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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.
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.
Consider the example of David Ross, who was once the director of, among other prestigious art institutions, the Whitney Museum, and until recently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York until his resignation this week. In 2009, Epstein talked to Ross about funding an exhibition titled Statutory that would feature underage models, aged 14 to 25, who “look nothing like their true ages”, according to Epstein. “Juvenile mug shots, photo shop, make up. Some people go to prison because they can’t tell true age,” Epstein explained. Ross responded to the idea saying: “You are incredible!”
While they were discussing the show featuring minors, Ross then asked Epstein if he was aware of the “total porno commercial kiddie picture” of a naked 10-year-old Brooke Shields that the photographer Richard Prince used in his highly controversial 1983 work Spiritual America. (The photograph of the 10-year-old Shields was originally taken by Gary Gross for Playboy, and was commissioned by Brooke Shield’s mother at the time. Prince took a photo of that photo, and exhibited it.) This is not far removed from the Trump of the Access Hollywood Tape (“Grab ’em by the pussy”) or, for that matter, his comments to shock-jock radio host Howard Stern about his daughter Ivanka’s physique. (Ross has not been accused of criminal misconduct.)
In a statement to the New York Times about Epstein, he said: “I continue to be appalled by his crimes and remain deeply concerned for its many victims.” Ross added in a statement that “I knew [Epstein] as a wealthy patron and a collector, and it was part of my job to befriend people who had the capacity and interest in supporting the museum”. Ross has also maintained that he believed Epstein’s claim that his solicitation of prostitution charges were a “political frame-up” related to his “support of former President Clinton”. “At the time, I believed he was telling me the truth,” he said.
A few years later, in 2015, Ross wrote to Epstein again after another investigation into the pedophile. “I reached out to him to show support,” Ross said in a statement, adding: “That was a terrible mistake of judgment. When the reality of his crimes became clear, I was mortified and remain ashamed that I fell for his lies.”
Despite his view that it was his “job” to befriend people like Epstein, there is still an incredible arrogance, a sense of absolute entitlement in his comments to Epstein, an implicit retort to the accusations and shaming of #MeToo.
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.
The suppression of gender studies is not only an attempt to suppress a critical analytical tool, but also knowledge itself. Witness the removal of any mention of slavery from Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, or the erasure of the vocabulary of diversity and inclusion from university mission statements. The impunity that surrounded Epstein is of a piece with the overt misogyny and racism of these actions.
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.
Abolishing those programs and the lessons about gender they have taught, will, Trump and his acolytes hope, undermine our ability not just to condemn, but also to critically analyze the policies and practices they want to impose. That is why a defense of gender studies is not a parochial feminist project, but a vital stand that extends to the “validity of the entire American system” as a democracy, one based on aspirations for equality and justice for all.
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Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study
