Response to Alexander Hamilton Forum Talk

The Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and the Feminist Resource Center want to express our concern and dismay at today’s Alexander Hamilton Forum talk featuring a “conservative feminist,” Leah Libresco Sargeant, who defines women as immutably biologically different from men. We believe that all oppression is linked and that separating one marginalized group from another will not lead to a more just and equitable world. Further, we stand by decades of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship that has debunked a binary view of sex, informed by the work of biologists who recognize more than two sexes, as well as by research into the limits of using hormones or body parts to determine sex or gender. 

Why are our views relevant to Thursday’s event? In her work, Sargeant intentionally excludes trans women from the category of women. Further, her book frames nonbinary identities as fearful and confused responses to a predatory patriarchy. While we agree that patriarchy hypersexualizes young women, the speaker’s argument is a dogwhistle for a common right-wing talking point which claims that non-normative gender identities are merely expressions of “social contagion.” 

As feminists, we stand in solidarity with trans, intersex and non-binary individuals, just as we stand in solidarity with groups marginalized by class, race, dis/ability, citizenship status, or religion. We question why our colleagues at the Hamilton Forum, which has a history of taking dark money from right-wing donors, would consistently hold events denying the validity of trans identity and trans-inclusive feminism at a time when transgender peoples’ rights are being severely restricted, and gender studies professors are being targeted, suspended and fired for refusing to conform to a biological essentialist gender ideology. Finally, we find it shameful that such an event would be held in the wake of Lia Smith’s ’26 death by suicide, and of the many other queer and trans student deaths at Middlebury over the past several years. 

We invite our fellow colleagues and students to stand in solidarity with all oppressed groups, as well as with gender studies scholars and other disciplines currently under attack. Such attacks rely on misinformation and the false lure of a return to “nature” or “tradition”, which has never existed. Manifestos are a fabulous feminist genre; historically, they have served to critique institutions of power from below. While Sargeant’s feminist manifesto presents itself as a critique of patriarchy, its arguments in fact align with a right-wing executive power seeking to eliminate any kind of understanding of gender outside of its own narrow worldview.