Northwestern to host talk on ‘threat to gender justice’ from Project 2025
The event aims to examine the ‘centrality of gender politics for authoritarian movements through an in-depth examination of Project 2025.’
The event, which was scheduled for Sept. 1 but is now postponed, appears to have been deleted from Northwestern’s website.
Northwestern University in Illinois is planning to host a talk warning that a conservative policy initiative will be a “threat to gender justice.”
The Sexualities Project at Northwestern is organizing the talk, titled: “The End of Gender: Project 2025 and the Authoritarian Threat to Gender Justice,” which will be led by “feminist and political anthropologist” Annie Wilkinson. The talk was originally scheduled for Sept. 1 but has been marked “postponed.”
It appears that the event was deleted from Northwestern’s website, but an archived version is still available online.
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“Are you wondering what will happen to reproductive rights, queer people, and trans folks if Republicans win the 2024 presidential election?” the event description reads. “There’s a plan for that. It’s called Project 2025, and its revanchist vision for ‘saving America’ includes ‘making gender sex again.’”
Project 2025 is a policy initiative by the Heritage Foundation that seeks to “start undoing the damage the Left has wrought.”
The Northwestern event will focus on the “centrality of gender politics for authoritarian movements through an in-depth examination of Project 2025,” which the university calls a coalition aimed at the “consolidation of American authoritarianism and Christian nationalism in United States [sic].”
Wilkinson, the postdoctoral fellow who will conduct the lecture and who goes by the pronouns “she/her/ella,” engages in “deep listening” as part of her studies that analyze “the politicization and polarization of gender and sexual politics.” She has led the courses “Witches, Bots, & Trolls: Misinformation in Society” and “Science & Anti-Science of Race and Gender” at Northwestern in previous semesters.
The talk will also address the alleged “centrality of gendered hierarchy to authoritarian movements like those behind Project 2025 and how authoritarian movements around the world are strategically deploying anti-gender rhetoric to build power by threatening to obliterate the very concept of ‘gender’ itself.”
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The Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership calls to “rescind President Biden’s 2022 Gender Policy and refocus it on Women, Children, and Families.”
The plan also states that the next president should “work with Congress to amend Title IX to include due process requirements; define ‘sex’ under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth; and strengthen protections for faith-based educational institutions, programs, and activities.”
President Biden has tied “gender identity” to “sex” in revisions to Title IX, and poured millions of dollars into researching “transgender” medicine.
Campus Reform has Annie Wilkinson, Northwestern University, and the Heritage Foundation for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
