BY LAURIE ESSIG

On Wednesday, October 1, the Department of Education sent nine universities a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”  The document asks universities to comply with a variety of restrictions like capping the number of international students and not considering factors like race or gender in hiring and admissions. More ominously, the compact opens the door, with this line, to shutting down all gender studies departments: “Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes.” And yet somehow media coverage failed to acknowledge the danger to gender studies that the compact represents. Not on public radio, not in the New York Times, and not even in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A government that demands that we not recognize the complexity of sex stops academic inquiry in its tracks. Gender scholars and biologists can no longer write or teach about the 1–2 percent of people who are born with a variety of conditions that do not make them easily identifiable as just male or just female. Gender scholars and historians also cannot teach about the somewhat recent introduction of the two-sex model into medicine, which replaced the one-sex (Galenic) model that was dominant from Classical Greece until sometime in the eighteenth century. And gender scholars and anthropologists would be prevented from teaching about other cultures that have nonbinary models of sex, such as the hijra in India or Two-Spirit persons among indigenous North American cultures. But more ominously, we would be prevented from teaching about gender as something that is not necessarily the same as sex assigned at birth. This is already happening at some universities, such as Texas A&M, where a professor was fired for speaking about “gender identity” and at Texas Tech where, because of the January 20 executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” only two sexes (and no separate gender) can be taught.

It is worth connecting the dots between the “war on gender” here in the US and the global antigender movement. Like many authoritarian regimes around the world, the Trump administration uses “gender” (both gender studies and members of the LGBTQ community) as “the enemy within.” This global antigender movement was first politicized by Vladimir Putin, to good effect, with his war on “homosexual propaganda.” Putin also  shut down every gender studies program in the country. In Hungary, Viktor Orban outlawed gender studies and then refused to give accreditation to the Central European University if they kept their gender studies program.

Yet somehow most major news outlets missed the global war on gender. Perhaps because gender studies is “not important.” But that attitude stops journalists from seeing that the authoritarian regimes of the twenty-first century organize against gender. These regimes use gender as the scary monster that they must protect all good citizens from. Authoritarians need to shut down gender studies as an academic field because asking about the history of our sex or gender systems undermines the claim that sex and gender are obvious, natural, and binary and therefore the government should force a restoration of “traditional sex roles” and the patriarchal order to save us. Authoritarian regimes must take control of certain key institutions that stand in the way of controlling “truth” and “knowledge.” The university is under attack because gender studies is under attack, and if the universities don’t stand up to this infringement on academic freedom now, it is not just gender studies that will be lost, but all free and open inquiry. If gender studies is destroyed, so is the university as a place of academic freedom and knowledge production. It is the duty of a free press to take the attack on gender seriously.

Laurie Essig is chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Middlebury College.