Anti-LGBTQ activist publicly targets specific UW student

An incident in the Wyoming Union Friday was just the latest anti-queer action on campus. LGBTQ community members say hateful activists are being emboldened by national rhetoric and local inaction.

The specific targeting of an individual trans student at the University of Wyoming by a longtime campus fixture is just one of many recent anti-LGBTQ incidents in Laramie.

On Friday, Laramie Faith Community Church Elder Todd Schmidt displayed a banner in the student union, naming and attacking a specific trans student and rejecting the validity of trans identities more generally.

The Branding Iron, UW’s student newspaper, reports other students surrounded the table, blocking the transphobic message and arguing with its purveyor.

Schmidt’s table in the Wyoming Union after he was made to remove the trans student’s name.

Dean of Students Ryan O’Neil arrived and asked Schmidt to remove the student’s name from his banner. University of Wyoming Police also responded to the scene.

Neither institutional authority asked Schmidt to leave and he continued tabling throughout the day.

Student Senator Tanner Ewalt said the incident Friday is only the latest example of university leadership failing to stand up for its LGBTQ students.

“It’s the obvious end result of the last week and the last several years on this campus of upper administration deciding that queer identities and queer students are a political question and not a question of humanity,” he said. “We had somebody come into our union, pay to be there, and use that platform to directly harass not a group of students, but a single student. And instead of immediately removing him, the university decided that all he needed to do was take down the name and that the general message of harassment was perfectly fine.”

It wasn’t the only attack queer UW students weathered last week.

Two separate events — a gender-affirming night for students and a queer dance at the UW Art Museum — were disrupted by agitators who showed up to mock and interfere with the scheduled activities.

Each individual event might seem small on its own, but Ewalt said they form a consistent, recognizable pattern — and carry special significance for Laramie’s LGBTQ community.

“Every queer student who goes to this school has an image of a queer man tied to a fence and beaten to death bouncing around in the back of their head every day,” he said.

Laramie is infamously known as the place where gay UW student Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered. The 1998 killing has colored the local gay community ever since; the community still hosts regular vigils for the slain 21-year-old, and the memory of that hate crime empowers locals, even today, to vociferously reject politicians whenever they attempt to spread anti-LGBTQ talking points at public events in Laramie.

But even here, the national rise in anti-gay and anti-trans activity is being felt.

Record numbers of anti-LGBTQ bills are being introduced and passed throughout the country, while deadly hate crimes grow steadily more prevalent. Last month, a gunman killed five people in a Colorado Spring gay bar; the rising tide of anti-LGBTQ sentiment empowered the gunman and has accelerated in the weeks since.

Laramie’s LGBTQ community fears similar violence, Ewalt said.

“Five queer people were gunned down in a safe space for them less than 300 miles from this university and we still haven’t been able to hold a vigil because we’re too afraid that somebody’s going to shoot it up,” he said.

(Such an event would not be without precedent for the UW campus. In 1970, UW students set out to host a solidarity vigil for the Kent State University students killed by the Ohio National Guard. In the ensuing standoff, Governor Stanley K. Hathaway’s National Guardsmen came seconds away from open-firing on the unarmed students occupying Prexy’s Pasture.)

Trans acceptance a matter of life and death

Trans people, and specifically trans youth, face a unique and heightened threat of suicide. About 52% of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the United States contemplated suicide in 2020, according to the Trevor Project’s 2021 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health.

And suicide among trans and nonbinary youth is far more likely in communities where those youth do not feel accepted or welcome.

“Transgender and nonbinary youth who reported having pronouns respected by all of the people they lived with attempted suicide at half the rate of those who did not have their pronouns respected by anyone with whom they lived,” the Trevor Project survey reports. “Transgender and nonbinary youth who were able to change their name and/or gender marker on legal documents, such as driver’s licenses and birth certificates, reported lower rates of attempting suicide. LGBTQ youth who had access to spaces that affirmed their sexual orientation and gender identity reported lower rates of attempting suicide.”

These findings are corroborated by earlier surveys from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Human Rights Campaign.

Schmidt’s direct targeting of a specific trans UW student included a flat-out rejection of her gender identity, insisting that she was not a woman. He inaccurately claimed to the student newspaper that his transphobic statement was backed by the science of biology.

