University of Minnesota offers art class on ‘transgender saints’

(LifeSiteNews) – Not every institution of higher learning is retreating from woke extremism despite recent nationwide trends, as evidenced by a recently discovered University of Minnesota Twin Cities’ Center for Medieval Studies course offering three college credits to learn about “transgender saints” in medieval art.

“Grounded in critical race theory, intersectionality, and queer theory, this class draws on primary texts and a range of visual and material sources to trace the histories, experiences, and representations of marginalized identities in the medieval world,” reads the description for MEST 3009 – Intersectional Medieval Art. “We will consider gender, sexuality, and race in the context of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures during the Middle Ages. This class will examine topics including transgender saints, miraculous transformations, demonic possession, female artists and patrons, the “monstrous races” of travel accounts, and gender-affirming surgeries. In contrast to misconceptions of a homogenous white European past, the reality of medieval Europe was diverse and complex, and its boundaries — geographical, cultural, bodily, and otherwise — were in flux, as reflected in its visual and material culture.”

Numerous college officials failed to answer The College Fix’s requests for comment, but University of Chicago professor of Catholic history Rachel Brown surmised that the course might have in mind Joan of Arc wearing male clothes or St. Symeon the Theologian possibly being a eunuch, although such examples only have a tenuous connection to modern usages of terms like “transgender.” Neither case challenges the objective existence of biological sex, as today’s “gender-fluidity” movement does.

“The problem in medieval studies is not that we have been ignoring the marginal and monstrous; it is that we have been failing to put the concern for the marginal and monstrous in context,” Brown told the Fix. “That we care now about the marginal and monstrous is a direct effect of the medieval Christian insistence that even monsters like the ones described in the travel accounts were human beings to whom Jesus commanded the apostles to preach.”

The indoctrination of students with left-wing ideology on sexuality, race, and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in every level of American education. More than 30 states have introduced legislation that would eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. Conservatives have long criticized DEI and other forms of identity politics for stroking rather than curing division and focusing education toward left-wing political indoctrination at the expense of traditional learning.

In May 2024, insiders from the University of California-Los Angeles’ (UCLA’s) prestigious David Geffen School of Medicine warned that the school’s diversity fixation had led to a crisis in which more than half of students in various cohorts admitted since 2020 fail standardized tests for basic medical knowledge of subjects ranging from emergency medicine and family medicine to internal medicine and pediatrics.

The Trump administration has declared that educational institutions must cut their DEI programs or lose federal funding. Many such uses of taxpayer dollars are currently under review by the administration, including pro-abortion and pro-censorship activity through USAID, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” through the National Science Foundation, and billions to left-wing “green energy” nonprofits through the Environmental Protection Agency.