This should serve as a reminder to all marginalized groups, including people of color. No victory, no matter how hard fought, stays won.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/21/texas-trans-students-college-hostility/
I’m looking around, like, ‘What’s going on?” said Graff, who transferred to the University of Texas at Austin from the University of Houston this fall but ascribes the change to the larger political atmosphere. “I’m being treated differently.”
In September, a video of a Texas A&M University student confronting a professor for discussing transgender identities went viral, kicking off a blur of action. The professor was fired and the university’s president replaced. Hundreds of miles away, Angelo State University officials quietly unveiled limits to discussing transgender identities in class. Days later, the school’s parent system, Texas Tech, issued its own restrictions to faculty.
And most recently, on Oct. 2, UT-Austin said it was “enthusiastically”reviewing an offer from President Donald Trump to receive federal funding advantages if, among other things, the college adopted a binary definition of gender.
“I didn’t expect people to cave so easily,” said a transgender Texas Tech University alumna. “At the same time, I think people are legitimately very, very frightened right now, and I think that’s especially true of institutions.”
Lubbock was once the nation’s second most conservative city, set in a county that has voted for the Republican nominee in every presidential election since 1948 with the exception of Texas’ own Lyndon B. Johnson. While political conservatism has long dominated the region, Texas Tech in the last decade has offered freedom for LGBTQ+ students to safely and openly celebrate their identities.
Texas Tech held its first pride week in 2015. Three years later, it hosted its inaugural Big 12 LGBTQIA Allies Summit, a three-day event that ended with a screening uof “Love, Simon,” which chronicles a gay teenager’s coming-out story. Stickers signifying faculty and staff were LGBTQ+ allies adorned office doors. At one point, the campus pride index scored Tech five stars for queer friendliness.
“There’s, like, this porous boundary between Texas Tech and Lubbock, and I think a lot of that progress probably started to bleed into the community,” the Texas Tech alumna said. “It was a big deal, because Lubbock is very conservative, and so you had people coming onto campus to support these events.”