Gender studies is a discipline that has gained recent popularity, with it even achieving the status of a field of study that undergraduates can choose to major in. This field, at the same time, along with a few other related ones that are sometimes collectively known as “grievance studies”, are widely criticized for their lack of rigor, ideological dogmatism, overwhelming deviance from science and the scientific method, potential harm caused, and political bias.

Psychologist Debra W. Soh worries that gender studies is composed of dubious scholarship, that it is based on unscientific ideas, and that it causes needless disruption in the lives of children. A famous project known as the “grievance studies affair” revealed the lack of intellectual rigor in the academic community of gender studies and related disciplines by successfully publishing deliberately bogus articles in major journals of the field. The prominence of the ideology that emerged from its influence has also been resulting in serious violations of free speech and harassment of people who express opinions which deviate from the central beliefs of the discipline.

Hungary has taken a lead in banning gender studies, and Romania recently approved a law that would ban “theories and opinions on gender identity according to which gender is a separate concept from biological sex.” It is time we collectively did something about this pseudo-scholarly absurdity that has been going around under the guise of science and with its power drawn from our funding. We propose a complete defunding of gender studies unless it demonstrates its merit under rigorous criteria that major academic fields are subjected to.