‘Communities Ripped Apart’: On Texas College Campuses, LGBTQ+ Services Have Been Completely Decimated

EXCLUSIVE

Dante Stetson recalled getting his first chest binder at the Pride Closet at the University of North Texas in Denton in 2023. He was 18, and it was his freshman year on campus.

“My family isn’t supportive of people with transgender identities, and I’ve never been able to buy one and store it at my home,” Stetson, who grew up in rural Texas, told The Barbed Wire in a recent text message. “It was the first gender-affirming material I’ve ever had.” 

The Pride Closet, hosted by the Pride Alliance LGBTQ+ resource center at UNT, was typically stocked with gender-affirming care supplies like binders, which are compression garments that help flatten a person’s chest. “Since it was already used, it wasn’t new, so you didn’t have to like, stretch it out or anything,” he said. “So it was very much like, this is what it’s supposed to (feel) like whenever you use it, and we had different sizes that you could choose from.” Trans and queer students could also drop off clothing that no longer fit their bodies or their identity.

The binder and the closet represented far more than a simple article of clothing. Moments like this helped Stetson discover and express his true self. 

“Going to university gave me space to get what I needed for gender-affirming care while having a safe enough distance to figure myself out and form a way to come out to my family,” he said.

Stetson found refuge in the supportive environment created by the Pride Alliance, so much so that three years later he became the communications officer for GLAD: Queer Alliance, a student organization at UNT that helped organize and promote the closet. 

Then, in 2024, the closet closed — along with the entire Pride Alliance resource center which hosted it — thanks to new, sweeping policies at public universities in Texas that banned any programs, services or policies associated with diversity, equity, or inclusion.

Senate Bill 17 was passed by the state legislature in 2023 and took effect the following year. It forced Texas’ public universities to close LGBTQ+ centers, women’s and gender centers, and those designed to serve marginalized groups such as Black, Latino, Indigenous, or Asian American and Pacific Islander students. It’s just one of many recent laws and policies designed to attack the ability of schools and public institutions to support the most vulnerable.  

After SB 17 went into effect, other organizations also began feeling the impacts of these policies. The GLAD: Queer Alliance had to cancel drag shows and a leadership seminar to comply with the new rules — and because funding was cut.

“A lot of the student organizations are kind of in-fighting with each other to see who gets what funding,” Stetson said.

The impact of Texas’ sprawling war on diversity, equity, and inclusion wasn’t just felt on the UNT campus. Across the state, public universities that were once making strides toward inclusivity and support for some of their most vulnerable students have faced devastating cutbacks amid a national, conservative cultural shift. Some queer students considered leaving their school — or Texas entirely — after institutions of higher education were forced to implement the law, KERA News reported in April 2025. 

Two years after the law went into effect, The Barbed Wire used online research and hours of interviews with nonprofit workers — along with current and former students — to create a broad survey of the damage caused by this law. In brief,

• At least 12 resource centers that either specialized in LGBTQ+ student life, or offered services and programs tailored to their needs, have shut down 
• More than 100 faculty and staff that supported LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups were either laid off or transferred to new positions at public universities across the state
• LGBTQ+ student groups lost advisors, funding, and well as supportive venues to host events, leaving many to shut down or become newly dependent on donations
• Under pressure from state and federal officials, a host of related policies have proliferated, from cutbacks to LGBTQ+ classes to bans on campus drag performances
• Students have lost “safe spaces,” including gender-neutral bathrooms
• As centers closed, students lost access to STI testing, mammograms, and other health care services — including flu prevention — offered in a supportive, safe environment
• The cutbacks and cultural shifts caused by the anti-DEI law created an atmosphere that was more permissive of attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, students said

This hostile environment has left many LGBTQ+ students considering moving out of Texas to finish their degrees and has them seriously questioning if they would ever return, according to Brad Pritchett, who has been tracking some of the aftermath as CEO of the nonprofit Equality Texas. He said the state is hurting not just its student population, but also the universities’ rank and reputation  through its attacks on queer and trans students. 

