When Adrienne Hunter was an undergraduate transitioning from male to female, there was one place on campus she knew she could go to for judgment-free support: the Gender and Sexuality Center.
The center, which catered to the needs of LGBTQ+ students at the University of Texas at Austin, helped her change her name in university systems and pointed her to resources like the counseling and the health centers.
“There are so many little things about transitioning that are excruciatingly painful to endure, and I didn’t have family or financial support,” recalled Hunter, who graduated in 2022. “The center was there for me.”
Future students may have a harder time finding such support. The Gender and Sexuality Center, which opened in 2004, closed at the beginning of this year — the victim of a new state law, SB 17, that bans diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at Texas’s public colleges.
In the space that housed the Gender and Sexuality Center is a new “Women’s Community Center,” with a mission to “be a place for Longhorns of all genders to connect, find resources, and get support around experiences of intersectionality, community, and gender solidarity,” according to a statement posted on its Instagram page.
That seemingly semantic shift could have big consequences for students. Though the new center is staffed by former employees of the Gender and Sexuality Center, who students, faculty, and alumni say remain committed to serving the LGBTQ+ population, some fear the new name could confuse or even alienate some students, particularly those who don’t identify as women.
“I’m really sad to see it renamed because it could deter a lot of people from going,” said Elizabeth R. Gillam, a senior who last year co-directed UT-Austin’s Queer and Trans Student Alliance. “It was a safe space for a lot of people.”
And it’s not just the name that’s changing. Because SB 17 bars public-college employees from offering programs that reference race, sexual orientation, or gender identity, the center can no longer host activities that are specific to the LGBTQ+ community. Student organizations can take over that work, but advocates say that’s a lot to ask.
Many colleges in Texas and Florida, a state with similar constraints on DEI initiatives, are confronting urgent questions as they race to rebrand, repurpose, or shutter centers focused on race and gender identity to comply with new state laws. Colleges in other states, including Utah, could soon face these questions, too:
If students don’t realize that a campus center serves them, will they miss out on its resources, staff support, and programs? And can a center truly support LGBTQ+ students without ever mentioning their identities?
Stephen Russell, a professor of human ecology at UT-Austin who studies the health and well-being of LGBTQ+ youth, said the loss of spaces designated for LGBTQ+ students could have an impact on their retention in college. Research shows that students do better in school when they feel safe, and LGBTQ+ centers make them feel both safe and seen.
“Representation matters,” said Russell.
UT-Austin isn’t the only college that has dismantled its gender and sexuality center in recent months. One of the first to act was the University of Houston, which announced in August that it was replacing its LGBTQ+ resource center with a “Center for Student Advocacy and Community.”
Texas A&M University followed in the fall, announcing that its Pride Center would become the “Student Life Center.” Another identity-based resource at Texas Tech University, the Black Cultural Center, became the “Student Enrichment Center.”
UT-Austin waited until mid-December, two weeks before the anti-DEI law took effect, to make its plans public, writing in a letter to the campus community that the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, which oversaw the Gender and Sexuality Center, would become the Division of Campus and Community Engagement. The letter, which made no mention of the center, put a positive spin on the change, saying the new name would “better reflect our work’s new scope, nature and reach,” emphasizing “that we are here to serve all Longhorns and all Texans.”
Lawyers for the university tested several new names for the Gender and Sexuality Center, trying to determine what would pass legal muster while still allowing staff to support LGBTQ+ students, said Lisa Moore, chair of the department of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, who was privy to some of those conversations.
It’s like a flashback to 1987 or something.
University officials ultimately settled on “Women’s Community Center” because SB 17 doesn’t apply to gender-based programming, only programming based on race and sexuality, said Karma Chávez, chair of the department of Mexican American and Latina/o studies.
Now a space that was created to cut against the gender binary has a name with an explicit reference to it.
To Chávez, the new name feels like a throwback to the ’80s, when women’s centers and lounges were common on college campuses.
“It’s like a flashback to 1987 or something,” she said. “We changed these names for a reason in the ’90s and 2000s.”
One of those reasons was that the centers came under attack from critics on the right, who claimed they violated Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. Some faculty wonder if the newly named center could face a similar fate.
As the revamped names have taken effect, those critics have weighed in again — dismissing the changes as window dressing. They suspect colleges of doing “the bare minimum to ensure compliance and seeking ways that they can still advance the initiatives of DEI under other names and the auspices of other offices,” as Adam Ellwanger, a professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, put it to The Chronicle in November.
But defenders of DEI efforts say that language matters, and point to substantive changes that the law has precipitated.
