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The move to cancel gender studies is explicitly justified as a way to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order of last year titled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. That document makes “the biological reality of sex” a matter not of science but of law.
Until this week’s latest dump of the Epstein files by Trump’s justice department, I hadn’t seen the connection between the two. But now it’s as clear as day. The abolition of gender studies is a way of further guaranteeing impunity to the elite men whose contempt for and exploitation of women and girls apparently knew no bounds, whether they actually slept with the women on offer or simply shared Epstein’s fantasies in order to gain influence or funding.
We don’t need to find incriminating evidence about Trump in the Epstein files to know where he stands with the Epstein cohort on the relationship between the sexes. The executive order, for all that it refrains from “locker-room talk”, is of a piece with Trump’s other utterances and is enough to make him fit in with the people in Epstein’s orbit.
Powerful men exchanging women and girls for their pleasure is the underlying premise of the executive order, however much it proclaims its interest to be the defense of women’s “intimate spaces” and “their dignity, safety, and well-being”. What’s really at stake is the enforcement of “sex-based distinctions” that have long been understood hierarchically (men on top) to deny women (and sexual minorities) equality of treatment and access to resources and power. (“Equality” is a word notably lacking in the executive order.)
Gender studies – feminist-initiated scholarly programs in schools and universities across the country – brought a critical lens to the biological determinism Trump invokes. And this critical lens extends to revealing how gender hierarchies enable the kind of abuses that some men in Epstein’s circle seemingly believed they had the right to commit. It educated generations of young women (and men) about the complexities of sex-based identity; explored the ways in which arguments for the “truth” of biological determination differed across societies and cultures; and used the findings of history, anthropology and psychology to better understand how gender norms underlay social and political organization.
[Ed: Is it a case of throwing out the feminist baby with the woke bathwater? I suspect the woke bathwater was added with that end in mine. After all ‘gender studies’ used to be called ‘women’s studies’. ]