“By targeting LGBTQ+ people, Texas is undercutting academic recruitment and alienating a significant portion of the young workforce,” Pritchett said. 

Now, he said, many students “are left without the tools they need to thrive.”

‘We Still Have So Much Important Work to Do’

It wasn’t always this way in Texas. 

The traces of a very different university system, one that was at least making strides towards supporting vulnerable groups, can still be seen across the web thanks, in part, to the presence of campus newspapers. Press releases and proud announcements of new DEI initiatives linger online for years after the supportive services they advertised have turned into dead links.

For example, in 2016, the Office of Media Relations at the University of Texas at Dallas celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Carolyn Lipshy Galerstein Women’s Center, named for the university’s female dean. The center grew from modest beginnings as a tiny office in the student center meant to support female faculty, onto a full suite that featured services like mammograms, flu shots, and gender-neutral bathrooms. It even hosted feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who spoke to a crowd of more than 1,000 people. 

Four years later, the nonprofit Campus Pride, which recognizes safer college environments for queer students, named the University of Texas at Dallas as one of the best universities for LGBTQ+ students, in large part because of the Galerstein Women’s Center. In 2020, Matt Winser-Johns, who was, at the time, assistant director of LGBTQ+ programs, told UT Dallas Magazine: “We still have so much important work to do to ensure our LGBTQ+ faculty, staff and students feel affirmed here at UT Dallas in every space, program and policy.”

At first, the Galerstein Center became part of the newly renamed Office of Campus Resources and Support.

Then, in March 2024, then-state Sen. Brandon Creighton, who authored SB 17, targeted state universities that had tried this tactic with letters threatening to pull funding and other unspecified “legal ramifications” if universities didn’t close down these renamed centers. By spring, the renamed centers and their associated services were gone. The Associated Press estimated there were at least 100 job cuts associated with the DEI ban, but the actual number is likely higher. 

“Once those letters went out, that kind of spelled the end for all of the different resource centers that had attempted to stay open and serve at least some students,” Hall said.

Under increased pressure from the legislature, the Galerstein Center was forced to close entirely in April 2024.

The University of Texas at Austin had its own safe space for LGBTQ+ students, the Gender and Sexuality Center. That office opened in the fall of 2004 with support from the student government, the Dean of Students Office, and the student services budget committee, according to the Knight Center for Journalism. 

Ash Hall, policy and advocacy strategist for LGBTQ+ rights at the ACLU of Texas, said they “practically lived” at the campus Gender and Sexuality Center during their time at UT Austin during the early 2010s. 

“Thinking on all the books that I read there, all the people I met, the advice I got, not just about figuring out relationships and identity and solidarity, but also just practical advice for career options, and then thinking about how LGBTQIA plus students today don’t have that on campus, it’s just astounding to recognize what a loss that is,” Hall said.

Like the Galerstein Center, at first, Austin’s Gender and Sexuality Center became the Women’s Community Center under a new Division of Campus and Community Engagement, in an effort to deemphasize the now forbidden ‘‘DEI.” Then, thanks to Creighton’s threats, nearly 20 years after the center opened its doors, it announced it was closing in January 2024 to comply with Senate Bill 17, according to the student newspaper, The Daily Texan. 

The effect was an immediate loss of faculty and staff who served as trusted advisors, as well as the loss of resources — and physical spaces formerly accessed by a wide variety of students, organizations, and nonprofits that served them. Hall noted that the law does not directly target student groups themselves. But by closing resource centers that served these populations, the infrastructure they depended on had been decimated. 

“A lot of those student groups received their funds to do their annual activities from those centers and from those DEI offices, and so when they closed down, those groups, either had to figure out how to continue without funding, find a new place to get funding, such as turning to public fundraising or finding somewhere else on campus that might be willing to help them, or they shut down,” Hall said. 

Which Centers and Programs Closed Down?

