@marlowe1 I’m not sure what you mean - we are here to learn, not to wage the culture war. The mechanics of learning are fundamentally incompatible with throwing politically charged platitudes at each other.
For example, take trans rights, which usually comes up when discussing gender roles and culture. But we are already assuming the conservative argument (there is no distinction between sex and gender) as the culturally reinforced axiom of which we are examining the validity. No one is stopping you from dismissing what you are reading wholesale and trying to convince everyone that there is in fact no distinction between sex and gender, but then you’d have to explain to the class and the professor why every point in your reading critiquing that conception is wrong. That’s a remarkably difficult position to take - in general professors don’t assign readings because they are easy to refute. Critiques are perfectly acceptable, and even encouraged, but if your critique is “I think this is totally wrong” you’re going to have one heck of a time defending your argument on intellectual grounds against the class and the professor (who usually takes the role of the defender of the author since generally they understand the text far better than any student).