But there is nothing in biology that rejects the validity of transgender identity, but quite a lot to affirm its validity. Biology doesn’t even establish a sex binary, as anti-LGBTQ activists often erroneously claim.

However wrong they are about the science, anti-trans claims can have real-world impacts — not just in the extreme cases of suicidal ideation, but in the everyday mental health of trans and nonbinary people.

In response to the Friday incident, UW’s Office of Multicultural Affairs offered up a list of resources available to students affected by Schmidt’s actions or by other anti-queer activities and rhetoric.

“The harm that was caused this week has left a lot of pain for many, if not all of us, in the community,” reads the statement from Multicultural Affairs. “For those who have been hurt and negatively impacted by the biased incidents this week, we are sorry. We share your feelings of frustration, mistrust, fear, anger, and hurt. We want you to know that you are not alone.”

But Senator Ewalt said many students do in fact feel alone or devalued because of the lackluster response from UW’s president and police force.

‘We honor free expression’ vs. ‘Hate has no home here’

Schmidt is a known person on campus. Sometimes labeled the “Creationist Guy” or the “Bible Guy,” Schmidt can frequently be found tabling in the Wyoming Union, a campus hub through which hundreds of students pass every day.

According to the University of Wyoming Fee Book, he pays at least $40 a day — but possibly $75 a day — for the privilege of tabling in the Union.

Schmidt uses the table to display a litany of books promoting his various beliefs — from biblical literalism and creationism to vaccine conspiracism. His table banner often quotes the Bible.

UW Spokesman Chad Baldwin said anyone is able to table in the Union as long as they complete the reservation process.

“I don’t believe we have any restrictions related to the nature of the organization or the content of their message, and that’s in part because we’re a public institution, a public space, and we honor and recognize free expression,” Baldwin said.

But he added that targeting a specific student is not allowed.

“The student is a member of a protected class and our general counsel’s office determined we would not allow that personal reference to stand,” Baldwin said. “Someone using a student’s name — that takes things to a different level. He was told that if he didn’t remove that reference, he would be escorted out of the building. He removed it. He complied. And so the rest of his message was not something we could restrict.”

Among those who countered Schmidt in the Union Friday were members of the targeted student’s own sorority. The UW Panhellenic Association, which governs the university’s fraternities and sororities, issued a statement Monday.

“Hate has no home here,” the association writes in a statement. “We are upset with the socio-political oppression as observed on Friday. We stand with the individual, the LGBTQIA+ community and any and all individuals affected by this event. You are not alone. We see you, we hear you and we will continue to stand with you.”

University police, president respond

UWPD received a call just before noon; when they responded, Schmidt had already removed the student’s name from the sign. The police did not ask Schmidt to leave.

“Really we were just there in a ‘preserve the peace’ type of role,” UWPD Chief Mike Samp said. “There’s a fine line between free speech and targeting an individual. That person had rented space and that was essentially the decision that was arrived at following consultation with the dean of students. Provided that individual is willing to remove that sign that targeted the student, then they would be allowed to stay.”

Samp said an officer remained nearby through the rest of the day.

“It created a bit of a disturbance and there were some upset students, so we had an officer there for a couple hours after that, just hanging around in the area to keep the peace,” he said.

UW President Ed Seidel was less willing to label recent incidents a ‘disturbance.’

“While the individual engaged in heated exchanges with students and perhaps others throughout the afternoon, these interactions were not in obvious violation of UW policies,” the president writes in a message to campus. “The Friday incident followed what we believe to be two unrelated incidents on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, in which members of UW’s LGBTQIA+ community observed what they perceived to be disruptive behavior from a small group of students at two separate campus events.”

Seidel’s letter states everyone should “feel they are welcomed and belong,” but also takes space to “reaffirm the university’s commitment to civil discourse.”

Ewalt said these vague statements do little to make queer students feel welcome and fail to counteract the threat at hand. He said he fears what anti-queer agitators might do if the efforts already underway to create more educational, medical and bureaucratic hurdles for gay and trans young people make significant headway in the Wyoming Legislature.

“If something like that happens … there is going to be another Matthew Shepard on this campus and we will have all seen it coming, we will have all been screaming about it,” he said. “And when it happens, the university will have the audacity to say, ‘Who could have seen this coming?’”