Wellesley School proudly proclaims itself as a spot for “girls who will make a distinction on the earth.” It boasts an extended line of celebrated alumni, together with Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Nora Ephron.

On Tuesday, its college students will vote on a referendum that has divided the campus and goes straight to the problem of Wellesley’s identification as a girls’s faculty.

The referendum, which is nonbinding, asks whether or not admission ought to be open to all nonbinary and transgender candidates, together with trans males. Presently, the school permits admission to anybody who lives and constantly identifies as a girl.

The referendum would additionally make the school’s communications extra gender inclusive — for instance, utilizing the phrase “college students” or “alumni” as a substitute of “girls.”

The vote is in some methods definitional: What’s the mission of a girls’s faculty?

The referendum’s supporters say girls’s faculties have all the time been protected havens for individuals going through gender discrimination, and that with trans individuals underneath assault throughout the nation, all transgender and nonbinary candidates should be capable of apply to Wellesley.

The activists additionally say that the referendum will replicate actuality on campus, as there are already trans male college students on the faculty who, for instance, transitioned after admission.

The school, which has roughly 2,500 college students, has no knowledge on the variety of college students who determine as trans or nonbinary.

Opponents, together with the president, Paula Johnson, say the referendum is a rewriting of the mission of Wellesley, which they are saying was based to coach girls.

In a message to the campus final week, Dr. Johnson, held agency on her stance.

She described Wellesley as “a girls’s faculty that admits cis, trans and nonbinary college students — all who constantly determine as girls.”

There was fierce pushback. College students have held an ongoing sit-in on the administration constructing. The scholar newspaper’s editorial board wrote that “we disapprove and fully disagree” with the president.

Departments have issued statements in assist of the referendum. An affiliate provost for fairness and inclusion mentioned the workers in her workplace had been “deeply challenged” by the president’s electronic mail.

And an open letter signed by a whole bunch of college, workers and alumni mentioned the school was abandoning the radicalism of its creation “by specializing in the letter, quite than the spirit, of its founding.”

Alexandra Brooks, the scholar physique president, mentioned the referendum, which might be voted on anonymously, was a option to display simply what number of college students assist such a change — and the way it displays the fact on campus now.

“We’re simply asking the administration to placed on paper what’s already true of the scholar physique,” she mentioned. “Trans males go to Wellesley, nonbinary individuals go to Wellesley, they usually type of all the time have.”

A brand new coverage, she mentioned, “wouldn’t in any method change the tradition of the college.”

“It’s nonetheless, and all the time might be, a college to coach people who find themselves of marginalized genders,” she mentioned.

Girls’s faculties have been grappling with trans points over the past a number of years. In 2015, Wellesley School introduced a coverage that allowed admission to any scholar “who lives as a girl and constantly identifies as a girl,” opening the door to trans girls candidates.

Some girls’s faculties have stricter insurance policies. Candy Briar School, a small personal faculty in Virginia, requires a delivery certificates or amended delivery certificates indicating the applicant’s gender as feminine.

The school’s president, Meredith Jung-En Woo, says Candy Briar welcomes trans college students in the event that they meet the admissions coverage. She has not obtained a lot pushback, she says.

Mount Holyoke has among the many most open of admissions insurance policies, accepting functions from all feminine, trans and nonbinary college students.

However when Mount Holyoke modified its admissions requirements in 2014, many alumnae voiced deep issues generally in a vitriolic and private method, mentioned Lynn Pasquerella, the president on the time.

One despatched her a university sweatshirt with “Mount Holyoke” crossed out and wrote in blood-red ink that she was destroying Christianity. One other made a dig at her instructional background, writing in a letter that if the president “hadn’t began at a neighborhood faculty, I’d perceive what a girls’s faculty actually is,” Dr. Pasquerella mentioned.

Even so, she mentioned, the assist for the coverage change amongst present college students was enthusiastic.

