Or on campus

Amidst a statewide Texas push to cast parents of trans children as child abusers, a pair of fraternal twins heading up the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) are under fire for using student-group resources to push transphobic campaigns at their respective colleges.

The twins, Kelly and Jake Neidert, manage communications for YCT chapters at the University of North Texas and Baylor, respectively. Kelly, who has been at the center of several anti-trans controversies on her campus, faces growing calls from her fellow students to be expelled for allegedly making the environment inhospitable to trans students.

Kelly has also received support from former Proud Boys lawyer Jason Lee Van Dyke, who has his own long history of anti-LGBTQ comments.

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Van Dyke’s desire to help a far-right student group is not out of character for him. Back in 2007, years after having been kicked out of Michigan State University for weapons charges, he lent legal aid to the now-infamous chairman of MSU Young Americans for Freedom, white nationalist lawyer Kyle Bristow. (Leading up to and after the tragedy in Charlottesville during the violent Unite the Right rally, Bristow helped construct a network of white nationalist lawyers around the country aimed at bringing white supremacists to speak on college campuses. He founded the now defunct Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas, of which Van Dyke was named the Director of Legal Advocacy in 2016.) In 2007, MSU YAF became the first student group in the United States to be designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

With Bristow’s support, the MSU YAF chapter carried out strikingly similar tactics of activism and provocation as YCT is doing today at the University of North Texas. They chalked up sidewalks, distributed provocative flyers for events aimed at capturing undocumented students, and turned lecture halls into makeshift culture-war zones that required their escort by police through angry crowds.

Also, totally incidentally…

On Saturday, during a meeting with the Young Conservatives of Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott stated that trans and gender nonconforming (GNC) teachers must be “ended” in the state. This statement follows crackdowns on transgender teachers in various Republican-controlled states in the United States. Book bans, “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, and anti-drag laws have increasingly been weaponized against all transgender and GNC individuals, especially within educational settings. In Texas, many of these laws have been blocked due to being likely unconstitutional; however, this has not prevented the governor from making one of his strongest statements yet in support of overt discrimination toward transgender people.

The statement, first reported by journalist Steven Monacelli, addresses a teacher in a small town in Texas. Abbott, who repeatedly refers to the teacher as a “man dressed as a woman,” states that the teacher’s mere presence “normalizes the concept” of being transgender or GNC—a concept Gov. Abbott then asserts the state should try to prohibit. He states, “This kind of behavior is something we need to end in the state of Texas.”