This week a federal judge stepped in to save a student-sponsored drag show at Texas A&M University. The need for that intervention shows that efforts to control on-campus speech, long decried by conservatives who complained of censorship by intolerant progressives, are a bipartisan phenomenon.
Men have been dressing as women in theatrical performances for millennia — a history that includes ancient Greek dramas, 16th century productions of Shakespeare’s plays, and popular films such as “Hairspray,” “Tootsie,” “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “White Chicks.” But the continuation of that tradition was too much for the Texas A&M Board of Regents, which last month banned “drag shows that involve biological males dressing as women” from “special event venues.”
That decree put the kibosh to Draggieland, an annual event sponsored by the Texas A&M Queer Empowerment Council. The organization had already reserved the Rudder Theatre at the university’s College Station campus and sold tickets for the show, which was scheduled for Thursday.
The theater previously had been available for a wide variety of events, including comedies, musicals, ballet, political speeches and a fraternity-sponsored beauty pageant. Although the theater had never rejected a reservation request, the regents unanimously decided that Draggieland was beyond the pale because it was “likely to create or contribute to a hostile environment for women,” thereby violating federal law and the university’s “anti-discrimination policy.”
The regents also cited President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order aimed at “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government,” which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had welcomed in a Jan. 30 letter instructing state officials that their policies must conform with “the biological reality that there are only two sexes.” The regents worried that allowing drag shows “may be considered promotion of gender ideology in violation of the Executive Order and the Governor’s directive.”
These concerns were legally and logically frivolous. It was utterly implausible that an annual event attended only by paying patrons could result in harassment “severe” and “pervasive” enough to create a “hostile environment,” and it was quite a stretch to suggest that cross-dressing in the context of a drag show denies the “biological reality” that Abbott is keen to uphold.
Even as the regents worried that Draggieland promoted “gender ideology,” they argued that it did not actually send any message at all — a point that was crucial to their position that canceling the event did not implicate the First Amendment. And even as they explicitly targeted a particular viewpoint, they denied that they were doing any such thing.
U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal had little trouble seeing through the double-talk. In the decision that allowed Draggieland to proceed as planned, she noted that federal courts had almost uniformly recognized drag shows as a form of constitutionally protected expression.
Rosenthal, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1992, is hardly a “Radical Left Lunatic”— the label that Trump reflexively applies to judges who disagree with him. Nor is U.S. District Judge David Hittner, a Ronald Reagan appointee who ruled that a Texas law “touted as a ‘Drag Ban'” was unconstitutional in a 2023 decision that Rosenthal cited.
“In recent years, the commitment to free speech on campuses has been both challenging and challenged,” Rosenthal noted. “There have been efforts from all sides of the political spectrum to disrupt or prevent students, faculty, and others from expressing opinions and speech that are deemed, or actually are, offensive or wrong.”
The victims of those efforts have included conservatives who condemn abortion, promote “a Christian perspective,” or chafe at speech restrictions in the guise of fighting “discriminatory harassment”—exactly the tactic that Texas A&M attempted in this case. Instead of picking up the unconstitutional weapons that have been deployed against them, conservatives who want to ensure their own protection should take a page from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which represented Draggieland’s sponsor in this case, by embracing an even-handed application of free speech principles.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine.
Send letters to letters@suntimes.com
Get Opinions content delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.