Laura Briggs

Teaching “Gender Ideology” and “Critical Race Theory” in Trump’s America: Fear and Solidarity in the Classroom

In January 2025, I walked into the first meeting of my course, the History of Race and Sexuality in the United States, with my heart pounding. I thought I was feeling much more anxious than I needed to be, but worried, nevertheless, that somehow the new Trump administration was going to cause trouble for me. Trump had just taken power in a flurry of new executive orders about (among other things) diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender ideology; and critical race theory. As Timothy Snyder tells us, fascism does its work through the aura of an omnipotent leader and the threat of violence, and it was working on me.¹ Still, the first slide I put up had a “Know Your Rights” poster from Chicago that told people that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) needed a judicial warrant to enter a home or a classroom. I wanted them to feel what I so profoundly did not: safe. I don’t imagine very many felt better, but at least I could tell them what I needed to hear: that resistance was happening.

I told students that the Trump administration had tried to ban the histories we were going to study together from public K–12 schools.² Not knowing if it was true, I said that US Americans were resistant to calls for “patriotic education” and top-down claims about what students should be learning. I told them about alternative traditions — the Freedom Schools that enlivened the consciousness of the Black freedom movement in Mississippi through the teaching of Black history and stories of the legacies of African American engagement in the political process; the students who organized sit-ins at universities to demand Black studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies in the 1960s and 1970s; the workshops that provided repair skills and self-defense information to women to stop rape and end the assumption that home or car maintenance required men and hetero­sexual marriage; the study groups that animated the consciousness and hope that inspired the Movement for Black Lives.³ I wanted them to know that they belonged to a historical tradition.

I looked out at the sea of students’ faces in the lecture hall, and at least half of them were Black, Latino, immigrant, or foreign students. A considerable number also inhabited the kind of beauty and inventiveness that marked them as trans or gender nonconforming. My roster told me that they were the usual mix of general education students, mostly sophomore or junior science and business majors trying to wrap up their requirements. The knife’s edge of protectiveness and paranoia that I was inhabiting made me wonder if they might make secret recordings that could appear on right-wing media. It was a thought unworthy of these students; as I learned over the subsequent year, a surprising number of them decided in those first weeks of class to major or minor in women, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS). I was trying hard to ignore all the signals to obey — from the press lining up to give money to Trump, to Silicon Valley’s announcements that it wouldn’t try to stop conspiracy-mongering and lies from running rampant on social media to the Democrats’ apparent inability to function as an opposition party this time around.⁴ The Trump administration was making noises about targeting federal funding for universities, a threat that would become quite tangible in a few months, and it immediately began targeting immigrant graduate students.⁵ My head believed that there was plenty of space to resist and even more reason. But my fear wasn’t listening, and my students’ silence seemed ominous. People capitulate to the aura of power for a reason. I couldn’t hear students’ silence as an echo of what we were all being told to do.

I also felt faintly ridiculous for being so worried. WGSS at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, was a department, and I, a tenured full professor. Clearly, I had far less reason for fear than colleagues in Florida, where we had, a year earlier, seen the image of feminist and queer books in a dumpster outside the New College of Florida, or Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott was quick to follow Trump, enacting rules for university education in that state.⁶ I knew feminist faculty and scholars in Türkiye, where signatories of a letter calling for peace and an end to persecution of the Kurds were called PKK terrorists and risked jail and torture. I was in touch with gender studies scholars in Hungary, where the state ended the gender studies degree at Eötvös Loránd University and the Central European University as part of Viktor Orbán’s campaign against “gender ideology.” By comparison, my non-problems were hardly worth mentioning. Besides, the state attorney general and the local superintendent of public schools were saying that the administration’s anti-trans and pro-racism gestures violated the Massachusetts state constitution.⁷ If they were resisting, surely the university could, too. Besides, as one of my students told me, my reputation on campus was as a “badass,” the visible face, to take only one example, of the no-confidence vote against the chancellor when he called down massive police repression on a student encampment in solidarity with Palestinians (which broke the leg of one of our department’s students). Still, trying to shame myself out of being fearful worked about as well as it usually does — which is to say, it didn’t.

The advantage and disadvantage of the long history of harassment of WGSS, ethnic studies, and Black studies was that it gave me, at least, a considerable range of memory and stories of Bad Things That Happen. This meant I knew people who had lost jobs and departments that had been shuttered or combined with others, which made me edgy. On the other hand, I had survived unscathed being harassed by internet trolls and Canary Mission (in campaigns to get me, in particular, fired); the Catholic Church in Spain had denounced me for giving a talk about queers and adoption; and the Arizona state legislature, a provost, and a dean had (each separately) sought to shut down our department in the name of austerity. Like so many other feminists, queers, and scholars of race and ethnicity, I felt like a palm tree that had survived a lot of hurricanes. We are flexible and put down deep roots in our communities. We learned about the toothlessness of many threats.

