The dean of Southern Illinois University’s School of Medicine, Dr. Jerry Kruse, is under fire after suggesting that linking women to vaginas is a harmful “sex-based stereotype.” In a video obtained by Fox News, Kruse delivered a fiery address dismissing the Trump administration’s efforts to define sex based on biological reality—an effort he claimed amounted to an “attack on science.”

Speaking at a university panel, Kruse responded directly to President Trump’s Executive Order 14168, which reasserts that women are biologically female and men biologically male. The order was introduced to restore “biological truth” in federal policy, particularly in areas concerning sex-segregated spaces such as domestic abuse shelters and showers. Trump’s directive warns against the rising trend of letting men self-identify into women’s spaces, calling it a violation of women’s dignity and safety.

Kruse, however, painted a starkly different picture. He called Trump’s order “a direct attack on all that is important to us: science, higher education, healthcare,” and insisted it targets transgender, nonbinary, and intersex individuals for “mistreatment and discrimination.”

In one of the most controversial parts of his remarks, Kruse suggested that equating women with vaginas is harmful and rooted in outdated assumptions. “This order threatens any woman or girl who doesn’t conform to sex-based stereotypes,” he claimed. “It opens them up to invasion of privacy.” According to Kruse, the real danger isn’t biological men entering female spaces—it’s defining womanhood in terms of biological sex at all.

This radical ideology is nothing new in higher education, but hearing it from the dean of a medical school—a person tasked with training the next generation of doctors—raises fresh concerns about the state of science and medicine in academia. If medical schools begin to reject the foundational concept that biological sex is real and relevant, where does that leave patient care, diagnosis, or informed treatment?

Kruse insisted SIU “stands firm” against Trump’s order and praised the university’s president, Dan Mahoney, for vowing to resist the administration’s efforts. The school, he said, is committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion—and that includes rejecting what he called harmful binaries.

That sentiment is echoed in Kruse’s official biography, which states that he’s “a student of the interactions of biology and society” and has a special interest in “cross-cultural and population health.” In other words, he views medicine not simply as a science, but as a tool for social engineering.

Kruse didn’t stop at gender issues. He also blasted Trump’s actions on immigration, nutrition programs, global health, and more—essentially framing the Trump administration as a threat to the entire mission of his medical school.

This isn’t the first time ideology has crept into medical education. From lectures on systemic racism in geoscience to woke redefinitions of gender and sexuality in biology, the academic world has increasingly blurred the line between political activism and scientific rigor.

At the center of the storm is a simple question: Should medicine reflect biological reality, or bend to social theory? For Kruse and many like him, the answer seems to be the latter. It’s no longer about anatomy or evidence—it’s about ideology.

As this worldview spreads, medical institutions may become less about healing and more about indoctrination. What used to be settled science—that men and women are biologically distinct—is now being cast as a bigoted assumption. And if you challenge that? You’re labeled the extremist.

It’s a troubling sign when doctors are told that acknowledging biology is offensive. But for the activists shaping our future physicians, that seems to be exactly the point.