Perspective

While many educators lament the mediocrity of American universities in encouraging study of science and engineering, U.S. colleges are surely among world leaders in one area: sensitivity to students questioning their gender. In the current school year, Bellevue (Wash.) College and Mills College (Oakland, Calif.) have offered students unprecedented choices of self-identification. “Male/female” is no longer useful at Bellevue, which offers “feminine, masculine, androgynous, gender neutral, transgender and other.” At Mills, students identify themselves as “agender, bigender, third-gender or gender-fluid,” and select the pronoun to which they wish to be referred — he or she or ze or sie or ve, or the agrammatical “they.”