A Texas A&M course in geography is promoting gender identity, intersectionality, and critical race theory. As such, it satisfies the university’s “international and cultural diversity” requirement.
In a slideshow presentation for Intro to Human Geography, a module entitled Cultural Geographies touches on identity and asserts that gender is “socially constructed.” Texas Scorecard obtained the presentation through an anonymous source.
Gender “can be influenced by biological, social, and cultural influences” and often disadvantages females, the presentation reads.
One bullet point states that gender “intersects” with other identities like race and religion to “further marginalize females.”
The instructor included a model of The Genderbread Person, a graphic that claims to distinguish between gender identity, gender expression, and anatomical sex. It contends that gender identity is not binary, but instead self-defined and uncorrelated with a person’s sex.
The model was created and promulgated by the leftist social justice website It’s Pronounced Metrosexual.
The lesson directly contradicts an executive order signed in January by President Trump declaring that gender identity is not “a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.”
Another slide introduces “discrimination overlap,” referring to the concept of intersectionality. Kimberle Crenshaw, a founder of critical race theory, coined the ideology and term.
The radical framework suggests that the more identities a person claims, the more oppressed they are, because the overlap of their identities compounds their disadvantages.
In this system, educated white men are positioned as the most privileged and inherently oppressive, thus they are expected to participate in “anti-racism” and acknowledge their “white privilege.”
Another presentation slide states that sexuality can be used to “assert political, economic, social, and cultural change.”
It reads that sexuality “can be expressed spatially,” citing the “spatial expression of prostitution.” The slide refers to city zoning laws that prohibit the construction of places of prostitution, challenging the cultural idea that such places are inappropriate or immoral.
The slide also directs students to see work “focused on the spatial constraints of homosexuality.” Another describes race as a “problematic classification of human beings” and defines racialization as “the practice of unequal castes based on the norm of whiteness.”
Additional slides in the presentation discuss “cultural appropriation” and “cultural nationalism,” defined as protecting regional and national cultures from globalization. The slide claims that cultural nationalism seeks to combat “Americanization” around the world.
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