• Lamar University, Beaumont, LU Office of Global Diversity & Inclusive Excellence
• Texas A&M University, College Station, Campus Pride Center
• Texas Southern University, Houston, TSU Pride Center
• Texas Tech, Lubbock, Office of LGBTQIA Education and Engagement 
• Texas Women’s University, Diversity Inclusion and Outreach office
• University of Houston, Houston, LGBTQ+ Resource Center 
• University of Houston–Clear Lake, Pasadena, Office of Student Diversity, Equity and Inclusion 
• University of North Texas, Denton, Pride Alliance
• University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, LGBTQ+ Program
• University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Gender and Sexuality Center
• University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Galerstein Women’s Center
• University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Office of Inclusive Excellence

‘Their Voice and Their Communities Ripped Apart’

One victim of the closure of the Gender and Sexuality Center at UT Austin was the Kind Clinic, a nonprofit offering sexual health services like PrEP, STI testing and gender-affirming care in Austin, San Antonio and Dallas areas, as well as virtually throughout the state. (Editor’s Note: Kind Clinic, a program of Texas Health Action, underwrites “Big & Bright,” The Barbed Wire’s coverage of queer life in Texas. All editorial decisions are made solely by The Barbed Wire’s editorial team with no input from Kind Clinic or Texas Health Action.) But for four years, beginning in 2020, Kind was able to offer testing services on a weekly basis in the Gender and Sexuality Center. 

Steven Tamayo, director of community health for Texas Health Action, the nonprofit that operates Kind clinics around the state, said the resource center offered an important opportunity to reach LGBTQ+ students where they already gathered on campus. Even though STI testing is available through the university’s official health services, LGBTQ+ students in particular, may hesitate to approach them. One 2024 survey by the healthcare polling nonprofit KFF found that one-third of LGBTQ+ adults have been mistreated by medical providers, compared with just 9% of the general population. The Kind Clinic helped create a safe space for its patients. 

“Over the four years of that partnership, that service became really a consistent and trusted access point for students, particularly for those who may have not felt comfortable accessing traditional health care settings, either because of medical mistrust, or maybe they had been misgendered or dead named at the doctor before,” Tamayo told The Barbed Wire. “That can be very triggering.”

In addition, since sex education isn’t part of the standard curriculum at most Texas high schools, Tamayo said it was often the first opportunity to reach students with accurate information about safer sex and sexually-transmitted infections. 

“Not only did that reduce barriers to accessing care, but it allowed us to get in front of folks who had never been tested before, folks who had just started exploring their bodies,” said Tamayo.

With the closure of the resource center, Kind lost access to the support and office space necessary to operate directly on campus. They’ve since partnered with the University Baptist Church, which neighbors the University of Texas at Austin campus, to offer testing services, but this still took them further from the student body than before. 

Tamayo said the consequence of cuts like these “isn’t abstract, it shows up as additional barriers. It shows up as delayed testing, missed opportunities for prevention services, and more complex access to sexual health services.”

Joel Astbury is a University of Texas at Austin student who made regular use of Kind’s testing services. “They’re trying to deconstruct any sort of spaces for marginalized folks, or any sort of power that they might have,” Astbury told The Barbed Wire.

Astbury said, from an on the ground perspective, SB17 feels linked to numerous other attacks on his ability to freely express himself as a queer student, from crackdowns on campus free speech to what he sees as an overall conservative turn in campus politics. 

“Their end goal, which I think is really obvious, … is to turn the college campus into a conservative powerhouse,” Astbury said.

Arshia Papari, a UT Austin junior who is running for Texas State Representative in House District 49 on the Green Party ticket, who also made use of the campus’ shuttered resource centers. He told The Barbed Wire  that students believe the administration rushed to comply, even going overboard in implementation, rather than fighting the law for their students’ best interests. 

“It’s because the basis of UT Austin’s administration has always been tied to the state — and to the political winds and leanings of the state,” Papari said. “We’re regarded as the most progressive university in the state, and folks think we’re all very crazy socialists here in (UT) Austin, but in reality, the administration of the university is very hardcore conservative, and has become more and more conservative by the day.” 