“Semantics play a big role in how communities are built. The way something is promoted can make someone feel at home or not at home,” said Sameeha Rizvi, a recent UT-Austin alum and former advocacy director of QTBIPOCA, a group that represents and supports LGBTQ+ students of color at the university.
And the renaming of the Gender and Sexuality Center is “a lot more than semantics — it’s a resource-based change,” she said.
Despite their reputation today as progressive bastions, college campuses haven’t always been welcoming to LGBTQ+ students. Sexual orientation is the second most motivating bias for hate crimes at colleges, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and close to half of transgender undergraduates in a recent survey said they had experienced sexual harassment.
Even before the passage of the anti-DEI law in Texas, LGBTQ+ students at UT-Austin were more likely than their straight or cisgender peers to say they felt unsafe on campus or were uncomfortable expressing their sexual orientation, a survey and focus group conducted in 2022 found.
Students who were aware of the Gender and Sexuality Center spoke highly of it, but more than 40 percent of respondents didn’t know it existed.
In a report that outlined the survey findings, students called for more money and space for the center, as well as the hiring of an additional staff member to conduct outreach to students. At the time, the center had three full-time staff and a shared administrator, along with two graduate assistants, four student workers, and a varying number of interns. Its budget in 2019-20 was just over $180,000, according to the report.
Even as a scared little freshman, it was a place I knew I could always feel safe.
KB Brookins, who worked at the center from the fall of 2019 to the summer of 2021, described it as “small but mighty,” with a dedicated staff that made the most of limited resources. The doors were always open for students to drop in, said Brookins, who’s now a graduate student. The center offered weekly interest groups — Trans Thursdays and Feminist Fridays, and a women of color support group — along with weekly testing for sexually-transmitted infections.
Today, the website for the Women’s Community Center doesn’t mention Trans Thursday or the group for women of color; only Feminist Friday currently remains. The center’s staff didn’t respond to requests for comment on changes taking place there. A calendar for the division still listed Trans Thursday as recently as January, but that page has since been taken down.
One program that is definitely discontinued is ally training, a workshop where faculty, staff, and students could learn about identity formation, pronoun use, and other issues important to their LGBTQ+ students and peers. A listserv of faculty and staff who self-identified as allies was also taken down.
Faculty and staff who completed the ally training would receive a sticker that they could post in their office, a signal to LGBTQ+ students that they were welcome there. As of 2023, nearly 1,400 faculty and students had gone through the training. (Employees can still choose to display an ally sticker or Pride flag.)
The center will also no longer provide financial or logistical support to two events that have bookended the UT experience for LGBTQ+ students: Bloq Party, a welcome event, and the Lavender graduation ceremony.
Vox Jo Hsu, an assistant professor in the department of rhetoric and writing and a faculty affiliate of the LGBTQ Studies program, said the rebranding “buries the resources” available to LGBTQ+ students. Hsu said it will be up to faculty to ensure that students know the center is still there for them.
Hsu described the scramble to comply with SB 17 as “a tremendous energy drain,” adding “unfortunately, I think that’s part of the goal.”
If opponents of DEI “can drain us of our energy, and divert our attention into responding, they can delay new developments” in DEI, Hsu said. “We can spend entire semesters not doing anything, because we’re not sure what we can do.”
In an Instagram post, the Women’s Community Center said that student groups can still host events and workshops focused on race, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
But some faculty and alumni said it will be hard to offer such activities and trainings consistently without institutional support.
“A lot of students come from low-income backgrounds, so taking on work without pay is incredibly difficult. And they have to focus on academics,” said Rizvi, the former student leader. “You’re putting so much pressure on students. I think it will have a detrimental impact on their mental health.”
The law has also hindered student organizations like QTBIPOCA, which no longer receives financial support from the university. Christian Mira, the group’s newly named financial director, said its activities are on hold until it can raise enough money to resume its work. Last year, QTBIPOCA received $8,000 from the Multicultural Engagement Center, which after more than 30 years has now closed as a result of SB 17, while the university considers “how best to use the space.”
Mira said other student groups organized around race and sexual identity are in a similar position.
Isaac James, a 2022 graduate of UT who was co-director of the Queer and Trans Student Alliance, said he worries that future students won’t have the same access to resources and explicit support that the Gender and Sexuality Center provided him.
“It was just a vibrant space where anyone could walk in and have immediate community, where we knew we’d be loved and accepted,” said James, a 2023 Rhodes scholar. “Even as a scared little freshman, it was a place I knew I could always feel safe.”
James said he has tremendous confidence in the center’s staff but is concerned that they will be limited in the outreach they can do under the law.
And the center will have to do its work without the help of key partner organizations. Due to a loss of funding and leadership, the Queer and Trans Student Alliance has disbanded.