As the early weeks of 2025 passed, my confidence was buoyed by an inter-campus faculty network that shared information about how we were defending academic freedom, immigrants and students studying on visas from abroad, pro-Palestine activists, and trans young people. Every kind of resistance we heard about on another campus inspired us to take action on our own. When the Department of Homeland Security began terminating students’ visas simply by removing them from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) database, we explored strategies for getting our administrations to track and inform students. When a senior ICE official let drop in a Michigan District Court deposition that Homeland Security no longer considered a terminated SEVIS record synonymous with a visa termination, I was able to quickly inform our Office of Global Affairs, whose staff reached out to the Massachusetts attorney general. Our network was rapid and effective and made us feel less alone. A lot of people were pushing back against the persecution of students, staff, and faculty.

As my course gathered momentum over the semester, the historical narratives themselves unspooled a story of resistance and survival through hard times that brought ancestors and hope into the room. We recalled that many people lived with this abuse and precarity much of their lives — indeed, generations had endured enslavement and slavecatchers, sexual violence, lynching and its lies about how rape happened and to whom, miscegenation law, the Ku Klux Klan’s murder and terror, and the federal troops and state militias that forced members of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations to march from the eastern seaboard to Oklahoma.⁸

Eithne Lubhéid’s work focused our attention on the myriad shifts in immigration law, how arbitrary and even random its official and unspoken rules were, reminding us that there was nothing natural or even comprehensible about the opposition the Trump administration was promoting between (Black and Brown) criminal immigrants and Europeans and their descendants who had “done it the right way.” ⁹

We also read about those who carried other ideas of what this country could be, and made them real. We thought with Martha S. Jones about how Black activists before and after the Civil War used the courts and the legislative process to demand rights and an end to threats of deportation of African Americans, culminating in the Fourteenth Amendment and birthright citizenship. We talked about Native nations and how they fought to keep their children from forced education far from home. We paid attention to Peggy Pascoe’s arguments about how scientists and academics hollowed out and then upended the “racial” basis for miscegenation laws and its ideas of purity. We thought about the women’s movement’s unabashed demand for an end to sexual violence and for pleasure.¹⁰

My favorite, though, remained Sarah Schulman’s account of queer folks in the 1980s, because this was so much my own story, but rendered heroic in her telling. “This is the story,” she wrote,

of a despised group of people, with no rights, facing a terminal disease for which there were no treatments. Abandoned by their families, government, and society, they joined together and forced our country to change against its will, permanently impacting future movements of people with AIDS throughout the world and saving incalculable numbers of future lives. Some men and women with AIDS fought until the day they died. The dead and the living ultimately transformed the crisis.¹¹

For trans and other young queer people whose entire childhood had been spent in a short period of (uneven) social tolerance for gay and trans folks, of gay marriage and even critiques of homonormativity, the Trump administration was a shocking deviation. And whether students fully believed it or not, the liberal promise they had so often heard of ever-expanding social tolerance left them with few resources for anticipating or understanding the right-wing revanchism that brought Trump to power. While it was a stretch for students to believe that things were as bad or worse for queer folks as recently as the 1980s, the narrative that ACT UP offered about organizing, solidarity, and mutual care helped them feel less helpless and alone. Students began to speak up in class, and especially in discussion section meetings. Although I felt acutely the alienation of a lecture class, where I did not hear students’ thinking out loud, the teaching assistants for my course conveyed students’ excitement. They made connections between the historical material and their lives, and our current political situation.

Above all, what the Trump administration sought to project in those early weeks and months was total control and the inevitability of a strong right-wing state. What we were discussing and practicing in class was the opposite. We encountered those who believed that people were not a decoration in a democracy, but the ones who embodied it and fought for it to become reality. Mutual aid was not a new idea or a buzzword; the kinds of communities that people built had kept them alive and made new worlds possible. The academics’ networks that buoyed me through the early days of Trumpism were built on our decades of collective work to teach against imperialism and through critical ethnic, race, and gender/sexuality studies, working together to build strategies to face down budget cuts, speed up, and threats to our students and their communities.

What we began to learn in those opening days of the administration was that gender and critical race studies were places we could use to think about what opposition to the far-right might look like. They were more than just a safe haven where those of us who had endured many street battles came to rest; we embodied and taught the history of political movements. Our faculty networks, the hard-won historical memory that enabled us to write our syllabi and the books that populated them, the students who came to think with us, even our own personal and institutional experiences of precarity prepared us for this moment. Students did fantastic work in this and my other courses. There was a reason that the Trump administration was trying to outlaw such spaces. Faculty in more secure disciplines told me they felt sorry for us, but there was no place I would rather have been.