Gender studies courses are shutting down across the US. The Epstein files reveal why

Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2026-02-14 00:04

Article here. Predictably, a feminist objects to WST being shut down. Bizarrely she links it to the controversial "Epstein files" release question. I'm always... impressed... at how feminists have this way of associating utterly unrelated things to their causes celebrés. Excerpt:

'Last week, we learned of the decision of the Texas A&M University board of regents to end women’s and gender studies programs as well as the teaching of “divisive concepts” such as race. A&M was not the first university to do this. Florida’s New College made the move in 2023. Other red state legislatures have passed similar requirements and their public universities (in North Carolina, Ohio and Kansas) have followed suit.

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.
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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.)
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Trump’s executive order claims that “the erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system”. A system, gender studies teaches us, that is based (in his case) on a politics of masculine rule. Gender studies is not an “ideology”, but a critical tool for examining – in the case of Trump and Epstein – the predations of toxic masculinity.'

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