A women’s center at Amherst College suspended its normal operations Wednesday, a day observed by many in the U.S. as the “Day Without a Woman,” the conservative Campus Reform website reported.
“The Women’s and Gender Center (WGC) usually provides a number of resources to women, including menstrual products, sexual health resources, self care items, and pregnancy tests,” said Campus Reform, noting that the WGC opted to suspend its operations on March 8, although it held “community and dialogue” events throughout the day, according to an Amherst website.
Amherst chief communications officer Sandy Genelius told the Washington Times Wednesday afternoon that the WGC’s “specialized programs” for the day were not negatively impacting women on the campus.
What’s more, Campus Reform updated its initial story to note that another Amherst communications official blamed “possibly confusing language” in a Facebook post for lending the impression that WGC’s closure might negatively impact female students access to sexual health resources.
Students could simply avail themselves of other student resource centers “a stone’s throw” away from the WGC, Amherst’s Carolina Hanna told Campus Reform.
The Amherst WGC’s celebration of the 2017 Day Without a Woman comes on the heels of the one-year anniversary of Amherst hiring Jesse Beal — a “non-binary” biologically female individual who prefers to be referred to by the neuter plural pronoun they/them/theirs — to be the WGC’s full-time director.
“Often, when we think about a women’s and gender center, we think about cis women, straight women and white women,” former WGC interim director Angie Tissi-Gassoway said, according to a March 1, 2016 Amherst news release.
“We think of womanhood in a very narrow way. And compared to the other candidates that we saw, Jesse really was able to articulate to us how womanhood and being a woman, and understanding gender and how gender operates through its intersections, require much more than a single lens.”
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