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South Dakota has joined a group of right-leaning states trying to curtail expressions of personal identity in the US.
In December, the South Dakota Board of Regents issued a policy prohibiting professors at public universities in the state from including their designated gender pronouns or tribal affiliations in their email signatures, the Associated Press reported on Friday.
And it didn’t take long for the board – which governs the state’s six public universities — to take action.
Two University of South Dakota professors — Megan Red Shirt-Shaw and Red Shirt-Shaw’s husband, John Little — recently told the AP they’d received written warnings to remove those details from their signatures.
On X, formerly Twitter, the two said they’d received their warnings in mid-March. The consequence, Little told the AP, could be as severe as losing their jobs.
“I was told that I had 5 days to remove my tribal affiliation and pronouns,” Little wrote in an email to the AP. “I believe the exact wording was that I had ‘5 days to correct the behavior.'”
Little added that if the request wasn’t met, administrators would evaluate whether or not to invoke suspension or even termination as punishment.
On X, Red Shirt-Shaw said she “made the difficult decision” to comply with the warnings, removing her tribal affiliation and gender pronouns from her email signature, “so I would not miss the remainder of the academic year.”
That said, Red Shirt-Shaw found a workaround: She has continued to place those details “in the body of each email that I send,” which she said on X “will not be challenged (for now).” Little has done the same.
For Red Shirt-Shaw, including those details is personal. As director of Native Student Services at the university, she wrote, “I feel I have an ethical responsibility to claim the tribal nations that make me who I am.”
The American Civil Liberties Union’s South Dakota chapter also weighed in on X. The group called the Board of Regents’ policy an effort by the state’s leadership “to shove queer identities out of public life.”
Other experts agree that the South Dakota Board of Regents’ guidelines are an escalation of a larger movement sweeping the US.
Larger efforts at play
South Dakota’s flashpoint over email signatures comes as a national discourse rages about rights for LGBTQ+ Americans and members of diverse and protected groups.
“Quite frankly, this is the first time I’ve heard of a state university choosing to use branding standards to eliminate what obviously has become a practice of including pronouns and tribal affiliations to emails,” Paulette Grandberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, told the AP.
“But I’m not surprised, given the current climate we’re in,” she added, calling the decision by the state’s Board of Regents a “steady progression” in a broader push.
Grandberry Russell told the AP she thinks that such early-stage measures in conservative states could be used as a “testing ground” to determine if more severe laws could take hold.
Kelly Benjamin, a spokesperson for the American Association of University Professors, an advocacy group for academics in higher education, told the AP that it’s the latest step in “a longer-term agenda” aimed at limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion measures to protect LGBTQ+ Americans.
Benjamin pointed to recent efforts in states like Florida and Arkansas. Florida lawmakers, for example, have passed bills that have limited or prevented access to services for transgender individuals, including gender-affirming care or even the ability to update their correct gender on their driver’s license.
Though LGBTQ+ Americans benefited from legal strides in the 2010s like a landmark Supreme Court decision upholding the legality of gay marriage in 2015, more recent actions by some Republican state leaders have raised the specter of threats to similar protections. South Dakota’s recent policy is just one example.
Meanwhile, violence against members of the LGBTQ+ communities has also increased as these debates have raged in the background. A 2022 Business Insider investigation found that homicides of transgender people, for instance, doubled between 2019 and 2021.
The University of South Dakota did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside of normal working hours.
