“As a public university, it is our responsibility to comply with all applicable federal and state laws and executive orders while balancing our duty to carry out our core missions of teaching, learning and research,” Williams wrote in the directive. “We will respectfully wait on a definitive ruling on litigation against other Texas universities from our federal courts to provide necessary guidance.”
The directive applies to all UNT campuses and facilities, including the primary campus in Denton, the Frisco satellite campus, the UNT Health Science Center in Fort Worth and both of the Dallas campuses. The decision came soon after the Texas A&M University and University of Texas systems banned drag shows across their facilities in compliance with President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order entitled, “Defending women from gender ideology extremism.”
Perhaps more now than ever before, a political target seems squarely placed on Texas drag queens, as a flurry of bills aimed at restricting drag performances have been filed over this session as well as the last one. In 2023, the state passed Senate Bill 12, which prohibited performers from dancing suggestively or wearing certain prosthetics in front of children, singling out drag performers without naming them. A court struck down the law almost immediately for being unconstitutional and infringing upon free speech.
Two student organizations had drag performances planned for this month at UNT, according to the Daily. One of the organizations, GLAD Queer Alliance (GLAD), has moved their scheduled show from a ballroom on the Denton campus to Rubber Gloves, a local concert venue.
"We had to completely reschedule our show to an off-campus venue," the President of GLAD, Ty'Rianna Simpson, wrote in an email to the Observer. "The day we found out we immediately got to work to secure a spot for our performers to still have the drag show. Luckily the venues around have been generous to offer spaces, and people since have offered a helping hand in any way they could."
The drag ban, Simpson explained, is emblematic of the university's recent reputation of conformation.
"The restrictions on the drag performances at UNT is a message that UNT itself will not advocate for [its] students," Simpson wrote. "UNT has been over-compliant to anything [regarding] DEI and the restrictions on the drag performances tell us that they inherently don’t care to uphold our free speech or freedom of expression."
Drag Bans Across Campuses
The Texas A&M University System sought to ban drag shows on all 11 university campuses in late February. The Board of Regents claimed that such performances are “offensive” and “demeaning.” The University of Texas System followed suit in early March.Similar to the GLAD annual drag show on UNT’s campus, a yearly drag pageant, Draggieland, at the flagship College Station campus was forced to scramble to find an off-campus host. However, one of the performers, Jessy B. Darling, told the Observer in March that community support for the show was strong.
“Scrolling through Facebook, everybody's posting about how we're still not going to back down,” Darling said. “I feel like this year since it is the inauguration year, I feel like a lot of people are more upset this time than they were in previous years. I feel like there's a lot more fire in everybody to fight this.”
A Judge Strikes Down The Ban on Draggieland
Immediately following the ban, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) filed for a temporary restraining order on behalf of the student organization that produces Draggieland, “These are students who are conveying to a very conservative campus community that there are LGBTQ members of this community, and there’s a space for them in this community,” FIRE Attorney Adam Steinbaugh said in court last month. “A lot of people have their own individual lines that they think that speech should not cross, but it’s not the government that gets to draw those lines.”
A federal judge ruled in favor of FIRE and allowed the pageant to proceed on campus on its originally scheduled date.
“A&M has consistently recognized in its policies on speech and conduct on its campuses that exposure to a variety of ideas, including ideas that may offend some or many listeners, is a critical part of the education it promises to provide,” Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas wrote in the opinion. “[Draggieland] is a ticketed event; only those who want to attend do so. Anyone who finds the performance or performers offensive has a simple remedy: don’t go.”
On March 27, Maria Maria was crowned the winner of Draggieland 2025 inside Texas A&M’s Rudder Theatre.
UNT Overcomplies
The University of North Texas has been a focal point of criticism for its “extreme” adoption of state and national executive orders that target minority communities. After the university dissolved its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion offices in compliance with Senate Bill 17, it doubled down on clearing DEI programs from its offerings. The school system gained heavy media attention when it changed the titles of courses to not include words like class, equity and race.“The situation at UNT is one of the most extreme cases of over-compliance with a censorship law we have ever seen,” Jeremy C. Young, PEN America’s Freedom to Learn program director, said in a statement. “SB 17 already restricts diversity initiatives and programming on campus, which is bad enough. But by extending the reach of this law into areas explicitly protected by the legislation itself, UNT is not only misinterpreting the law but also putting faculty members’ academic freedom in severe jeopardy.”
A university spokesperson told the Dallas Morning News that the course title changes were not in accordance with SB 17, but in February Wendy Watson, a longtime professor at the institution, told the Observer that such strict subordination has caused her to depart at the end of this semester.
“It doesn't make sense that we would need to dramatically change the titles and descriptions of that many courses in order to comply with standards that have been around for quite some time,” Watson said. “I don't know that the administration is purposefully deceiving us. I think one of the things that we've noticed with the implementation of SB17 is that there's a lot of decentralization at the process. I am not sure, I think none of us are sure, where the impetus for some of the compliance is coming from.”
