MILWAUKEE (LifeSiteNews) — A conservative action organization has launched a petition to push a women’s-only Catholic university in Wisconsin to stop permitting gender-confused men.
CitizenGO, an organization founded to gather and activate like-minded citizens, called attention to the fact that Alverno College, a women’s-only private Catholic university located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had been permitting the admission of gender-confused men since an amendment to its nondiscrimination policy in 2019.
Alverno College espouses a foundation on “Catholic Franciscan” values. However, it states in its catalog that it admits not only actual women but also all “students who consistently live and identify as women,” including “[s]tudents who live and identify as female regardless of biological sex” and “[f]emale students who identify as non-binary or gender non-conforming.”
It accepted its first “transgender” student in 2019.
“Alverno College strives to create an institution and programs appropriate to the educational needs of women in the 21st century, particularly in its weekday college community,” the catalog reads, claiming that “gender identity may change over time” and explaining that it supports “students on their journey of self-discovery.”
This stance, CitizenGO asserts, has the effect of “putting the safety and well-being of its students at risk” and cutting against “the college’s mission.”
The group pointed out that “boards of all-women educational institutions” like Alverno have been “adopting policies that allow men posing as women to attend” for years now. The policy changes have not been without backlash, some of which has been effective.
“In recent news, amid strong pushback, St. Mary’s College, also an all-women college, reversed course on a policy that allowed men who claim to be women into the school,” the group said, calling on Alverno “to make the same rational policy change” to take effect in the 2024-2025 school year.
READ: Catholic women’s college reneges on transgender admissions policy in response to criticism
The petition advanced by CitizenGO seeks to encourage potential signers to “act quickly and decisively” to urge Alverno president Christy L. Brown as well as the School Sisters of St. Francis and the college’s board of trustees to “reverse this damaging policy and return the college to being all-female.”
In making its appeal, the group affirms the fact that “sex is not changeable,” a fundamental reality the Catholic Church has always upheld.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “Everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity.”
“Physical, moral, and spiritual difference and complementarity are oriented toward the goods of marriage and the flourishing of family life,” the catechism states. “The harmony of the couple and of society depends in part on the way in which the complementarity, needs, and mutual support between the sexes are lived out.”
READ: More people are standing up to the radical LGBT movement, and it’s working
CitizenGO warned that the stakes are high in the battle to secure women’s spaces amid the transgender ideology craze.
“The future of Alverno College hangs in the balance,” the group said.
“If we lose this battle, other single-sex institutions may follow suit, succumbing to the radical leftist ideology and putting our youth in jeopardy,” the article reads. “By winning this fight, we can send a powerful message to other universities and schools which have or are considering similar radical policies.”
The petition to push Alverno College to change its policy to affirm biological reality and protect real women comes as support for radical LGBT ideology seems to be starting to slip.
A new poll released in December indicates that a smaller percentage of Americans supported the LGBT agenda in 2023 than they did in previous years. That change coincides with state-level legislation and grassroots pushback against the widespread promotion and celebration of homosexuality and transgenderism.
Conservative-minded parents, lawmakers, and school boards in states across the country have been pushing back against radical homosexual and transgender ideology by working to require schools to notify families of a child’s gender confusion, pull sexually explicit and pro-LGBT curricula and materials from classrooms and school libraries, protect girls’ sports and spaces, and ban sexualized performances targeting children.
Opposition to LGBT ideology has picked up considerable momentum in recent years. Last year, amid pro-reality legislation opposing the LGBT agenda, the boycott against prominent beer brand Bud Light over its ill-advised pair-up with divisive transgender-identifying TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney generated massive support and achieved significant success. Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh, who has actively endorsed and promoted the protest, called it “the most effective conservative boycott in modern American history.”