This story is part of our monthly series, Campus Dispatch. Read the rest of the stories in the series here.
As the conservative Supreme Court plans to hear next term United States v. Skrmetti, challenging Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, it’s clear that transgender rights in the South are not only up for debate, but under serious threat. Colleges and universities, along with establishment politicians, are just a few of the many institutions of power in the country that are unwilling to listen to the demands of young transgender people and medical professionals.
But in Tennessee, anti-trans youth attacks are nothing new.
In 2022, when I was a student at Vanderbilt University, my campus became the center of an anti-trans media frenzy. Matt Walsh, a conservative podcaster and columnist for the right-wing publication the Daily Wire, targeted Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Gender Confirmation Care Clinic, which is one of the only supercentered health care centers available in the South.
What started as a tweet thread of conspiracy theories endorsed by conservative lawmakers like Tennessee Governor Bill Lee quickly turned into a major media story about Vanderbilt doctors performing “genital mutilation.” It has led to massive amounts of online attacks, threats and trolling, alongside anti-FGM campaigns by neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists and right-wing extremists in the state capital.
Online threats have also led to the closing of the KC Potter Center, a queer-affirming space on campus, and campus LGBTQ+ leaders reported threats and safety concerns to us. Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s transgender health clinic even had to take down its website for at least a month.
Amid these attacks on both undergraduates and health professionals, our university he remained completely silent until students began agitating through a public poster campaign. Vanderbilt eventually issued one statement days later, he said the medical center and the university were separate entities, but did not address the issue of transgender rights on campus and in Tennessee in general. A student’s anonymous post on Vanderbilt Hustler shed light on how transgender Vanderbilt students I felt:
“I was afraid of the legislators, who seek to uproot me. I was afraid of the Vanderbilt administrators, who, except for a late and vague email from [Chancellor Daniel] Diermeier, keep eerily quiet. I was afraid of my peers and how those I was out to would begin to see me. I was afraid of myself, and I began to believe, after hearing it from the legislators over and over again, that I was something worth eliminating.”
These incidents continued on and off our campus. Next summer, Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) hijacked transgender patient records to Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s office, again with little public recognition from the university. Recently, the local station NPR reported that the US Senate Finance Committee found that VUMC did not do enough to protect its patients during this event. The article cites a number of cases in which hospitals blocked such requests from Skrmetti, citing patient privacy concerns. VUMC is currently facing a lawsuit and a federal investigation over its decision to hand over sensitive records.
But none of these incidents have stopped the university from promoting anti-trans figures. In December 2023, during my senior year, Vanderbilt invited Michael Knowles—another right-wing figure associated with the conservative group Turning Point USA—to speak. At the event, he made a series of inflammatory statements, including calling for “elimination of transsexuals”, and “gave thanks” to settler colonialism. Knowles’s remarks were not met with any affirmative statement from the university and, indeed, our chancellor famous as a measure of free speech on campus.
This approach to addressing forms of anti-trans and right-wing activism is not indicative of a centrist, free-speech position. Instead, it opens the door for right-wing base building and attacks on all marginalized people across Tennessee. Since Walsh’s campaign began, Tennessee has banned gender-affirming care for minors—and federal appeals courts have supported them.
At Middle Tennessee State University, a meeting of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) last year was disrupted by “Patriot Youth and the Tennessee Active Club, the latter a local paramilitary group that outwardly identifies as Nazi,” according to the Nashville scene. Their intention was to make students feel uncomfortable about their participation in left-wing political action by posting the students’ faces and names on right-wing networks, with clear anti-trans undertones. Near the end of the confrontation, one of the right-wing rioters threw a homophobic slur at one of the students.
As YDSA organizer and former Middle Tennessee State Democrat Elizabeth Cannan-Knight pointed out to me, trans people are being attacked with bills from the right-wing establishment and targeted by neo-Nazis at events on our campuses. But many of our colleges and universities, as well as the Democratic Party leadership, “were showing up at events touting big rainbow symbols, but behind closed doors they would say we shouldn’t post about trans issues because they were ‘losing issues.’
Institutions like colleges and universities, and their “neutral” approach to addressing transphobia and neo-Nazism on their campuses, despite their calls for diversity and inclusion, are a microcosm of a shift toward “centrist” rhetoric in supposedly progressive spaces as a whole.
Just last month, the Biden administration succumbed to far-right terrorism, as did the universities of Tennessee, publicly declaring it contralateral surgeries for transgender minors. This is in stark contrast to messages in the campaign trail, where, before he left, President Joe Biden positioned himself as a champion of LGBTQ+ rights in contrast to Donald Trump. The statement was met with public backlash by LGBTQ+ advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign, which said it was “wrong on science and wrong on substance” and “inconsistent with other steps the administration has taken to support transgender youth.”
These campus incidents and changes in policy and discourse do not occur in a vacuum. Every time we allow the “discussion” of transgender existence, we normalize right-wing conspiracy theories about genital mutilation and child abuse to permeate the national discourse. These theories ultimately shift the sphere of acceptable discourse to the right, effectively threatening trans people through policy reversals.
Now, Samantha and Brian Williams of Nashville are complaint the state, citing their own experience watching their daughter struggle with her gender identity before accessing “lifesaving health care.” The final decision of the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti it could delay trans rights even further, especially for young trans southerners.
Unless and until institutions can correct course in how they choose to address dangerous rhetoric that endangers transgender people, they can certainly expect prospective students, patients, faculty and, in the case of Democrats, voters , to take their money and support elsewhere.
CORRECTION: Elizabeth Cannan-Knight’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.
