Florida fights to preserve the future of gender studies: ‘This is about to be the entire country’s problem’

Scary. Fascist. Dystopic. Unreal. Painful. Absurd.

These are just some of the words Floridians used to describe the proposed HB 999, a specter that loomed over educators this spring. While ultimately tabled, HB 999 spawned SB 266, which passed in early May. Throughout its evolution, this legislation and its foreboding restrictions have targeted the free flow of ideas, threatening to inhibit progressive pedagogy and limit the possibilities for diversity and inclusion at the college level.

While Florida has long been treated as a punchline to a national joke about regressive politics, “this is about to be the entire country’s problem,” warned Lorna Bracewell, women’s, gender and sexuality studies program coordinator and an associate professor of political science at Flagler College in St. Augustine. “Every Republican-dominated state legislature is watching closely what is happening in Florida.”

Flagler is a private college that remains insulated from the effects of these bills, for now, but in many ways that is immaterial to the larger issue. HB 999 exemplified “an existential threat to academic freedom and all the ideals that underpin public education,” Bracewell said, ruminating on the bill prior to its tabling.

SB 266 is equally catastrophic. “If these policies are permitted to go into effect … it’s a death knell for public education in the state — and it’s not going to be confined to the state.”

The first women’s studies, ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies programs — so named at the time — were founded at U.S. universities more than 50 years ago. Since then, these disciplines have become well respected in academia, offering a place for students to challenge assumptions about gender, race and sexuality throughout history and in contemporary culture.

The legislative attacks on these fields of study illustrate an unprecedented overreach from a Republican-led legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis and are symptomatic of a widespread bid for power on the part of reactionary politicians and organizations, as well as their determination to prevent critical examinations of the role of gender, race and sexuality in our daily lives and in public policy.

In the 2023 legislative session alone, Florida either passed or proposed bills that would:

• institute a six-week abortion ban;
• allow individuals to carry concealed firearms without a permit;
• prohibit doctors from treating transgender minors with puberty blockers or hormone therapy;
• outlaw teaching about gender identity or sexual orientation in K-12 classrooms;
• prevent elementary-age girls from discussing menstruation at school; and
• expand eligibility for tuition vouchers, thus diverting funding from public education toward private and religious schools where the curriculum can more easily be manipulated.
• allow anyone in a given county the right to lodge complaints against books in school libraries or other instructional materials they find objectionable;
• give authority to the Department of Education (which reports to the governor) to design the sex education curriculum statewide; and
• ask K-12 schools to create disciplinary policies to punish students for using bathrooms that do not correspond to their sex at birth.

Far from separate issues, these and other restrictions at the K-12 level dovetail with regressive plans for Florida’s public colleges and universities—and further intersect with other attacks on reproductive rights, the LGBTQ+ community and labor unions. Put together, they constitute a concerted effort to push back a century of progress on civil rights.

“We know that constitutionally a ban on an idea cannot hold,” Reid said, “but what damage is done between when they articulate that ban and when you can finally get it thrown out? There are several years of pain, of not learning, of students being driven away, of people being too afraid to speak out, of teachers being afraid, of individuals’ careers being destroyed, of families being uprooted.”

Florida Atlantic University’s Morse added, “The rest of the country can sometimes dismiss what happens in Florida, [but] this is a nationwide right-wing movement to take over education. People who might want to dismiss it as just a wacky Florida thing need to be ready to learn from our experience.”

We can all learn from the organizing and resistance of the students and faculty leading the charge to preserve academic freedom in Florida — and turn the tide of these attacks on higher education, women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants and other marginalized communities nationwide.

Aviva Dove-Viebahn wrote this article for Ms. Magazine. Republished  in collaboration with the Florida News Connection.

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This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2023.