Women’s History Month was established in 1980 to recognize women’s achievements—scientific discoveries, humanitarian work, the arts, etc. But this year, American colleges and universities have decided to use the month to advance intersectionality theory, radical feminism, and transgender ideology.
Take Luther College, a private Lutheran liberal arts school in Decorah, Iowa. Founded in 1861 as a Lutheran seminary and now affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the college has a rather unconventional way of marking Women’s History Month.
On March 12, University of Iowa professor Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz delivered a keynote titled “Feminist Futures: WTF (Women/Trans/Femme) Solidarity in the Movement for Reproductive Justice,” framing trans liberation as “essential to reproductive justice” and dismissing any tension between “cisgender” women’s rights and those of trans and queer people as a political fiction.
Scheduled for March 16—though since postponed—is self-described “Decolonial Pathfinder” Shelley Buffalo, who plans to argue for “undoing colonial structures” and “reweaving the fabric of society” through the lens of Indigenous futurism and the myth of “Grandmother Spider.”
Pennsylvania State University is commemorating Women’s History Month in a similar fashion across its 20-something campuses.
On March 18, Penn State University Park will feature Laurie Essig of Middlebury College and her lecture on “Tracing the Global Anti-Gender Movement: Feminism, Fascism and the Future.” The presentation, covering “anti-gender movements and their impact on feminism, trans rights, reproductive justice and gender studies,” will discuss the possible “strategies of resistance” to combat “anti-gender ideology.”
At Penn State-Harrisburg, students may tune into “Necessary Bread: AzaleaMagazine and Black Lesbian Feminist Writers, 1977-1983,” by SaraEllen Strongman, an assistant professor of Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. The lecture, taking place on March 30, will focus on “Black feminisms, Black women’s political and cultural history, and African American literature.”
A featured Women’s History Month event at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York, is a “Gender Equity March and Resource Fair,” whose keynote speaker is New York State deputy director of LGBTQ+ Affairs Chanel Lopez, a man identifying as a woman. The University of Colorado-Boulder, meanwhile, offered a “Good Vibrations” workshop—which teaches students, “regardless of anatomy or gender identity,” about different kinds of sex toys—in a “safe, woman-led, queer-led sex education space.”
Leftists have a peculiar way of honoring women: championing their right to abort their children, encouraging them to abandon traditionally female qualities, and insisting that the most pressing women’s issue of our time is making room for men who wish to become women. Intersectionality theory adds another layer, sorting women into oppressors and the oppressed based on skin color—a strange way to build sisterhood.
The result is a Women’s History Month that, on many campuses, says less about women’s achievements than about the ideological preferences of campus administrators. That’s not a celebration. It’s a hostage situation.
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