For some famously progressive colleges in Ohio, a new state law designed to keep transgender women from using women’s restrooms at schools is bringing a moment of soul-searching for students, alumni and administrators.

It’s one of many such laws adopted around the country, with the stated intent of protecting female students. The Ohio law — which applies fully to private colleges, unlike the others — allows individual institutions to decide how they will obey and enforce the measure.

But navigating the law has become a challenge, especially at colleges like Antioch and Oberlin, campuses built on a bedrock of idealism and protest where many see the law as part of a wider attack on transgender students.

For some, the idea of complying at all runs counter to the long-held value of being gender-inclusive. At the same time, colleges across the country are sorting the impact of the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, including a threat to cut federal funding for schools that reject its interpretation of civil rights laws.

Oberlin has published policies saying the school will comply with the law taking effecting Tuesday and is offering counseling and a chance for students to ask to move out of their dorms. Antioch has not announced a detailed plan.

Ahri Morales-Yoon, a first-year student at Antioch College who is nonbinary, said the law’s impact will go beyond bathroom access.

“It will cause a lot of fear and uncertainty,” they said. “It’s in the back of your head that this law is hanging over us.”

Colleges see effort to undercut support for transgender students

Jane Fernandes has been president of Antioch College since 2021. In that time, she said, she hasn’t fielded a single complaint about anyone’s presence in a restroom.

The school, about an hour’s drive west of Columbus, was founded in 1850. Horace Mann, the education reformer, abolitionist and former member of Congress became its first president. The school shuttered in 2008 amid financial struggles but relaunched three years later. Nearly 90% of the school’s 120 students identify as LGBTQ+ and about 1 in 6 say they are transgender.

“We will do everything we can to make it possible for transgender students to be very supported and safe here,” said Fernandes, who has spoken out repeatedly against the law.

Shelby Chestnut, the executive director of the Transgender Law Center, who is an Antioch graduate and chair of the school’s board of trustees, said the law is an effort to deter colleges from supporting students.

“This is an outright attack on student safety,” they said in an interview.

The law calls for colleges in Ohio to designate all multioccupancy restrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms and showers for the exclusive use of males or females, based on sex at birth.

Ten other states already enforce bathroom laws. But none of those apply broadly at private colleges and universities.

“The point was that we’re treating our students equally across the board in Ohio,” said Republican state Rep. Beth Lear, one of the measure’s sponsors.

The bathroom laws are part of a wave of anti-transgender policies. Most GOP-controlled states, including Ohio, have banned gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors and passed laws to keep transgender women from competing in women’s sports.

Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has signed a series of executive orders targeting transgender and nonbinary people on several fronts, an abrupt change from President Joe Biden’s efforts to include them explicitly in civil rights protections.

External pressure leads to internal campus strife

Since its founding in 1833, Oberlin College and Conservatory, outside Cleveland, has broken down social barriers, including being among the first colleges to admit women and Black students. The college was on the cover of Life magazine in 1970 when it offered co-ed dorms.

By the 1990s, dorm residents were voting on bathroom policies, and they often made facilities open to any gender.

The bathroom law has sparked angst on campus and among some alumni, who see the administration’s intention to comply with the law as an abdication of values by the school of nearly 3,000 students. The college said in a campus-wide note that following the law “does not diminish our support for every member of our diverse community.”

But it’s not that simple to everyone.

It goes against “the whole idea of Oberlin,” English professor DeSales Harrison said, “to refrain from making a decisive argument about what seems true and good in the world.”

Some have called for Oberlin to take a more forceful stand.

Kathryn Troup Denney, who graduated in 1995, is a Massachusetts-based musical theatre director who wrote a production about transgender people. Like several alumni on message boards, she said her alma mater should not comply with the state law, even if it means risking government funding.

“When the law is deliberately causing discriminating against one particular population of people,” Denney said, “that’s when good people can rise up and say, ‘No, this law is not fair, it is not equitable, and it is not safe.’”

Oberlin officials declined interview requests.

Signs are changing, but it’s not clear restroom use will

When students returned to Oberlin for the spring semester, there were new signs designating multi-person bathrooms as being for either men or women.

Many dorm bathrooms previously had signs designating them as open to everyone, people of just one gender or just one occupant. Students could change the signs. In academic and other buildings, instead of designating a gender, some signs described whether a bathroom had stalls or urinals.

Some of the new signs have been removed, apparently as acts of protests, and the administration has been replacing them.

But at both Antioch and Oberlin, it’s not clear that who uses which restroom will change.

Natalie DuFour, Oberlin’s student body president, noted the law does not require anyone to check who is using the bathrooms.

“Students, in theory, have the freedom to use whatever they want,” she said.

Antioch’s Fernandes has signaled the same thing: “We’re not going to monitor who’s going in which bathroom.”