When the Heritage Foundation released its priorities for 2026, much of the critical attention was focused on the familiar: the organization’s plans for deregulation, executive power, immigration, and building on Project 2025. Even more fundamentally, the 2026 priorities include social goals, such as restructuring families to model traditional (that is to say, Christian) ideals, using governmental power to enforce traditional gender roles, and delegitimizing relationships outside of its ideal of a married, heterosexual couple having as many children as possible.
While these specific goals are not laid out in Heritage’s sales pitch, its directors have articulated them with unusual candor in essays associated with their roles. For example, Scott Yenor, the organization’s Director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, recently described the supposed need to undo gender integration in education. This renewed push for sex-segregated education is not a narrow policy proposal or a technocratic debate about pedagogy. It is a counterrevolutionary project aimed at undoing constitutional equality and reinstating a rigid, hierarchical vision of sex roles under the guise of civic renewal.
The recent essay defending “sex-specific education” as necessary to preserve the U.S. republic offers a clear statement of this agenda. Framed as a lament for the decline of the Virginia Military Institute after United States v. Virginia, the piece argues that the Supreme Court’s decision forced VMI to abandon its true purpose: cultivating “manly honor, martial valor, and public-spirited ambition.” According to this account, admitting women did not merely broaden access to the institution—it left it a hollowed-out shell of its former self, replacing a republican ethos with bureaucratic management, DEI oversight, and what the author derides as therapeutic moralism. The proposed remedy is explicit: reopen the constitutional question, reassert the legitimacy of distinct sex roles, and build new state-supported institutions devoted to forming men and women separately for their “different social destinies.”
This argument is worth taking seriously—not because it is persuasive, but because it is ascendant as the Heritage Foundation continues to hold tremendous influence over the current administration. It is also deeply misleading, both legally and historically.
Start with the law. United States v. Virginia did not prohibit single-sex education. It held that when the state excludes one sex from a public institution, it must provide an “exceedingly persuasive justification” and offer genuinely equal alternatives. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinion rejected Virginia’s defense not because it denied sex differences, but because the state relied on generalized claims about women’s capacities and social roles while failing to provide women with anything remotely comparable to VMI. The problem was not that VMI cultivated discipline or honor; it was that those goods were reserved, by law, for men.
Yenor’s argument attempts to invert this logic by treating constitutional scrutiny itself as the villain. Because VMI could not openly declare that its mission was to train men for leadership and women for domesticity, the author claims, it was forced to pretend that its goals were “gender neutral” while everyone knew they were not. But this complaint concedes the central point of the Equal Protection Clause: The state may not allocate civic opportunity based on a theory of natural hierarchy, however sincerely held. The inability to defend sex segregation on explicitly sexist grounds is not a flaw in constitutional law. It is the point.
The historical narrative fares no better. The claim that VMI’s decline was caused by the admission of women mistakes correlation for causation and romanticizes a past that was neither as stable nor as virtuous as advertised. Institutions change over time for many reasons: professionalization of the military, shifts in higher education, liability law, federal regulations, and internal governance reforms long predate coeducation. To attribute every disliked change—from haircut rules to honor codes—to the presence of women is not analysis; it is scapegoating.
More revealing than the factual claims is the normative vision driving them. The essay insists that VMI’s true purpose was to form men into a particular kind of moral subject: stoical, hierarchical, deferential upward and commanding downward. This “manly honor” is presented not merely as one virtue among many, but as a civic necessity—something women, by implication, neither need nor can fully embody. In this telling, women could only ever trigger litigation, soften standards, invite oversight, and transform peer governance into administrative control. Equality is portrayed not as justice, but as contamination.
This is where the argument’s authoritarian core becomes unmistakable. The lament is not really about pull-ups, haircuts, or even VMI itself. It is about the loss of a social order in which hierarchy was enforced informally by culture rather than formally by law—and in which men, trained separately, were habituated to rule. What is mourned is not the erosion of excellence, but the democratization of authority.
Seen in this light, the call to revive sex-specific education is inseparable from a broader political project. It aligns seamlessly with Scott Yenor’s arguments against coeducation, his open hostility to women’s professional ambition, and his insistence that modern America went wrong when it abandoned distinct sex roles—see his complaints about (white) women not having enough children, being able to leave toxic marriages through no-fault divorce, and the entire idea of anti-discrimination. It fits comfortably within Heritage’s Project 2025, which seeks to centralize power, weaken institutional checks, and reassert “traditional” norms through the machinery of the state. Education is not incidental to this vision, it’s foundational. Train boys to command and girls to accommodate, and the rest of the hierarchy falls into place more easily.
The defenders of sex-segregated education often insist that their proposal is voluntary, pluralistic, and compatible with liberal democracy, but history suggests otherwise. When the state endorses sex separation as a positive good rooted in “innate differences” and “social destinies,” equality becomes contingent and reversible. “Choice” operates within a framework that already assigns value, status, and expectation. “Separate” has never been equal because separation exists solely to justify unequal power.
What makes the current moment especially dangerous is how openly this agenda is being articulated—and how respectable its institutional sponsors have become. These ideas are no longer confined to marginal publications or nostalgic alumni networks. They are being laundered through think tanks, legal strategies, and policy roadmaps designed for immediate implementation. Overturning United States v. Virginia is an explicit goal—the beginning of a substantial rollback.
The question, then, is not whether single-sex education can ever exist. It already does, within constitutional bounds. The question is whether Americans are prepared to recognize a counterrevolution to undo the gains of the last century. The fight over VMI is not about one military college but rather a test case for how much of the constitutional commitment to equal citizenship we are willing to surrender—and how readily we will accept hierarchy dressed up as tradition.
