Hollins University was founded in 1842 on the principle that “young women require the same thorough and rigid training as that afforded to young men.”
Melissa Block/NPR
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Melissa Block/NPR
Hollins University was founded in 1842 on the principle that “young women require the same thorough and rigid training as that afforded to young men.”
Melissa Block/NPR
Toward the end of Kendall Sanders’ first year at Hollins University, a historically women’s college in Roanoke, Va., the sociology major had a realization.
“My journey has been, ‘Girlhood does not define me,’ ” Sanders says. “My womanness, my femininity does not define me.”
Sanders, a senior now, is nonbinary and uses the pronouns they/them.
“I was like, I don’t think I care about being a girl,” they say. For someone who grew up in the Bible Belt region of Little Rock, Ark., that realization was a pretty big deal.
“I really just want to escape the binary in general, to do away with it,” Sanders says. “I don’t want to spend my life trying to prove that I am one gender. I want to wake up, put on some clothes, go out into my day. If you perceive me as one gender, that’s OK, too. But for me, it just is what it is.”
“I really just want to escape the binary in general, to do away with it,” says Kendall Sanders, a Hollins senior from Little Rock, Ark. “Girlhood does not define…