At Texas Tech, even the Vikings are too queer to teach, thanks to new restrictions on teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation.
In the Poetic Edda, written between the ninth and 13th centuries, Thor and the Asgardians have a problem: His hammer has been stolen. To get it back, they devise a scheme: They’ll disguise Thor as a woman and send him into the land of giants. Thor protests: What if people think he’s “queer”?
Medieval Icelanders had no problem with this story, and I’ve used it many times in the classroom to help students talk about gender expression, and subversion, in the Middle Ages. However, thanks to the administration of Texas Tech University (TTU), I am no longer allowed to teach it to our students. And the people who will pay the highest price for this change aren’t professors like me—they are the students and communities of Texas.
The school year started on Aug. 24, 2026, for Texas Tech students. I should have been there, teaching them about Vikings and gods; but I’m not. I quit, because Texas politicians and university administrators have made it impossible to teach how medieval people saw the world.
In early April, the Texas Tech University System issued a memo effectively banning academic programs, instruction and even student research on sexual orientation and gender identity across the Texas Tech system, under the specious claim of adhering to laws that don’t exist. The directive mandates that faculty recognize only “two human sexes” and, across all levels of courses, explicitly forbids us from teaching that gender identity is a fluid spectrum.
This is a dramatic escalation of the state’s ongoing restrictions on curriculum—a campaign that has already decimated faculty morale, obliterated academic freedom and committed our university—an institution ostensibly dedicated to truth-seeking—to proclaiming falsehoods and propaganda.
Teaching the Vikings as presented in their texts and found in their graves, rather than an invented modern mythology, means I must assign the poems they wrote. These poems include several where Loki and Odin frequently change sex and gender; one poem has Loki transforming into a mare to give birth to Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir. I must discuss the Icelandic sagas, where women dress as men and get revenge on their husbands for divorcing them.
Under these TTU guidelines, if I asked students to read certain passages on the Norse pantheon—passages which reveal how Vikings themselves understood their gods—I would be violating the memo’s dictates. The mandate was clear: Sterilize the gods. Hide the past. Lie to my students.
But it’s not just history at stake here. Right now, at TTU, graduate students are having their academic futures stolen from them. Young scholars are abandoning their theses or leaving TTU entirely because their research is now prohibited. Undergraduates have watched classes get canceled and are scrambling to find replacements. They’re transferring away from TTU. Worse still, we are telling future clinical psychologists, social workers and educators that they cannot study the diverse realities of the human beings they are going to serve.
This is a deep injustice to the students who came here to learn.
Further, faculty have been advised not to share the memo with incoming students. Our students themselves abhor this policy. Texas Tech’s Student Government Association passed a resolution condemning the memos (thus far ignored by the administration). The American Association of University Professors is suing TTU for violating First Amendment protections.
These restrictions hinder student outcomes. In my own class last semester, I had many students elect to investigate Viking women, masculinity, magic, runes and jewelry as part of a research project. All of those topics were forbidden under the April memo.
TTU’s chancellor states that he is orienting our students for career success and that the TTU memo will be a “national model” for higher education.
What the chancellor does not consider is that a sterilized fantasy helps no one. If I cannot show my students how to think for themselves because they are now no longer allowed to read or conduct research freely, then I am failing them. We are handing future graduates politically-curated falsehoods when what they need, and deserve, is the capacity to discover the past on its own terms—not the sanitized, heteronormative version this memo forces us to teach.
Ms. Classroom wants to hear from educators and students being impacted by legislation attacking public education, higher education, gender, race and sexuality studies, activism and social justice in education, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Cue: a new series from Ms., ‘Banned! Voices from the Classroom.’ Submit pitches and/or op-eds and reflections (between 500-800 words) to Ms. contributing editor Aviva Dove-Viebahn at adove-viebahn@msmagazine.com. Posts are accepted on a rolling basis.
