Gender studies on ‘high alert’ amid conservative attacks

Gender studies, a college-level field established decades ago to dive into the relationship between gender and society, is trying to fight off a fresh barrage of conservative attacks.

Evolving from women’s studies, the academic branch now also encompasses LGBTQ issues and works with many other disciplines. While it has always faced some criticisms, this evolution has put a target on the back of the major, as evidenced by the recently appointed conservative trustee board at the New College of Florida voting last week to end its 28-year-old gender studies department. 

“They’re trying to capitalize on what they see as a political moment. And it’s really unfortunate, because what they’re doing is going to have long-term negative effects on our education system, and the health and well-being of our children,” said Amy Reid, director of the gender studies department at New College. 

Trustee Matthew Spalding, a Hillsdale College professor, told The Daily Signal, “Removal of gender studies as an area of concentration at New College is fully in accord with its strategic mission to be the state of Florida’s liberal arts honors college.”

“Not only does gender studies fall well outside this focus, but its ideologically driven and tendentious character render it more a movement of cultural politics than an academic discipline,” Spalding added. “Any substantial topic taken up in gender studies may be found thoroughly treated in the ordinary academic disciplines such as history, psychology, or biology.”

Conservatives across the country have increasingly taken up arms against gender studies, especially as the debate around transgender youth and what children should be taught in schools about LGBTQ issues has ignited. 

“What’s different now than before is that the kind of ideas or ideology that has been developing and brewing within the collegiate level gender studies, majors and programs has really burst the dam and the common culture, and especially affected children and what we teach children,” said Max Eden, education research fellow for the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “I mean, 10 years ago, the idea that you could be born in the wrong body and that the way to cure yourself would be to put yourself on a path towards medicalization … would have appalled almost every American.”

Gender studies professors say these attacks show a fundamental misunderstanding of what the field is and diminishes the work they have done for decades. 

“It’s very frustrating to see people imposing a very narrowly ideological vision of education upon what has been a really wonderful and robust tradition of the liberal arts in the United States by excising fields that do not align with a certain political ideology, including gender studies, but also other fields that look at the history of the United States, including our unfortunate history of racism, sexism and social exclusion,” Reid said.

New College of Florida professors and students are fighting back, suing education officials over a law in the state that says schools cannot have programs that teach “that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

The suit says the law is too broad, violates freedom of speech and censors academic freedom. 

The lawsuit is a test, as other professors in Republican-led states are bracing for their governments to go after their departments. 

“Those of us who are working in red states are on pretty high alert,” said Lisa Moore, professor of women’s and gender studies and the director of the LGBTQ Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin. 

While the attacks are distressing and demoralizing at an individual level to the professors, they are not shocking. 

“The reason why this feels new in the U.S. is because it’s probably an import from abroad, right? In recent years, especially under Donald Trump’s influence, but also independent of that, the Republican Party moved towards right-wing populism and has sort of looked to European, largely European antecedents for guidance,” said Adrian Daub, director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. 

“They’ve been doing this for much longer than us over here. And there it has been about bringing the universities into alignment with conservative policy preferences. So no, it’s not going to stop there. This is the Trojan horse” for other majors to be attacked, Daub added.