Academia: This Class Has Been Cancelled
Thursday's Child Is Not Going to Be Learning Much
At Texas A&M University this week, a student in a course on young adult literature interrupted the professor as the professor began the class with a plan to “recap remarks on gender and sexuality from the last class”.
The student objects:
I just have a question because I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching. Um. Because according to our president, um, there’s only two genders and he said he would freeze um, uh, agencies' funding programs that promote gender ideology. Um, and this also very much goes against I, not only myself, but a lot of people’s religious beliefs. Um, and so I am not going to participate in this because, um, it’s, it’s not legal and I don’t want to promote something that is, um, against our president’s laws as well as against my religious beliefs.
As many have pointed out, an executive order is not a law. But it also turns out that the student was not just announcing as a matter of conscience that she would not participate in this discussion, or that she was interested in discussing her views, but instead communicated that she had already been in touch with the president of the university (and very likely others outside the university). Which the professor was not surprised by, given that there had been an unexpected outside observer at the last class session. Plainly, the student meant to get the course shut down and the professor fired.
Which is what has happened: the president of Texas A&M not only has fired the instructor but has also removed a dean and a department chair from their posts.
We’re well past “this might be a sign of totalitarianism or fascism.” It’s not might be, it is. The question is only “how far are we going into that catastrophe?” Today, a firing, and six months from now, what? Total professional blacklisting? Fines and imprisonment? That student at that moment was not trying to express a point-of-view or establish a principled position, they were invoking an authoritarian power with the intention of silencing anyone who thought differently than they do. They weren’t putting out a name on social media or staging a “cancel culture” protest: they were formally invoking “our president’s laws” to demand that the professor and the professor’s authority be silenced.
Folks who are wishy-washy on this point, who think, “Well, just don’t talk about transgender identity in a class on young adult literature and you’re safe” are not really seeing the whole picture.
If I were a professor at Texas A&M right now and I needed or wanted to keep my job despite the fact that Texas is becoming a comprehensively shitty place to be a professor in, I would from this moment on have to extensively police myself against any mention of a massive list of issues, cultural works, historical events, individual persons, and so on. Even the slightest mention at this point could put my job and my career in jeopardy—and here I’m just sticking to anything related to transgender identity, cross-dressing, drag, and so on. People have got to think a bit on what it means, on the vast range of stuff that is going to be unmentionable even when it is obviously something to talk about and was completely mainstream at another moment in our history. Don’t tell me this is an exaggeration, not at this point. Anything on this list might be picked up by the fascists who need to make their quota. They’ve built a machine that requires firing and disciplining professors, that believes the professoriate is full of enemies and traitors. Anything is going to do as a pretext for being fed into the machine.
So consider the things that cannot be taught, discussed, read, seen or mentioned at Texas A&M from this point on, some of what a professor there would be foolish to even mention, let alone put on a syllabus. This is a very partial list.
Oedipus Rex.
Middlesex.
Bringing Up Baby.
Eddie Izzard.
Psycho.
Anything that mentions or features Caitlyn Jenner, including the Olympics in 1972 and 1976.
Your Name. (And a fair amount of anime generally.)
Queen Christina.
Tootsie.
The Matrix films and any other movies made by the Wachowskis.
Quaker history between 1776 and 1819, or maybe any Quaker history before the 1840s, because someone might mention or ask about the Public Universal Friend.
Christine Jorgensen.
Dog Day Afternoon.
Tyler Perry.
Milton Berle.
At least several of Shakespeare’s plays in toto, a fair number of lines in his other plays, and maybe arguably all of Elizabethean drama, at least any discussion of men playing women at the time they were written.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the full series and all movies.
Self-Made Man.
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
Kids in the Hall, everything.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The Civil War veteran Sarah Emma Edmonds (or indeed, any of the substantial number of cases in military history of women dressing as men in order to serve in militaries. See Mulan.)
Yentl.
The Drew Carey Show, at least any episode where Drew’s brother shows up.
Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.
I Was a Male War Bride.
Flip Wilson.
Mrs. Doubtfire.
Either the history, biology or medical nature of hirsutism and as a result, the history of circuses in the United States, most particularly P.T. Barnum’s, due to the presence of “bearded ladies”.
Some Like It Hot.
Any historical study or older text which includes mentions of eunuchs, either as a central focus or even as a significant element of the functioning of ruling courts or administrative systems, which is a potentially sweeping constraint affecting hundreds of works in the Western tradition. Including the Bible.
MASH. (Klinger, who is in a lot of episodes.)
L. Frank Baum’s The Land of Oz, and because of it, possibly any book in the series that features Ozma, the ruler of Oz. (Which is all of the books except for The Wizard of Oz.)
The jazz artist Billy Tipton.
Victor/Victoria.
The Roman historian Cassius Dio, due to his account of the Emperor Elagabalus’ reign.
Mulan.
Dame Edna.
The history and ethnography of any society that had third or alternative genders, forms of gender nonconformity, transgenderism of any systematized kind, etc. Can’t teach any of the material on those societies because there is a non-zero chance that as students are reading they’ll come across knowledge that Texas has decided is forbidden that the professor can’t acknowledge, can’t discuss and can’t allow to be talked about.
The British military surgeon Margaret Bulkey, known during her professional life as James Barry.
Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Boys Don’t Cry.
Kiss of the Spider Woman.
The pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
Deadpool (I don’t want to explain to my TAMU dean what pegging is, do you?)
The Famous Five.
National Velvet.
I was hired at a small university in rural Texas in 1993 (a tenure-track position even!) to teach creative writing, critical theory (specifically gender theory, applied linguistics/stylistics, and what would become stigmatized as "critical race theory"), and multiethnic literature (by the time I retired and escaped from Texas in 2020, that category had developed into marginalized literatures). The small uni got sucked into the A&M system a few years after I was hired, but the flagship mostly ignored us completely. I was incredibly lucky that my department (including the more conservative lit-crit types) believed in academic freedom (and supported me when I was almost denied tenure, despite a unanimous department vote for tenure), and against the occasional Dean out of the sciences or social sciences. But I am happy every single day that we are in a blue state (and retired, did I mention!) because damn! It was bad enough how many of the books I taught were banned/challenged. My classes were not the sole requirement for any category, but I still had a few students who were unhappy ("I didn't expect to read Black women and lesbians in a 'women's literature' class,' one said!). But I retired earlier than I might have because of the ways in which my students started spouting out a lot more racism, homophobia, and misogyny after 2016. The majority of my students were incredible, but things were definitely getting worse during my time there.
As someone who works entirely in the field of race, sex and gender politics I am keenly aware that I may never speak in the US again