What it's like to get a Gender Studies Degree (as a straight white male)

Nobody loves sharing my lived experience more than I do.

I want to share my experience as an (allegedly) straight white male getting a minor degree in gender studies. It has fundamentally transformed how I understand human psychology and the role that ideologies and beliefs systems have in shaping it.

Why did I get the degree?

I was in college during the 2016 election of Donald Trump. You would think that at a liberal arts university, it would be a major topic of discussion in at least some of my classes. I was majoring in business, so at the very least I thought there might be business implications to the election that were worth discussing - but nope. Nobody talked about it.

All we got was an email from our accounting professor letting us know class was canceled for a week in order to give people a break from all the stress they were feeling from the election.

So I decided that next semester, I was going to take a class where I know for a fact that this kind of stuff will be talked about, and Gender studies was the one.

The importance of fighting over words like “gender”

I started with a 400-level class called “Gender, Race, and Law.” It was actually pretty interesting, all things considered. The professor was a lawyer and we focused a lot on the constitutional protection of protected classes—gender, sexual orientation, etc.

It was in this class where I learned why language games, language control, and language policing is critically important in shaping our world.

Changing the definition of words allows you to change legislation without actually doing any legislating. If the Constitution guarantees the protection of people based on their sexual identity or biological sex, redefining the common understanding of these terms creates significant legal consequences through extralegal means.

The other funny thing is that, on the first day of class, I immediately noticed that everyone in the class was a woman, except for a couple guys who were clearly gay.

But in the back of the room, there was one black guy with a Chicago Bears hat (I’m a Bears fan myself), and without even thinking, I sat next to him and started talking to him, and we ended up doing all our projects together.

It’s an example of how, at the end of the day, males of different races have far more in common with each other than males and females of the same race. Race and heritage can be major components to one’s identity, but they pale in comparison to the degree that being a male or female shapes your life experience.

Engaging with my Gender Studies professor

The next class I took was called “Gender in Pop Culture.” Our first project was analyzing Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

For those who haven’t seen it, imagine if Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign got together to make a Star Wars movie. That would be The Last Jedi.

Very explicit left-wing political ideology is prevalent throughout the film, which in theory isn’t a bad thing on it’s own, but it was just so on the nose at times that it became painful. Nevermind the obvious plot holes, bad acting, all that.

When that movie came out, it got a lot of criticism, and there was this loud minority of degenerate incels hating on the movie because it had women and minorities in it.

We were tasked with analyzing this reaction to Star Wars and what it says about how sexist and racist our society is. Of course, I made the point that I actually didn’t think the majority of the backlash to The Last Jedi was a result of sexism or racism - it was just a straight-up bad movie.

I compared The Last Jedi to Rogue One, which is a Star Wars movie with a woman lead, a minority lead, and very few straight white males in it - which is exactly what people thought that The Last Jedi was getting criticized for. But Rogue One was a phenomenal movie, and was very well received by the public. In fact, I think it’s the best Star Wars movie in the franchise. And it didn’t get nearly the degree, if any, of the pushback that The Last Jedi got.

After turning that paper in, my professor found me after class and said “Hey Paul, I found your essay really interesting, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you about it.” And I was like, oh here we go, the time has come to challenge the professor to an intellectual duel!

Well, it turned out that this professor would end up being my favorite professor I’ve ever had. Him and I had multiple three-hour conversations that were utterly productive. He talked about his frustration with the "fashionable left-wing critique of capitalism" he saw in academia. He’d go to conferences and he’d meet his peers who would complain about millionaires and billionaires. “And these assholes who are just making money off the university are making these hollow criticisms of capitalism!” he would say.

It was such a valuable experience for me because, if you think about it, you can’t conjure up a more archetypal punching bag for the conservative perspective than a Gender Studies professor. And yet, even in that role, there are exceptions to our preconceived notions of who they might be.

The oddities of Queer Theory

The next class I took was called something like "Contemporary Feminist Issues.” This was the most informative class in terms of understanding the socio-psychological nature of these programs.

The first thing I noticed was that the professor - a PhD student - was not very competent. He repeatedly had trouble spelling words like “hegemony” when he would write on the chalkboard, erasing it a few times and then giving up after the third or fourth attempt.

Other times, we would be sitting in a circle having a discussion and he’d ask a question, that was so poorly worded, no one would respond. He did not seem to know how to phrase a question in a way that would properly facilitate discussion.

One of the readings on the syllabus was a chapter from a book called “Black Gay Raw Sex.” Most people might hear that title and think, this is one of those examples of how backwards an ideology this whole project is. But the thing you have to understand is that it’s intentionally worded that way.

