Without gender studies, what will happen to all the animals in the Budapest Zoo?

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism

First, Hungary built a wall to keep Muslim migrants out. Then it passed the Stop Soros law. And then it really went too far by refusing to pay for degrees in gender studies at Soros’ pet leftist university.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s decree dropped funding and accreditation for gender studies last week.

The tragedy was only lessened by the latest findings within gender studies that gender had been invented by dead old white men to oppress the women who (as the latest research in gender studies had proven) never existed. If gender doesn’t exist, why do we need gender studies? Shouldn’t gender studies go the way of single sex bathrooms, due process and the entire history of western civilization?

Gender studies insist that gender is just a performative construct of the patriarchy, and if so, gender studies had disproven its own existence and eliminated itself from the threadbare fabric of reality.

Why do we need an entire academic discipline to study its own non-existence?

It doesn’t help that there’s no word for gender in Hungarian. Instead, gender studies uses a coined term, “társadalmi nem”, which apparently means, “social sex”. Making gender studies sound like a mandatory Stalinist collectivist dance in a gulag hasn’t helped win Hungarians over.

Hungary’s government has offered certain salient arguments in defense of eliminating the noble and non-existent field of gender studies, such as the few students enrolled in its courses, and the non-existent employment opportunities in the non-existent field of the non-existent discipline.

Or, as one Hungarian politician noted, “no-one wants to employ a gender-ologist.”

There are only two universities in Hungary that offer courses in gender studies, Eötvös Loránd University and the Central European University. ELTE has yet to graduate any asexually budding ‘genderologists’.

CEU was founded by that noted scholar of gender studies, George Soros, whose graduate degree in the field was achieved when his former Brazilian soap opera mistress punched him in court over his refusal to give her a $1.9 million Manhattan apartment.

Nor was she invited to lecture on gender studies to Hungarian hipsters in the hallowed halls of CEU.

CEU does currently offer an MA degree in Critical Gender Studies to “educate and train future generations of gender specialists”. Since gender doesn’t exist, it’s unknown if these generations of gender studies specialists will come from budding, cloning or other forms of asexual reproduction, and who or what wants generations of otherwise unemployable gender studies specialists in Hungary.

Especially as Hungary will no longer be accrediting or funding these gender specialist generations.

To gauge the sheer parasitic uselessness of the field, the MA degree posits that ‘genderologists’ may find jobs in, “education, academic research, social services, non-governmental organizations, policy, social change advocacy, government advising and applied research, journalism, as well as jobs that entail various kinds of artistic production”. To summarize, genderologists can poison minds in academia, create destructive policies for the government, write nasty screeds for the media or make bad art.

This isn’t an academic discipline. It’s a political movement. Its only employment opportunities are indoctrinating students to indoctrinate others in order to establish a leftist totalitarian dictatorship. Like other identity politics studies, it’s Marxism-Leninism in tribal identity flavors. And the Hungarians, like just about everybody else outside Berkeley and Brussels, are maxed out of Marx.

Soros U or CEU claims that the Department of Gender Studies “strives to meet the growing demand for expertise in gender issues”. How big is this demand? After a decade, CEU claims that only 129 students have an MA in Gender Studies. An average of 16 enroll every year. According to the National Lightning Safety Institute, more Poles are killed by lightning strikes than Hungarians enroll in gender studies.

Here are some of the PhD thesis topics in CEU’s Gender Studies sure to attract corporate employers.

“Re-con-queering Shakespeare: a Feminist Genderconstruction,” “Queer(ing) Naturecultures: The Study of Zoo Animals”, and “Integrating the Patriarch?: Negotiating Migrant Masculinity in Times of Crisis of Multiculturalism.” It figures that the only ones to get a pass on patriarchy would be Muslim migrants.

And how can any company pass up the opportunity to hire the author who contended that, “the issues of sexuality and gender have been a part of the zoo project since its inception”?

Without gender studies, who will genderqueer all the animals in the Budapest Zoo?

To paraphrase Gloria Steinem, Hungary needs gender studies like a fish needs a bicycle. Or Natureculture piscines queering Shakespearean velocipedes at the expense of Hungarian taxpayers.

CEU, for its part, has issued a statement warning that eliminating gender studies, “would harm the prestige of the country”. As the SS Panzer Corps had before it, the Open Society Foundation has been forced to retreat from Hungary to Berlin. CEU could take its gender studies off to Soros’ Open Society Fuhrerbunker in Berlin near the Rotes Rathaus (Red City Hall) once rebuilt and decorated with swastikas by the Nazis. If the Muslim migrants now filling Berlin won’t find gender studies appealing, who will?

Berlin has once again welcomed its occupiers turned refugees. And the Open Society Foundation’s personnel have reportedly found new homes, coffee shops and plans to irradiate all the world’s gold.

The twilight of gender studies in Budapest has led to an outpouring of support from useless academics worldwide. The London School of Economics Gender Department denounced, “right-wing populist agendas that naturalise power relations between men and women”. LSE’s Gender Department would apparently prefer that these relations be unnatural instead.

ATGENDER (European Association of Gender Research, Education, and Documentation) condemned, “the logic that the provision of academic degrees should be made dependent on financial merit”, and RINGS, the International Association of Institutions of Advanced Gender Studies, denounced it as, “anti-educational, anti-scientific, anti-democratic, and anti-equality.”

The National Women’s Studies Association, which supports a boycott of Israel, with no sense of irony, condemned Hungary’s move as “an affront to academic freedom and to the open exchange of ideas”.

Below that is a letter defending Rabab Abdulhadi, an anti-Israel academic who had used public funds to meet with Sheikh Raed Salah, the noted gender studies leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Israel convicted of funding Hamas. The Muslim Brotherhood is a feminist organization whose “family experts” have preached that if a woman is beaten, “she shares 30 percent or 40 percent of the fault.”

There’s some material for gender studies there, but they wouldn’t touch it with a thousand foot pole.

And Hungarians will somehow have to make do without hearing lectures about the evils of the patriarchy from radical academics whose feminism ends at the barbed green border with Islam.

Soros apologists have claimed that criticizing the hoary anti-Semite is anti-Semitic. Now they claim that ending support for ‘genderologists’ who accept beating women is sexist. Not to mention that failing to fund an ideological movement that seeks to destroy rational inquiry at universities is anti-intellectual.

Supporters of an academic boycott of the Jewish State hypocritically clamor about academic freedom, and the organizations that ‘no platform’ opposition speakers whine about political intimidation.

If it weren’t for the misogyny, misandry, anti-Semitism, and Islamism, gender studies would be just another academic scam for turning unemployables into political activists willing to work for almost nothing in exchange for wreaking vengeance on the society that refuses to employ them.

This is what Hungary is missing out on by passing up the opportunity to fund gender studies.

Don’t cry for Soros’ Gender Studies, Hungary. Weep for American academia instead.