BUZZ
Gender studies programs produce ‘better’ parents who are ‘less interested in enforcing a gender binary upon their children,’ professor says
A professor at Middlebury College accused President Donald Trump of forcing gender studies scholars to teach “lies about the body, culture and history” to their students.
Writing recently at Ms. Magazine, Professor Laurie Essig said “authoritarian” leaders like Trump “always come for gender studies first” in what she described as an effort to control education and knowledge.
Essig, who teaches gender studies at the private Vermont college, said Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban are other examples.
But Trump and other Republican leaders in the U.S. are being more strategic by linking gender studies degrees to career earnings, she said.
“By transforming the far right’s ‘war on gender’ into return on investment, the Trump regime can avoid the deeper question of whether knowledge should be controlled by politicians,” she wrote.
Through his executive orders, Trump also “would force gender studies to become ‘sex studies’ and teach a series of lies about the body, culture and history,” she wrote.
One order, which Trump signed in January, states that there are “two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. ”
Along with Trump, Essig also criticized Florida leaders. She brought up a review commissioned by its Board of Governors to review university women’s and gender studies programs to determine if they are a good return on investment.
Essig said it’s unfair to compare gender studies to programs like engineering or nursing, writing:
This is akin to comparing apples to a lone kumquat. After all, gender studies—like humanities in general—is not created to produce specialists, as much as it is meant to teach individuals to read carefully, think deeply, write proficiently and pose thoughtful questions.
Gender studies considers how things are not “natural facts” but are instead historical and cultural artifacts. It situates the way things are into a complex understanding of power, history, culture and the economy. Like philosophy or anthropology, gender studies does not accept “common sense” but instead digs deeper into why people think or act the way they do.
What’s more, it can “make someone a better parent by making them less interested in enforcing a gender binary upon their children,” she wrote.
Gender studies also is an “incredibly useful major” for students planning to become doctors, Essig wrote.
Then “medical practitioners can understand how structural racism can affect patient care or how to respond when babies are not easily marked male or female,” she wrote.
However, recent research has raised skepticism about studies on racism in healthcare, particularly the idea of “racial concordance,” or that patients receive better care from doctors of the same race, The College Fix reported.
Despite Essig’s concerns, she said she does not believe that all hope is lost.
“Critical thinking is difficult to destroy. It will fester in the cracks and fissures left behind by the regime. And, when the regime collapses—as all authoritarian regimes eventually do—gender studies will return with the skills and courage to teach about how the world really is, not how many on the far right wish it would be,” she wrote.
Increasingly, however, scholars and reports are coming forward with research that contradicts the idea that children suffering from gender dysphoria need “gender-affirming care” — which can include cross-sex hormones and the removal of healthy body parts.
Some universities also are shutting their “gender transitioning programs” for children, including the University of Pennsylvania and University of Southern California, The College Fix reported.
MORE: Several 50-year-old women’s studies programs on chopping block
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Wooden blocks spell out the word ‘gender’; chrupka / Shutterstock
