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The Trumpian campaign to bar gender and race ideologies from education came close to ridicule at Texas A&M University, whose ruling body decided that an intro-level philosophy course should be taught without mentioning Plato. Professor Martin Peterson had planned to teach excerpts from Symposium, a foundational work in ancient philosophy, in his Philosophy 111 course. Given the option of removing that content or being reassigned to a new class, he has been forced to opt for the former. Why prohibit the teaching of a text by Plato, the founder of Western philosophy? Race ideology (attempting “to shame a particular race or ethnicity”) and gender ideology (“a concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex”) were prohibited when the school system changed its course-content bylaws in November 20251, and the first victim was Plato, considered by many an arch-conservative. The ruling body targeted specifically the speech by Aristophanes in Symposium, where he develops his myth about the origin of sexual difference: to simplify it to the utmost, humans were first rounded as a ball, then they were cut into two halves which search for each other to return to unity – in short, this myth was considered all too close to the LGBT+ and trans topic of fragmented bodies searching for a renewed unity through different combinations. The madness of this decision cannot but strike the eye. If we follow its logic to the end, many of the passages from the Bible should also be prohibited. (They effectively were prohibited in the Catholic Church, where children were not allowed to read the Bible directly, without the guidance of a priest.)
At this point, I must confess my stupidity: when I first heard the news about this prohibition without knowing the details, I wasn’t sure if it was a Trumpian rightist act (which it turned out to be) or a politically correct leftist act against patriarchal binary sexuality (Plato seems to advocate a binary notion of sexual difference which strives towards a harmonious Whole). However, I think there was a moment of truth in my stupidity: the neoconservative patriarchal claim that there are two sexes grounded in biology, dismissing all other combinations as pathological, and the trans celebration of the multiple choices of our gender identity share a key feature – they both ignore the constitutively traumatic nature of sexuality brought out by psychoanalytic theory and practice. This is why the trans ideologists, sometimes even more than patriarchal neoconservatives, reject psychoanalysis, reproaching it for secret heterosexual normativity: psychoanalysis relies on a conceptual apparatus (phallus, sexual maturation towards normality through the resolution of the Oedipus complex, etc.). In clear contrast to this predominant stance, I think the psychoanalytic insight into the traumatic impossibility operative in the very heart of sexuality is much more subversive than the trans celebration of the plasticity of gender positions. No wonder that, from the late 20th century, trans identities are omnipresent in our media, with trans persons acquiring almost a star status. Incidentally, it is the same with the topic of decolonization: although it presents itself as the ultimate anti-Eurocentric notion, the very fact that it predominates “radical” social thought is in itself a negative proof that it fits perfectly with global capitalism, without disturbing in any serious way its basic antagonisms. We live in an era in which the ruling system reproduces itself through the appearance of its radical self-critique, so that there is almost something refreshing in an open apology of the existing system.
