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Dear Campus Community: April 2022

Dear campus community,

 

By now you have probably heard that the block U on campus which we wrapped in a pride flag for Pride Week was vandalized early the morning of March 31st, the Trans Day of Visibility. Affectionately referred to a as the “Pride U” in our office, this wrapping of the U is a new tradition we started just last year with the goal of raising the visibility of Pride Week as a campus-wide celebration of LGBTQIA+ people, history, and lives. The Progress Pride Flag was intentionally chosen to highlight the contributions of people of color and trans and non-binary people in our larger LGBTQIA+ communities, and to challenge the racism and transphobia that still too often persists in our communities.

Even only in year 2 of this tradition, we see the joy the Pride U brings through students lining up in groups to take pictures with it, students taking their graduation photos with it, prospective students and families and visitors engaging with it, and so on. It’s hard to reconcile a hostile act against this symbol of LGBTQIA+ power and community in the face of all the joy it brings, at a time of year when we come together as a campus to unapologetically celebrate contributions of LGBTQIA+ people and to take up space in ways we might not at other times of the year. It’s harder to know this vandalism exists in a larger culture of transphobic, homophobic, and racist acts that target our communities. This can be seen in everyday acts of hostility and harassment, such as another incident last week in which the Marriot library’s posters for their Drag Queen Story Hour were ripped down twice, and in the regular hate mail and harassment our staff at the LGBT RC navigate. It can also be seen in systemic violence against our communities, such as anti-trans legislation being perpetuated across the nation or in the racist epidemic of violence directed at trans women of color. We know that these specific acts of vandalism, harassment, and violence speak to a larger culture that dehumanizes and attacks LGBTQIA+ people, especially those in our community who are Black, Indigenous, People of Color and/or trans.

Here at the LGBT RC, we are galvanized by these moments to keep doing what we believe in: to keep pushing our office and our campus to be more responsive to the needs of LGBTQIA+ people, to center BIPOC and trans people in the new initiatives and support resources we create, to change our policies and processes at the university to be more equitable. We have been doing this by letting our Racial Justice Action Plan guide our work, by putting more resources into affinity programs for queer and trans students of color, by offering more education on the topics related to race and racism within LGBTQIA+ communities, by expanding our scholarships to better support trans students and students facing critical need. We make plans for the near future to expand our efforts for support trans and non-binary student community-building and support resources. We continue to work with our university leadership on eliminating barriers to LGBTQIA+ people’s academic, professional, and personal success at the University of Utah. We dream about how we will do more to create a campus culture in which LGBTQIA+ students thrive on their own terms.

We acknowledge that at times like these feelings of anger, disillusionment, distrust, and fatigue are valid. And yet we hope that you don’t stop there and that you find an outlet to make change in your sphere of influence. Specifically, we call on those in our campus community who hold more privileged identities to reflect on how they contribute to a campus that affirms and truly supports LGBTQIA+ people in all their diversity, and on actions they can take to be in solidarity with our BIPOC and trans community members.

To our LGBTQIA+ community, we love you. We love how your beauty can fill a space and transform it. We love the way you make our campus better through your leadership and your gifts. We love how you change the traditions of a place to be more expansive and affirming than they were previously. We love the way you challenge our campus to grow, sometimes through actively calling out inequity and sometimes by simply existing in this space that was not originally built with you in mind. We hope this Pride Week you have been able to find time for joy and reflection and community connection. We hope that you find these things outside of this week, and we won’t stop doing our part in making a campus on which LGBTQIA+ joy and celebration is found year-round.

 

Love,

The LGBT RC

Last Updated: 4/1/22