The University of Texas at Austin is offering an “Introduction to LGBT Studies” course this fall. A required course textbook promotes the sexualization of minors.
The class syllabus revealed the political bent of the course offered this fall 2024 semester.
A “land acknowledgment” is on the first page of the syllabus.
I would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on Indigenous lands. I pay my respects to the Carrizo; Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Caddo, Tonkawa, Comanche, Lipan Apache, Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo, Tigua Pueblo, and all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories in Texas, here on Turtle Island.
The instructor is UT-Austin PhD candidate Ipek Sahinler. Texas Scorecard redacted the teaching assistant’s name from the syllabus.
The course’s general guidelines contain even more left-wing framing. The syllabus states the course “carries the flag for Cultural Diversity in the United States.” In addition, the syllabus states that “the purpose of Cultural Diversity in the United States Flag is for students to explore in depth the shared practices and beliefs of one or more underrepresented cultural groups subject to persistent marginalization.”
However, it does not stop there.
The course description stipulates the “course offers students an intersectional perspective on LGBTQ+ studies” and that “students will gain foundational skills in theory, history, and research methods, investigating the social construction of sexual identity and its interplay with racial, class, religion, and nationality.”
Contained in the syllabus is an announcement that “special attention” would be paid to the term “queer.” “Transgender activism, critiques of homo/heteronormativity, and the role of art and culture in queer communities” are also to be examined.
“Our main goal will be to help students grasp how gender and sexuality are inextricable units of analysis to understand any societal dynamic. This is essential not only for students’ college work, but also for their life beyond school as individuals, political entities, or simply communicators of things,” the syllabus states.
One of the required books for the course is “The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2012).” The book contains multiple chapters that advance the LGBT agenda. Google Books provides a preview of the work.
Chapter one of the book, written by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, appeared to argue for the sexualization of minors.
Sedgwick complained about “the systematic separation of children from queer adults.” She called this the “systematic sequestration from the truth about the lives, culture, and sustaining relations of adults they know who may be queer.”
She criticized “the preponderance of school systems, public and parochial, where teachers are fired, routinely, for so much as intimating the right to existence of queer people, desires, activities, children.”
Sexualization in government schools has triggered a widespread parental backlash since 2020. To date, parents are still fighting to remove objectionable content from these schools.
East Texas mom Christin Bentley is one of those parents. Sedgwick’s quotes alarmed her.
“Not unlike other critical theories, critical sex and gender theories seek to divide people. In this case, children are divided from their parents and families in order to indoctrinate them with non-traditional, opposing values and beliefs,” she commented. “The culture war includes our children, and we must win. If we lose our children to the culture war, we lose everything.”
Bentley is also on the State Republican Executive Committee of the Texas Republican Party. Grassroots activists like Bentley are responsible for adding “Stop Sexualizing Texas’ Kids” as a Texas GOP legislative priority for 2025.
The syllabus for the “Intro to LGBT Studies” outlined the class’ learning outcomes. These include:
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Demonstrate how gender intersects with race, class, ability, and other social constructs
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Demonstrate a strong understanding of LGBTQ+ studies and its historical context—both locally and globally.
Those questioning the purpose of “queer studies” may find the answer in the introduction to “The Routledge Queer Studies Reader.”
“Queer studies is not a stable or hard-edged field of scholarly inquiry,” the book’s editors, Donald Hall and Annamarie Jagose, wrote.
While arguing for the validity and significance of various marginalized sexual identities and practices—such as barebacking, bisexuality, intersex and transgender subjects, public sex cultures, pornography and sadomasochism—queer studies attempts to clear a space for thinking differently about the relations presumed to pertain between sex/gender and sex/sexuality, between sexual identities and erotic behaviors, between practices of pleasure and systems of sexual knowledge.
Brady Gray of Texas Family Project criticized such courses being taught in academia.
“The LGBT movement, like everything else on the left, becomes more radical by the day. It has morphed from a movement about redefining marriage to one openly advocating for the mutilation of children and pedophilia,” he stated. “Universities’ continual promotion and advocacy for this movement further reveals the obvious motives of these institutions. What were once bastions of education and preparing a generation for meaningful contribution to American society have become literal indoctrination camps, designed to erode any foundation instilled by parents and community, and create a generation of confused and/or complicit radicals.”
The “Intro to LGBT Studies” course is from UT-Austin’s College of Liberal Arts–more specifically, the college’s Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. The college dean is Ann Huff Stevens. The department chair is Professor Kamran Asdar Ali.
The University of Texas at Austin is a branch of the University of Texas System. Neither replied to a request for comment.
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