Papari said students are “traumatized by having their voice and their communities ripped apart from them.” 

Astbury said he feels less safe on campus today than he did before the law went into effect, and thinks women, students of color, and other marginalized groups feel the same, “because if they have less resources, if they have less of an ability to advocate for themselves, that makes them easier to manipulate.”

The Last Drag Show at UT Arlington?

Even though LGBTQ+ student organizations are not technically banned, between cuts to funding and heightened public scrutiny on anyone perceived to be associated with ‘DEI,’ it often feels impossible to operate, students and experts told The Barbed Wire. These laws have given rise to further policies designed to limit organizations’ activities, and creates an atmosphere where they feel under heightened scrutiny for any event, students said. 

Campus drag bans have been the subject of multiple freedom of speech lawsuits, with one notoriously conservative judge comparing campus drag performances to “blackface.” The story of the last drag show on the University of Texas at Arlington Campus, and the dissolution of the Queer Social Work Association, illustrates how these policies eliminate student legacies. 

When Elwim Sorto, the social work association’s cofounder and president, enrolled as an undergraduate at UT Arlington in 2023, he called the school’s LGBTQ+ Program “amazing.” But to Sorto, the school’s social work program seemed to have an obvious gap: “We have military social work, we have gerontology, you know, we have family child welfare. So what about queer social work? And so me and some friends went ahead and created the Queer Social Work Association.” 

The university’s LGBTQ+ Program had a years-long tradition of hosting drag shows as part of on-campus events, and Sorto didn’t want their joyful presence to disappear when the program shuttered, so the Queer Social Work Association decided to keep them going. 

“We were tasked right with keeping drag on campus, this tradition, to keep it moving and because it now just relied on all the powers of the student organizations,” Sorto said.

As a way of helping the LGBTQ+ community find renewed strength under constant attack, the organization hosted an empowerment fair themed around “Queer Sex and Power” in February 2025, which would feature safer sex resources, STI testing, storytelling, and more. It was a struggle to find funding, but Sorto made it clear that the event was supported by students and private donors, not campus funds. 

Still, as the event approached, other campus organizations and services, like the campus counseling department, dropped out at the last minute. Sorto said the event drew unwanted attention, including violent threats and eventually, a letter from Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare to the Board of Regents, threatening the university if they continued to host drag events, which he referred to as performances designed to “denigrate women” by reducing them to “stereotypes and body parts.” As a result, the university system instituted a ban on drag performances, and the Queer Social Work Association had to cancel a second, future event they had planned. 

Deja Dubois, the drag queen who performed at that final drag show on the UT Arlington campus, flat-out rejected the idea that her performance was either sexually charged or meant to insult womanhood, she told The Barbed Wire. 

“I didn’t think there was going to be any issues with what I was doing because I was in a full turtleneck floral gown with gloves, and I didn’t have any skin showing, babe, and I had a beehive on my head … I was padded down more than your grandma’s couch,” Dubois said. For her performance, Dubois, who also works with the Dallas Opera, sang “Believe” by Cher and “Como La Flor” by Selena. 

Dubois graduated from UT Arlington in 2022 with a degree in music and vocal performance, and she said it’s disturbing how attitudes about her art form have changed in recent years. She’d performed on campus before, and even more frequently wore her drag makeup there, without facing issues. 

“We are here serving the student body and for (queer) representation, and I’m being told that I’m being too much, or that I’m being profane and that I’m inappropriate when all I’m doing is what any biological woman would do … which is … sing a song,” Dubois said.

Sorto said he felt like the Queer Social Work Association faced intense scrutiny from the school administration in the wake of the Queer Sex and Power event. In October, during LGBTQ+ History Month, the group decided to shut down, publishing an open letter to the university calling its administration out for their pattern of attacks. 

“This was not done out of defeat but out of self respect,” the letter read. “It is a statement against the kind of surface level allyship that celebrates queer students when it’s convenient and marginalizes them when it is not.”

