Author: Emily Taylor

Emily Taylor is an independent scholar and writer based in the Upstate of South Carolina. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and is a specialist in Caribbean literature, Latinx literature, and postcolonial and feminist theory. She has published academic essays in Caribbean-Irish Connections, The Journal of West Indian Literature, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, The Southern Quarterly, and in the Cambridge series Caribbean Literature in Transition. She writes the newsletter Hot Feminism: Letters from South Carolina.

Federal Civil Rights Protections for Students Are Being Hollowed Out

At least 25,000 unresolved civil rights complaints involving race, gender and disability discrimination are currently stalled as the Trump administration moves to dismantle the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights—leaving students in K-12 schools and colleges with few viable paths to federal protection.

At the same time, new Title IX guidance has shifted federal priorities away from survivors of sexual violence and toward expanded due-process protections for the accused—further eroding accountability in school environments already struggling to respond to gender-based harm.

Taken together, these changes represent a sweeping redefinition of equal access to education—one that disproportionately harms women, students of color, disabled students and survivors of sexual assault.

Last semester, after I published a piece in Ms. critiquing Charlie Kirk and violent masculinity, South Carolina politicians—including Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and Rep. Ralph Norman—publicly suggested I should be fired. In a climate where ideologically driven attacks on funding and governance threaten the very survival of colleges and universities, I ultimately resigned my full professorship. The message from state lawmakers was unmistakable: Even private institutions are no longer insulated from direct government interference, regardless of stated commitments to academic freedom.

Dying to Be Men: American Masculinity as Death Cult

Much as owing guns at home is most likely to injure or kill the people living with those guns than the supposed threats posed by home invaders, the violent discourse espoused by Charlie Kirk and many others has resulted in his murder in front of a crowd of thousands of students.

Kirk built his career on racism and misogyny, encouraging young Americans to the side of a fully radicalized and extremist Republican party that has abandoned any pretense of caring for Americans and instead has become a propaganda machine pathetically flaying to prove that they are all men.

I’m sorry for Charlie Kirk and all the other men like him that have been raised in this America and with these ideals of masculinity. I’m sorry that he decided to adopt this hateful ideology and to profit from it. And as the mother to a boy and a girl, my heart breaks for the America these children are growing up in. Here’s hoping we can save ourselves.

Let’s Imagine the South as Place for Feminism

Being a feminist in South Carolina isn’t easy, and it is sometimes nice to imagine fleeing to some hypothetical feminist haven. But I know I won’t. My family is here, and I have a job and friends and a community I love.

We’ll do more to fight the people that are responsible for the oppression here if we insist on seeing the South as a queer place, where the feminist fights are ongoing. Join us.