed for the fallout when this happens.

Potts—a Bryn Mawr alumnus, as I am—finds symbolic meaning in the disappearance of women’s colleges. She reads the decreasing number of women’s colleges as portending the end times of feminism, as a decline that “has serious implications for the ongoing, uphill fight for women's rights—a fight that should be waged alongside, rather than eclipsed by, the one for LGBT rights.” The piece is shot through with an ominous extinction narrative and claims that unless we renew our commitment to prioritizing women’s legislative and corporate equality (she cites the relatively few number of women in Congress and in the Senate, and Lean In “feminism”), then women’s colleges, and by implication feminism with them, will become “quaint relic[s] of a bygone era.”

This extinction story about the slow disappearance of women’s institutions at the hands of trans people isn't unique to Potts’s article; putatively feminist arguments that equate prioritizing the needs of trans women with sideways or latent misogynist prerogatives are hardly new. A spate of recent stories about the slow decline of the women’s college index a larger conversation about where feminist work is located in our cultures, and who that work is intended to serve. In Potts’s piece, it is institutions—women’s colleges, Lean In “feminism,” etc.—rather than people or organizations that take center stage as the most critical forces in the advancement of feminist political work today. Instead of identifying with the priorities of those whom women’s colleges are intended to serve—ostensibly those most vulnerable to gender-based oppression—Potts seems to identify with Bryn Mawr itself, ostensibly because it has become a symbol of the prospects of feminist politics in the United States. But how did we come to see institutions as the target, embodiment, and proper home of feminism?

Most of us identify with institutions in some way, whether we want to or not. It might be a political party, your alma mater, where you do (or don't) buy your food. In our neoliberal capitalist society, it is often difficult not to identify with the structures around which our lives frequently need to be organized. But according to Lisa Duggan, professor of American Studies at New York University and author of The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, neoliberalism has had a particularly devastating impact on the organization of liberation movements over the last 40 years. Instead of the redistribution of resources downward via grassroots political organizing, neoliberal economics advocates a redistribution of resources upward toward the state and private institutions. This has shifted the terrain of mainstream political work from coalition-based platforms organized around fighting the predations of structures of oppression—poverty, police violence, the prison pipeline—to more individuated, single-issue, or identity-based platforms fighting exclusively for the legislative and corporate enfranchisement of specific groups of people. As theorists and activists such as Sarah Jaffe, Nancy Fraser, Rahila Gupta, Michelle Murphy, and many more have argued, feminism has suffered mightily from this neoliberal reorganizing of its priorities, and the result of this is that we have come to think of mainstream feminism in corporate or institutional terms: Nike’s The Girl Effect, Half the Sky (“turning oppression into opportunity”), etc. The devastating effect of this trend is that “feminism” is a term that is increasingly associated with transphobia and racism, rather than liberation and coalition building.