Sorto said the action was an attempt to reclaim their power by going out with dignity. “Instead of giving into the system, we were like, ‘this is what you’re missing from your system, this is what your school has lost.”

Dubois, for her part, pushed back on the idea that she would be the last drag queen at UT Arlington or any other campus, when queer people are so plentiful in Texas. And, just as she did, they might someday duck into the music building to apply their fabulous drag makeup before a show.

“The queens are still out everywhere, period, whether people like it or not,” she said. “There are gender nonconforming people, there are nonbinary people, there’re trans people that are just living their lives, walking their streets, walking the halls everywhere at UT Arlington.”

‘We Will Yell With You’

There’s no way to paint a rosy picture of what LGBTQ+ life is like on campus at many of our public universities today. Many services, valued advisors, and classes have simply disappeared. But in some cases, student groups, often with support of their local off-campus community, have been able to mitigate the damage — and even reach new people.

In the wake of the closure of the Campus Pride Center at Texas A&M University, the student Queer Empowerment Council, a coalition of student organizations, has worked together to pick up many of the activities the center once offered, according to Katie Stewart, executive director of Pride Community Center, a virtual LGBTQ+ community hub that organizes events in the College Station area. However, after the campus resource center closed down, the school also cut funding to the Aggie Allies program, which trained faculty and staff to provide safe havens to LGBTQ+ students in crisis or facing problems at school. Those who completed the program received an ally placard they could display in their offices or classrooms as a way of showing their support. But after the anti-DEI law came into effect, the funding for the program disappeared.

“It, of course, created a lot of social anxiety with the students, but it also affected the faculty and staff as well,” Stewart said. “You can tell when people are hit by this stuff and it’s weighing on them. I know I have been affected by it.”

The Aggie Allies program first formed over two decades ago, after the death of a queer student on campus. Stewart said, even though no one specifically told them to take it on, it was a “no brainer” for the Pride Community Center to step up to replace the program. “We were playing emotional catch up with what was happening to (students) and trying to be a supportive space, I mean, that’s what we do, but the fact is that the law created so much more need for (Aggie Allies).” 

Amber Mastrobattista recently became the president of the board of directors for the center, and previously worked as a graphic designer for Texas A&M, where she’d attended the Aggie Allies training. As a board member, she spearheaded the rebranding of the program from an official A&M project, including creating a new safe space placard. Nowadays, participants are drawn from both faculty and the surrounding community, and training is held during nights and weekends. 

“It’s still Aggie Allies, because A&M doesn’t own the term Aggie, and our philosophy is that Aggie is a feeling, it’s a spirit, it’s a value. It’s more than just, you know, a mascot or being part of the university,” Mastrobattista told The Barbed Wire. 

She added that the cutbacks and cultural shift caused by the anti-DEI law created an atmosphere that was more permissive of attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, as well as queer and trans faculty, such as the recent high profile case in which a student filmed a teacher who was later fired for teaching about trans identities, in a scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of Texas A&M’s president under pressure from the right. 

“At the state and the federal level, they are looking for our young to become these whistleblowers for things that they don’t agree with, not necessarily things that are being done unlawfully,” Mastrobattista said.

Until laws change to allow these kinds of activities back on campus, queer and trans students will depend on the aid of groups like the Pride Community Center. 

 “We know that you’re going through the same thing that we’re going through and if you want to yell into the ether, we will yell with you,” Mastrobattista said.

If there’s been one benefit to the change, it’s that in taking over the “Aggie Allies,” the program is now open to everyone in the community who wants to protect their queer and trans neighbors, whether they’re part of the university or not. 

“We have people ask us, ‘Well, I don’t attend A&M, is it okay if I still come [to the training] and we said absolutely, you know, being in Aggieland means that you are an Aggie,” Mastrobattista said.

Despite the exhaustion that comes from supporting the LGBTQ+ community in 2026, Stewart hopes their messaging can reach an even wider audience, including students of all ages. 

“With Valentine’s (Day) coming up, what we most want is empowering messages, not just messages of love, but messages of you are worthy, you are important.”

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