Members of the University of Southern California Women’s Student Assembly unanimously voted this week to remove the word “women” from the group’s name in an effort to be more inclusive.
The students voted on Tuesday to change the name of the group from Women’s Student Assembly to the Student Assembly for Gender Empowerment (SAGE).
SAGE Assistant Director Maddie Hengst claimed that the changes were made so that the group could become a resource for not only women but transgender students as well.
“Our mission statement recognizes that we do not just cater to female-identified students, but also cater to students of all gender identities,” Hengst said. “We also don’t want to alienate any of our constituency by focusing exclusively on women.”
Considering that transgender women were welcome in the student group before the name change, it seems like the rebranding effort was done in order to attract non-binary students, meaning students who don’t identify as male or female.
Hengst added that the changes better reflect the mission statement of the group. “I hope that in the future women wouldn’t feel alienated by our organization or feel inadequately represented by our organization,” Hengst said in response. “I think right now the organization wasn’t appropriately representing our mission statement, so this name change isn’t really changing the purpose of our organization at all — it’s just better reflecting what our mission statement has been and the work we’ve been doing for the past few years.”
Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about social justice and libertarian issues for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com
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