It’s the whole premise of what is called Queer Theory. Queer theory is the central philosophy that Gender Studies is rooted in, and it’s primary injunction is to deconstruct and challenge societal norms created by oppressive cis-heteronormative white males like me. To be queer is to be inherently revolutionary, by challenging taboos and social rules.

And so a title like “Black Gay Raw Sex” is intended to transgress the boundaries of polite academia, because it’s meant to challenge the constraints that hitherto have marginalized oppressed people, and especially people who are queer.

But to be honest, I don’t remember learning anything from it, and I’m pretty sure it was all basically just slam poetry, which characterized a lot of the texts you will encounter in a Gender Studies Class.

Marxist ideology and awkward abortion debates

It was in these classes that I learned the lesson “do not attribute malice where incompetence is a simpler explanation.”

Think of all the bad ideas that come out of a department like gender studies, which in many ways is the think tank for hyper-progressive politics, just like the Heritage Foundation or the Ayn Rand Institute would be the think tank for libertarian politics.

The desire to deconstruct everything - all of our norms, all of our traditions - to attack capitalism and decolonize society, it all comes from a Critical Theory and Marxist framework. You might think it’s a bunch of malicious people pushing for these ideas, but the truth is, most of them are ignorant college kids who are taught ideas and then repeat them as if they were reciting a script.

Consider the fact that most people who call themselves Marxists have never read Karl Marx, just like most people who call themselves Christians have never read the Bible. Both groups of people just operate by a few simple axioms which were given to them by their pastors or professors.

Another example of obvious incompetence was when we did a mock debate about abortion for a class project. I was assigned to the pro-life side.

During the debate, I gave the very popular argument made by pro-lifers: abortion is actually racist, because the majority of infants and babies who are aborted are Black.

Now, you would think that every person who has a gender studies degree and who’s interested in these issues would have heard that argument before - but they hadn’t. They all just stood or sat around like a deer in the headlights, completely unable to resolve the cognitive dissonance they were clearly facing.

It was also in that class that we discussed the issue of female genital mutilation. I remember when we were discussing the issue and I said, "This practice is barbaric." And the immediate response was not agreement but condemnation of me: “Well hold on, we shouldn’t be so quick to criticize them because we have our own problems here in the West.” Someone literally said that verbatim.

It was such an absurd experience, but you have to understand that, from a philosophical level, the fundamental sin - the primary “ism” that undergirds all other “isms” when it comes to left-wing philosophy - is that all problems can be laid at the feet of neocolonialism.

From the Gender Studies perspective, since white people colonized parts of Africa and did objectively bad things to them (which of course they did), it’s the fault of neocolonialist white people such as myself that FGM is still a practice and hasn’t been abolished.

You’re not allowed to say that FGM is a barbaric practice because that assumes your culture is better than others, which is a mortal sin in Gender Studies, because moral relativism is the norm there.

The last class I took was called something like International Feminism. This was the class in which the professor regularly quoted Karl Marx directly. I think it was on the second day, where she said something to the effect of, “and remember what Marx said: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’”

She never made explicit that we would be approaching things from a Marxist perspective. It was just assumed everyone in the class was already bought in. “Hey, remember what Karl Marx said,” as in—you should know by now that we’re in a Marxist framework and you need to remember the central Marxist claim.

So when you hear people saying that Gender Studies classes are filled with Marxists, understand that they are not exaggerating.

Gender Studies is just youth group for progressives

The last thing that I’ll point out the most important thing to remember. The belief systems and social environments you find in a Gender Studies class are functionally equivalent to religious systems

I grew up going to Christian youth groups and attending Church camps where people would share your testimonies in a free flowing environment. “Jacob, how was your day today?” “Oh it was great, the Lord blessed me today because I got my homework done, and I got an A!” And everyone would be like, “Yeah, yeah, amen! Praise the Lord!”

That is exactly how it works in gender studies class. People would say something like, “and remember, women can have penises too.” And everyone would snapplause (applauding via snapping instead of clapping, so as not to upset the neurodivergent folx), providing verbal and emotional reaffirmation of these axioms.

In addition, people in class would regularly open up about discrimination they’ve faced on campus, and it was as much an emotional safe space and had a testimonial nature to it as any youth group that I’ve been a part of.

That more or less covers the key things I learned in Gender Studies.

To any women reading this, if you ever have any questions about women’s issues or you need an academically informed take on the plight of women in the world—feel free to reach out to me, because I am in fact a credentialed expert.

Just kidding. I would not want to be accused of mansplaining by anyone. FYI - for my female viewers, mansplaining is when a man explains something to a woman that she already knows.