Recently, my synagogue organized a gathering to support parents of LGBTQ+ kids. The youngest mom there described how her nonbinary tween had been viciously bullied at school, while the most elderly couple confided that their recently transitioned adult trans daughter is scared she will lose her military office job. Why? Because, after the first Trump administration forced trans troops to get a diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” in order to continue serving in the military, the second one is now using that diagnosis as grounds for kicking them out.[1]
My husband and I were in the room to hear these stories because we have our own trans child to love and worry about. Her coming-out experience and subsequent medical care were utterly unlike the panicked narratives that dominate media accounts of pediatric transition: her doctors did not rush to medical treatment and were frank about its pros and cons; the process was both liberating and exploratory. She just started her first year of college in a faraway town and now we worry that when she flies home, she’ll be hassled at the airport because she has a nonbinary gender marker on her state ID and one of the “X” passports that the Trump administration are trying to stop issuing.[2] The more we hear from others about travelling while trans, the more anxious we get.[3]
If you are not hearing stories like these from trans, nonbinary, and other gender-nonconforming Americans and the people who love them, please know that they are nevertheless unfolding all around you.[4]
Consider your students. Recent surveys suggest that nearly 30% of Gen Z – the generational cohort that most MIT students now belong to – is LGBTQ+. Those of us who teach subjects that tend to enroll high numbers of such students – like “Representing Girlhood,” my current Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) course – are hearing increasingly fearful questions about whether MIT will continue to be a community where these students feel safe being themselves and able to concentrate deeply on learning.
“I just don’t know if I can trust MIT to stand up for me and make sure I’m allowed to exist on this campus.” That was the gist of what two separate students said to me a few days ago, one of them at a reading group for graduate students and faculty, the other at a quickly organized yet crowded WGS community gathering convened to offer support and sustenance to anyone who felt they needed it, as we waited to find out how MIT would respond to the federal pressure to sign the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would have required MIT officially to define both sex and gender in terms of “reproductive function.”
Many of the students who came to this event were gender nonconforming in some way, and they were scared. One shared that she was afraid of losing medical access to hormone treatment. Another anxiously asked whether the WGS program might be dissolved before they could graduate with a WGS major that they regard as crucial to their future career plan.
I wanted to reassure this student that MIT would never cave to federal political pressure by dissolving a program so many faculty and students have adopted as an academic home on a campus we often find inhospitable. But how could I? That same day, some of my WGS colleagues told me they were so afraid that we might become a target of conservative ire that they didn’t think WGS should put out any kind of public statement regarding the Compact. A climate of silencing and self-censorship is already taking hold, undermining the Compact’s promise it will promote a “vibrant marketplace of ideas where different views can be explored, debated, and challenged” before anyone even signs it (2).
A few lines later, a truer intention slips out when the Compact states that “signatories commit themselves to [. . .] transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully [. . .] belittle [. . .] conservative ideas.” This conservative intolerance of liberal dissent is particularly threatening to WGS programs, since our discipline emerged in the late 1960s and 70s to challenge a patriarchal status quo that ignored what even the most accomplished women in the past had said, done, discovered, and created, even as it largely excluded modern-day women from the professoriat and other positions of power.
My students today consider the 1970s ancient history, but to me they feel relatively recent, because my mother was one of those pioneering feminist professors. Her scholarship involved recuperating the work of many unjustly forgotten or maligned women writers. When she walked into the English Department office on her first day of work, a male colleague curtly handed her a handwritten manuscript and ordered her to type it up. There were so few female professors in that department that he assumed she must be a secretary.
Every woman I know who entered the academy back then has similar and usually worse stories to tell about the sexism they endured. Many were so discouraged that they never made it through graduate school. When I got my first job as part of an academic couple, my philosopher husband and I were taken aback by how often the stay-at-home wives of his male colleagues would pull me aside at department parties to tell me poignant stories about when, why, and how they had deferred their own dreams of becoming an academic or pursuing some other profession.
All lovers of wisdom owe a debt of gratitude to early WGS scholars whose scholarship and activism helped push open the doors of the aptly named “Ivory Tower” so that many more brilliant women and members of other underrepresented groups could get in and go on to transform how we think about everything from the social cognition of babies to the British novel, from how to detect exoplanet atmospheres to how to ameliorate global poverty.
Surely, no one at MIT would deny that this diversification of our faculty has enriched the academic excellence of our institution, as well as higher education as a whole. Yet if MIT agrees to obey any federal dictate forcing us to define “‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes,”[5] we would be repudiating the feminist insight that opened these department doors: namely, that true equality for women requires delinking our “reproductive function” from social norms that constrict the range of opportunities open to us.
