Opinion: Amid hate and violence, Penn State must do more to support queer and trans students

Violence against queer and trans people — including the recent Club Q shooting — costs us our lives and robs us of our safety.

Campus Pride names University Park as a top LGBTQ-Friendly Campus. But at the highest level, support for queer and trans communities is sparse.

Nearly one-third of members of Penn State’s governing board publicly support anti-queer policies or politicians. Their lack of support continues Penn State’s anti-LGBTQIA+ legacy.

In the 1970s, students created the Homophiles of Penn State (HOPS). The administration suspended the organization, citing “legalities.” The “blatant repressive tactics” to silence queer students on campus—the ways Penn State’s leadership denied queer students’ “full humanity”— motivated faculty to quit.

In the 1980s, a longtime Penn State women’s basketball coach bragged to the Chicago Sun-Times that she forbade lesbian athletes in her program. This culture is hardly anomalous — as recently as 2019, Penn State ranked below all other Big 10 Schools on the Athlete Equality Index.

In the 1990s, Penn State became Pennsylvania’s last public university to add “sexual orientation” to their anti-discrimination policy — in a narrow, difficult-to-pass board vote.

Queer and trans students organized, hosted events, demanded community spaces, and made our campus safer. Penn State’s now-nationally-renowned support center for LGBTQIA+ students manifested from this advocacy.

Amidst homophobic speakers on campus and transphobic policies across the country, it is still students and student organizations, not the administration, fighting for a safe and inclusive university.

When convenient for their image, University leaders claim to support us. They call for us to “come together” in “a strong and visible statement against hate and intolerance.”

But since 2010, six trustees (three gubernatorial, one business and industry, and two agricultural) gave over $135,000 in political donations to sponsors of anti-queer legislation in Harrisburg including bills modeled after Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Today, all six agricultural trustees — one-sixth of the Board — won an election in which they were backed by the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, an organization that advocates for Harrisburg to “recognize marriage only between men and women as legal.” One trustee is the bureau’s vice president.

In the wake of another horrific assault on our community, we are grateful Penn State leaders acknowledged the event’s impact and offered counseling resources.

But without top-down institutional support and structural change, resources alone are inadequate.

Our institution’s most powerful people perpetuate the policies and rhetoric that motivate the anti-LGBTQIA+ violence Penn State allegedly denounces.

Is this what “diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging” looks like at Penn State?

We cannot carry the burden of creating an inclusive campus alone.

We want our leaders to acknowledge the rise in LGBTQIA+ hate crimes and their role in our persecution by supporting anti-queer and anti-trans policies and politicians. (This work should not be delegated to a token queer person.)

We want them to acknowledge Penn State’s less-than-perfect history and identify paths by which we can move forward together.

We want them to listen to community experts.

We want them to implement the Commission for LGBTQ Equity’s (CLGBTQE) 2021 recommendations.

We want them to construct networks to support queer and trans students beyond University Park and hire a coordinator to support trans and gender-diverse students, as the CLGBTQE recommended.

We want them to recruit supportive faculty by fielding a trans and gender-diverse faculty cluster hire and revising plans to create a Center for Racial Justice that promotes intersectional research, as the CLGBTQE recommended.

We want them to listen to students’ advocacy for institutional action to prevent sexual and gender-based harm, which disproportionately harms queer and trans students.

And — most importantly, if We Are committed to eradicating hate in all forms — we need leaders who stand up for our right to marry, exist, and live with dignity, rather than leaders who actively fight against us.

We need leadership that looks like, represents, works with, and advocates for us and the multiplicity of communities at Penn State.

We can’t wait.