The prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was the target of a federal civil rights complaint filed Monday over two student organizations catering to “Graduate Womxn.”
The Equal Protection Project charged that the university-sponsored student organizations “Graduate Womxn in Physics” and “Graduate Womxn in Biology” flout Title IX, which bars sex-based discrimination in educational opportunities at institutions that receive federal funding.
“The Womxn Programs discriminate on the basis of sex because eligibility is conditioned on whether an individual is male or female, notwithstanding the use of gender-identity terminology,” read the complaint to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
“Under the Programs’ own definitions, biological females are automatically eligible for participation, while biological males are categorically excluded unless they disclaim or redefine their sex.”
MIT did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Womxn” refers to the second-wave feminist spelling that removes the Matryoshka term “man” to symbolize how women are liberating themselves from the “oppression” of the opposite sex.
The term is controversial in certain woke circles because of its supposed “trans-exclusionary” origins.
However, a sect that includes the two MIT student organizations has co-opted “womxn” as an “umbrella term” to refer to transgender and nonbinary individuals in addition to biological women.
“The situation may be more serious than we even know. The situation may involve other programs that we don’t know about, so we would hope that the Department of Justice would open an investigation,” William Jacobson, president and founder of the Equal Protection Project, told The Post.
The complaint cited promotional material, including the websites for the two groups, which stressed that they were open to “transgender women, cisgender women, non-binary people, and gender diverse physics graduate students,” in the case of the “Graduate Womxn in Physics” group.
Notably, Graduate Womxn in Biology states that its events are “welcoming to everyone” and “you do not need to be a graduate student or womxn-identifying to attend and participate.”
But Jacobson argued that isn’t enough to cover their anti-discrimination bases.
“You can’t escape Title IX liability or Title VI liability, if it was race-based, by simply tossing in a sentence which says, ‘Disregard everything we just said, this is actually open to everybody,’” he contended. “That’s called signaling.”
“There’s case law that we cite in the complaint, that if you signal that something is open only to one sort of group, [other groups] will not apply,” he added.
The groups promote benefits to members, including networking abilities and — in the case of Graduate Womxn in Physics — grant funding of $1,150 for travel to attend an international conference and $800 to attend a domestic or Canadian event.
Jacobson’s group previously filed a complaint against MIT to the Department of Education about a program that was specific to women of color.
“We circle back all the time,” Jacobson explained about the origins of his group’s latest complaint against the Cambridge, Mass., institution.
