How Federal Policy Is Quietly Rewriting Queer Life on Campus

On a rainy Thursday evening in October, around fifty students and faculty gathered inside a theater at Arizona State University’s Tempe campus to hear John D’Emilio, an early scholar of gay, lesbian, and women’s studies, talk on the status of queer history in the United States. 

D’Emilio—whose 1988 book “Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America,” was used in the 2003 Supreme Court case striking down sodomy laws—visited at a moment when federal and state pressures have resulted in dismantling civil rights in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion. 

For queer people, their civil rights to healthcare, public accommodations, and travel are most pressing: Earlier this year, the Trump administration issued an executive order declaring only two recognized sexes in the U.S.— male and female—revising policies to remove other gender identifiers from federal forms. 

And while ASU continues to offer LGBTQ+ programming through academic degrees, community groups, and the Queer X Humanities initiative, the university is sending mixed signals about its willingness to comply with the administration’s demands.  

Queer X Humanities, who hosted the event, is an initiative of the ASU Humanities Institute launched in 2022 by co-directors Sa Whitley and Julia Himberg. It seeks to “[foster] queer and transgender scholarship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and critical dialogue about LGBTQIA2S+ culture, history, and politics.”

D’Emilio’s lecture, titled, “Finding Our Past: How LGBTQ History Has Grown as a Field of Study,” presented an overview of the discipline’s beginnings, largely born of women’s studies programs in the 1970s. According to D’Emilio, backlash against the LGBTQ+ community is often cyclical.

“Historians are not able to predict the future,” he told the audience, “but history teaches us that over the last 75 years, periods of intense repression lead to every stage of activism.”

“We're in this unprecedented situation where universities are being held hostage."
Mary Fonow, Emeritus Professor at Arizona State University

In March, ASU students and advocates alleged LGBTQ+ resources on university websites were disappearing or redirected to the Rainbow Coalition, a student-led coalition that advocates for the LGBTQ+ community on campus. University officials reject that resources have "disappeared" and instead say they’ve been consolidated. 

In April, ASU’s Global Education Office, which supports study abroad programs, altered language in digital resources that helped navigate LGBTQ+ students’ safety concerns in host countries. The resources changed “LGBTQIA” to “LGB”, removing references to trans and gender-nonconforming students. 

A spokesperson for ASU said the changes were made without university approval and the original language reinstated. Still, these incidents reflect a pattern under the second Trump administration of LGBTQ+ resources being modified by universities nationwide without clear explanation as to why. 

On October 1st, the Trump administration sent a handful of universities a proposal titled, “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” If signed, the compact would give the universities priority for federal grants in exchange for agreeing to a list of demands. 

Among the demands are that “institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes.”

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University of Arizona was one of nine schools who initially received the proposal. The university gave a soft rejection to the offer after significant pushback from university officials, student groups, and the Pima County Board of Supervisors, who described the proposal as an unacceptable attempt at federal overreach. 

ASU was not one of the universities who officially received the offer, but it was subsequently announced that they were in discussions with the administration over the compact and were asked to provide input. In an interview with the State Press, ASU President Michael Crowe signaled it is not likely they would sign the proposal, but he is committed to working with the administration to improve higher education. 

Although backlash against LGBTQ+ programs is not new, some aspects—like threatening or withholding federal funding in its entirety over such programs—are unprecedented, said academics in the field.  

Mary Fonow, Emeritus Professor at ASU, also attended D’Emilio’s lecture. She received her Ph.D in 1977 from Ohio State University and, like D’Emilio, was an early scholar in the field. In 2004, she joined ASU as Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, eventually founding ASU’s School of Social Transformation in 2008. 

She agreed that backlash is not new, but in prior years didn’t feel like it was ever that serious, adding that criticism against women’s studies in the past often revolved around reproductive rights. 

“The thousands of students that flocked to the courses was enough validation for me,” she said. 

But in the past five years, she said that’s changed. She never observed hostility towards the field in her decades in academia on the level that she sees it now. 

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“We're in this unprecedented situation where universities are being held hostage,” she explained. “They're being denied access to grants that are important for scientific research, for everybody's research. Really, I don't believe the American people wanted to see the destruction of universities or the takeover of universities.”

Fonow said she was not shy during her time at ASU about expressing to university administrators the need to protect programs. 

“Everybody was totally supportive and nobody [wanted] to undo the progress that’s been made,” she said. 

Now that she is retired and not regularly communicating with administrators, she’s not so sure. She said that if the schools continue to have events curated for LGBTQ+ communities, “I know they have to be cautious about it.”