I recently watched a viral video of a Texas A&M student challenging her professor for discussing “gender and sexuality” and “gender ideology” more broadly. The student expressed her concern:
“Um, I just have a question because I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching. Um. Because according to our president, um there’s only two genders…. Um. And this also very much goes against not only myself, but a lot of people’s religious beliefs.”
Since then, the professor has been fired.
As someone who also teaches in the Southwest, I find myself scared — scared of what consequences might follow if I teach well and honestly. Especially now, as misinformation about bodies spreads, with President Trump and others insisting people are exclusively male or female — a narrow, politically charged “gender ideology” of their own invention.
So I ask myself: Should I lie to my students? Should I deny that intersex people exist as a biological reality? Should I pretend, as the Texas A&M student wishes and Trump supports, that sex is a simple binary that perfectly aligns with gender and a simplistic view of sexuality?
Should I pretend I, as an intersex person, don’t exist?
Here’s my reality: I was born with a vagina but no ovaries, uterus or fallopian tubes. Instead of XX chromosomes, I was born with XY chromosomes and internal, undescended testes.
Intersex people aren’t a belief or ideology like religious and political views: We are a biological fact. Scientific proof that Trump’s rigid beliefs about bodies are not only dangerous, but also scientifically wrong.
This is why I’m scared to do my job. Should I stand before my students and lie to them about biological reality? That would be the only way to comply with an order to acknowledge only males and females; informed and honest teachers cannot go along with that fiction.
At Texas A&M, one might say the problem wasn’t what was being taught (the differences between gender expression, gender identity and sex), but where it was taught (in an English class). However, the course was “ENGL 360: Literature for Children,” and the material under discussion was a story about a nonbinary 12-year-old. Some students would be ill-prepared to understand and analyze the material without some background information like the teacher was providing.
The professor was fired for supposedly not adhering to the course description, but a description is a broad overview of content and objectives, not a prescription for how or in what depth subjects must be discussed — and certainly not a script for what questions students might raise and where class discussions might lead.
Take my own example: I’ve taught undergraduate social statistics for nearly 20 years across multiple campuses. The goal, per course descriptions that vary slightly, is to introduce students to statistical concepts and tools — chi-square, regression and so on. In this context, we discuss independent and dependent variables, and sex is a key predictor of many social phenomena.
Students often ask: What do we do when the data we analyze records only binary sex (male/female)? How do we interpret patterns in such simplified data?
I have a choice. I can lie and teach that sex is a simple binary, or I can explain the biological reality of intersex people before discussing the limitations of binary data and quantitative methods. I always choose the latter. Students leave class with a biology lesson alongside stronger statistical understanding — better prepared to collect and understand data, exactly what the class aims to achieve.
But now, because of edicts from the federal government, federal campaigns against universities and cases like the firing at Texas A&M, I’m afraid to teach like that. I feel pressured to avoid the truth about the oversimplification of sex, and instead teach a lie about bodies.
If I do, students will leave not only misinformed about human biology, but also unprepared to grasp quantitative analysis in the social sciences.
Teachers and the broader culture should reject the politics of fear and misinformation that threaten academic freedom and scientific truth. Educators have the right — and responsibility — to teach the full complexity of human biology and identity without fear of censorship or retaliation. Students deserve honest, accurate education that prepares them to understand the world as it truly is, not as some wish it to be.
I urge administrators, policymakers and communities to stand with professors who speak truth to power. Protect academic freedom. Protect the rights of intersex and LGBTQ+ people to exist and be acknowledged. And above all, protect the integrity of education.
Because if we silence educators, if we force lies into the classroom, we all lose.
Georgiann Davis is an intersex scholar-activist at the University of New Mexico and author of the forthcoming “Five Star White Trash: A Memoir of Fraud and Family.”