Texas Tech University will recognize only two human sexes, male and female, and has moved to close every academic credential built around sexual orientation and gender identity. The Lubbock university laid out the policy in an April 9 memo that bans most SOGI-related instruction in lower-level courses and restricts it sharply even at the graduate level.
The directive marks one of the most concrete steps any major public university has taken to strip gender-ideology programming from its classrooms. It did not arrive overnight. It followed a formal course-content review launched in December 2025 by the Texas Tech University System, a process the system tied to its obligations under Senate Bill 37, the state law that expanded oversight of college curriculum and governance.
Senate Bill 37 passed in June and was authored by Brandon Creighton, the same Republican state senator who now serves as chancellor of the Texas Tech University System. Creighton signed the December memo that triggered the review. The April 9 memo that followed spelled out the consequences in plain language.
The memo’s central declaration is blunt: Texas Tech recognizes “only two human sexes.” From that baseline, the university will “initiate the closure of all academic credentials centered on SOGI.” Fox News Digital first reported the details of both memos and reached out to Texas Tech for comment.
Core and lower-level undergraduate courses face a strict prohibition on SOGI content. If a primary textbook centers on or includes those topics, instructors must provide alternate materials. Upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses face restrictions too, though with “clear exemptions for strictly defined academic purposes.”
For graduate students already deep into affected programs, the memo allows “carefully delineated, strictly temporary instructional frameworks.” In practice, that means “certain SOGI instruction is permitted only for currently enrolled students completing formally identified teach-out programs at the graduate level.” New admissions are frozen. No one else gets in.
The memo also draws a bright line on classroom speech. Instructors “may not teach that gender identity is a fluid spectrum, endorse the existence of more than two genders, or decouple gender from biological sex as a factual or scientific baseline.” Faculty who discuss intersex biological conditions, anatomy, genetics, endocrinology, may do so, but “may not use these biological conditions to advocate for or validate sociological frameworks of fluid gender identities.”
A separate provision addresses what the memo calls “prejudiced advocacy”, defined as instruction that advocates for concepts of inherent racial or sexual superiority, inherent bias, or collective guilt. Even there, exemptions exist for independent student-directed research and professional licensure or patient-care requirements.
The December 2025 review process applied across the Texas Tech University System, not just the flagship campus. The Board of Regents evaluated materials as part of the process, which the system described as ensuring compliance with both state and federal law.
AP News reported that Chancellor Creighton ordered campuses to identify and phase out programs centered on sexual orientation and gender identity by June 15. Admissions to affected programs must be frozen, though currently enrolled students can finish their degrees. The policy also limits future faculty hiring in related fields and restricts most lower-level courses from centering on or highlighting SOGI content, with narrow exceptions for certain upper-level, historical, legal, and clinical topics.
Senate Bill 37, the law that underpins the review, increased state oversight of college curriculum and governance. Creighton authored the bill as a state senator before taking the chancellor’s post, a sequence that puts the same person on both ends of the policy chain. The law passed in June; by December, the system he now leads had launched the review it required.
That dual role has drawn notice. But the substance of the policy stands on its own terms: a state university system is aligning its academic offerings with state law and with the biological reality that humans come in two sexes. Whether critics find the messenger uncomfortable does not change the message.
Breitbart reported that the Texas Tech system ordered all five of its schools to review and adjust curricula, syllabi, and instructional materials to comply with state and federal rules recognizing only male and female sexes. The move is already drawing opposition from professors and free-speech advocates. Related policies at other institutions have faced legal challenges, including a federal hold in Mississippi and a lawsuit from 16 states plus the District of Columbia.
Faculty backlash was predictable. For years, gender-studies programs and SOGI-centered credentials have operated as a growth industry inside American universities, supported by administrative offices, dedicated faculty lines, and tuition dollars, much of it underwritten by taxpayers. Telling those programs to shut down disrupts careers and ideological commitments simultaneously.
The legal fights in other states show the pattern. Courts in California have already been forced to pay millions after the Supreme Court rejected a school gender-secrecy policy. The question of what schools can and cannot teach, and what parents and lawmakers can demand, is being litigated from coast to coast.
Texas Tech’s move does not exist in isolation. Across the country, states are grappling with how deeply gender-identity frameworks have embedded themselves in public education, from elementary school classrooms to graduate seminars. The debate touches on parental rights, academic freedom, and the basic question of whether public institutions should promote contested ideological claims as settled science.
In Ohio, a teacher recently sued a school district over the removal of an LGBTQ classroom poster, illustrating how these conflicts play out at every level of education. The fights are not abstract. They involve real classrooms, real students, and real consequences for families who object to what their children are being taught.
California, as usual, offers the starkest contrast. A federal appeals court recently rejected the state’s bid to narrow a Supreme Court parental-rights ruling, a decision that underscored how far some blue-state officials will go to keep parents out of the loop on gender-related policies in schools.
Texas is moving in the opposite direction. Senate Bill 37 gave lawmakers and university governing boards the tools to audit what is actually being taught. The Texas Tech memos are the first major product of that authority. They will not be the last.
Several questions hang over the policy. Which specific academic credentials are being closed? The April 9 memo orders their closure but does not name them individually. How many students are currently enrolled in the teach-out programs that will be allowed to finish? What specific state and federal laws, beyond SB 37, does the system cite as the compliance basis for its review?
Fox News Digital reached out to Texas Tech for comment. Whether the university responded is not clear from available reporting. The silence, if it is silence, would be notable. Universities that spend years defending the academic freedom to teach gender ideology as fact tend to get quiet when the law asks them to justify it.
The June 15 deadline for phasing out affected programs will be the next pressure point. Faculty who built careers around SOGI scholarship will have to adapt, retire, or fight. Students who enrolled expecting a credential that no longer exists will need a new plan. The transition will not be painless.
But the policy’s logic is straightforward. Public universities exist to serve the public. The public, through its elected representatives, passed a law. The university system is following it. That is how accountability is supposed to work, even when the people being held accountable don’t like it.
For years, gender-identity programming spread through American higher education with little oversight and less debate. Texas Tech just proved that the era of unchecked institutional drift can end, if lawmakers and administrators have the nerve to end it.
Biology didn’t change. The rules finally caught up.
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