Girls’s faculties have reputations for being a refuge for transgender college students, together with transgender males, mentioned Genny Beemyn, the director of the Stonewall Heart at College of Massachusetts Amherst. The colleges are likely to have very progressive scholar our bodies and huge numbers of lesbian and bisexual college students, who can be extra welcoming to transgender college students, she mentioned.

“For people who find themselves gender nonconforming, they might really feel extra snug in an setting that doesn’t have males in it, cis males in it, due to the larger chance of experiencing harassment,” Dr. Beemyn mentioned.

Lawrence A. Rosenwald, a retired English professor who started his profession at Wellesley in 1980, mentioned he had steadily observed a shift in how college students talked about gender.

Probably the most vivid manifestation of that change, he mentioned, was listening to college students at commencement sing “America the Lovely,” written by an alumna, Katharine Lee Bates.

College students historically had modified “brotherhood” within the penultimate line to “sisterhood,” Dr. Rosenwald mentioned. However now, some college students say “sisterhood”; others say “siblinghood.”

Dr. Rosenwald, who simply retired, says he helps the admission of trans males and nonbinary college students. Wellesley, he mentioned, has all the time been a house for people who find themselves “not in positions of energy in a patriarchal society.”

However opponents of the referendum say that Wellesley could be successfully coed if trans males had been allowed to use for admission. They usually fear concerning the erosion of the establishment’s mission at a time when girls’s faculties are dwindling. There are roughly 30 left, from a peak of almost 300 within the mid-Nineteen Sixties.

Elizabeth Um, a senior and president of the campus’s anti-abortion group, Wellesley For Life, mentioned she selected to attend Wellesley as a result of she is from Boston and wished to remain near dwelling but additionally due to its identification as a girls’s faculty.

“If you happen to don’t assume you’ll be able to slot in right here, then you may have your decide of 1000’s of different coed faculties within the nation or the world,” she mentioned, including, “We’re a girls’s faculty. That’s the core identification of the college, and we will’t begin watering that down.”

However Ms. Um has not been actively opposing the referendum, partly as a result of it’s destined to go, she mentioned, including that pushing towards it on campus is akin to “social suicide.”

With feelings excessive and division deep, Dr. Johnson thinks the talk to date has been unhealthy. There’s monumental social stress for college students to assist the referendum, she mentioned, including that she has obtained messages from college students, school and workers saying that they may not voice their opposition for worry of being ostracized.

“I’ve been personally booed at public gatherings the place I’ve referred to Wellesley as a girls’s faculty, which it’s,” Dr. Johnson mentioned.

Nonetheless, even when college students vote overwhelmingly for the referendum, she mentioned she is not going to rethink her opposition.

On the similar time, Dr. Johnson says the school has been paying extra consideration to the wants of its trans college students, noting that directors are working to cut back situations of scholars being misgendered. College students ought to quickly have the choice to add their pronouns into the school’s data administration system to be included at school lists and the listing.

She additionally mentioned that the school eliminated language on its web site that said college students who transition could be supported in the event that they now not felt a girls’s faculty was the correct them. She mentioned that no college students had ever been kicked off campus as a result of they had been transitioning however that the earlier language created that misperception.

“There’s been an evolution in our nation, and we’re a microcosm of that,” she mentioned. “Sure, it’s consultant of a altering world and a altering conception of gender. It doesn’t imply that Wellesley isn’t a girls’s faculty and an inclusive neighborhood. These two can stay collectively.”

Kaleb Goldschmidtt is a music professor who transitioned whereas at Wellesley. The school tradition is turning into extra welcoming to gender variety, however not as shortly as many college students would love, mentioned Professor Goldschmidtt, who identifies as transmasculine.

On the similar time, Professor Goldschmidtt questioned the outsized consideration that college students had been paying to the talk.

“I undoubtedly need the trans and nonbinary and questioning college students to really feel welcome and cherished and supported and inspired to discover,” the professor mentioned, “however my goodness do I want they’d rally like this for disabled college students or for different issues.”