Such backtracking constitutes a problem for multiple reasons, beginning with the fact that although much progress has been made to achieve more equitable representation in STEM, we still have some way to go, as indicated by the fact that the full professor cohort at MIT remains male-dominated: 78% of those at the top of our faculty tree are men; only 22% are women.[6]
Then, too, it is a clear violation of the academic freedom of WGS scholars and programs when the US government tries to bully us into accepting a conservative conflation of sex and gender that almost all the scholarly literature in our field has rejected. To move backwards and reinstate biological essentialism undermines gender equality and female leadership at the Institute as well as our competitiveness, credibility, and impact both in the United States and in the world at large.
Furthermore, this reduction of gender to “reproductive function” does not reflect the lived realities of many members of our MIT community. On the contrary, it actively seeks to erase the existence of trans and nonbinary students, faculty, and staff who came here hoping that our institution would be a safe place for them to live, learn, and work.
In contrast to such erasure, the students in my “Representing Girlhood” class excel at recognizing gender nonconforming folks even when they turn up in unexpected places. Before we even meet as a class to begin discussing Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), a student posts a query on our online discussion board about how “trans” the character of Josephine March seems. As evidence, she notes how Josephine renames herself “Jo,” self-identifies as “the man of the house,” and – when urged by her older sister to “remember that you are a young lady” – stoutly maintains, “I ain’t!”
While reading this student’s post, it occurs to me that a relevant teaching tool would be the “gender unicorn” graphic that a scholar in Texas recently shared with her children’s literature class to help her students understand distinctions between biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression – only to be fired after a student complained that President Trump’s recent Executive Order acknowledges only two genders. The more we learn about the details of this case, the more evident it is that government intrusion into the issue of how to define gender is already undercutting the academic freedom of scholars who study and teach about this topic.[7]
Those who presume that all this talk about trans people in contemporary classrooms is a modern imposition should know that Alcott herself remarked late in life that she felt she had a “man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body.”[8] And those looking for good role models for how to conduct ourselves in turbulent times should visit Orchard House in Concord, where Alcott lived while she was writing Little Women.
With the possibility that MIT might sign the Compact hanging over our heads, my “Representing Girlhood” class and I went on a field trip to Orchard House and learned from the tour guides about how Alcott and her family hid enslaved people there as part of the Underground Railroad, risking their own safety and wellbeing to do the right thing by resisting unjust laws that were oppressing members of other, less privileged social groups.
Students were awed by how fully the Alcotts lived in line with their most deeply held values, even when that meant enduring serious personal deprivations and hardships. For example, Louisa’s father Bronson Alcott accepted a Black pupil into a school he was running despite knowing that he might (and in fact, did) lose the financial support of the white families who were funding him.
The actions and fate of another Alcott relative, Samuel Sewall, illustrate the risks of moral panics that fuel deadly persecution. He served as a judge during the Salem Witch trials, then spent the rest of his life repenting his own participation and trying to make amends to the families of the girls and women whose lives he helped destroy.
At a moment when the government has already created fear and vulnerability – from demonizing rhetoric to attacks on gender-affirming care, passport restrictions, military exclusion, and more – it is vital for MIT to be a place of inclusion, acceptance, and support for trans, nonbinary, and other gender-nonconforming people.
If we stand by without protest as a modern moral panic denies some members of our community the right to enjoy the same freedom from government interference that others take for granted, history suggests that, like Sewall, we will live to regret it. For that reason and many others, let us instead emulate Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, by standing in solidarity with queer students, staff, and colleagues to resist collectively the political oppression they are currently facing.
[1] See https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5504670/pentagon-trans-troops-gender-dysphoria and https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgwwv3k5wxo
[2] See https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/10/transgender-americans-ask-supreme-court-to-leave-order-in-place-allowing-them-to-choose-sex-markers-on-passports/
[3] See https://www.propublica.org/article/tsa-transgender-travelers-scanners-invasive-searches-often-wait-on-the-other-side
[4] 90% of LGBTQ+ young people surveyed by the Trevor Project in 2024 said their well-being was negatively impacted due to the political situation in the U.S.; see https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2024/
[5] See “Compact” (5), but also President Trump’s Executive Order asserting that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female”: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/
[6] To see these statistics, visit https://ir.mit.edu/projects/demographic-dashboard/; click on the “Faculty” tab above the chart; then scroll down underneath the chart to select “Sex.”
[7] See https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/19/texas-a-m-welsh-firing-professor-gender-mccoul/ for a detailed account of what happened in this instructor’s classroom and then online.
[8] For a thought-provoking exploration of how we might interpret this and other similar Alcott statements, see https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/24/opinion/did-the-mother-of-young-adult-literature-identify-as-a-man.html
