WGSS Program Statement

Founded in 1978, Dartmouth's Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program was the first Ivy League WGSS program. Since its inception, the program and its affiliated faculty have been committed to producing and disseminating new knowledge in the fields of gender and sexuality studies. Because of this knowledge, we are committed to educating and protecting our students, and to the freedom, equality, and safety of all people. 

As leading experts in our fields and as advocates of equality and freedom, we say: Donald Trump's executive orders targeting transgender and nonbinary people are based on misinformation about the categories of sex and gender, especially what gender is and how it is lived and expressed. Sex and gender have always been historically contingent categories, and also vary over each individual's life course; the idea that people could be divided starkly into two unchanging categories according to the size of their  "reproductive cells" is something even biologists have called "nonsensical." We refute the characterization of "gender ideology" as "extremist" and the administration's project to re-biologize sex. We reaffirm the basic freedom of sexual and gender expression without fear, discrimination, and violence.

Similarly, the executive orders criminalizing undocumented immigrants and political dissidents and attempting to dismantle anti-discrimination protections are based on misinformation. They perpetuate the lie that crossing the border into the United States to seek asylum is illegal. They ignore the truth that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are central to US economic, political, and cultural life. Finally, these orders traffic in the fiction that they are restoring "a merit-based order," effacing well-documented histories of how past and present legal and extralegal disenfranchisement, exploitation, and persecution of minoritized populations in the United States have caused an unequal distribution of resources and power. 

During the first Trump presidency and beyond, we have seen the harm such attempts to entrench further the power of white supremacist patriarchy can do to our communities. These executive orders endanger our students, our colleagues, and our community. We reject these orders, and reaffirm our support for our LGBTQIA+, undocumented, and BIPOC students, colleagues, and neighbors. We also reaffirm our support for students, colleagues, and neighbors seeking abortion care, as well as all those with the courage to speak out in favor of Palestinian liberation. 

To all those affected by this administration's bigotry and violence, on our campus and beyond: we will do everything in our power to advocate for you and protect you. We call on Dartmouth's administration to do the same: to ensure our community's access to all forms of reproductive and gender-affirming care; to cease any current or future collaboration with ICE; to uphold the institution's commitment to non-discrimination and educational equity; to reaffirm students' right to protest injustice; and to protect the academic freedom of everyone at the College to pursue and create new knowledge in the fields of race, gender and sexuality studies. Clearly we need this knowledge now more than ever.