After a yearslong legal battle, West Texas A&M University students can finally host a drag show. On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed a lower court’s decision allowing the university to block an LGBT student group from hosting a charity drag show on campus.
“This is a victory not just for Spectrum WT, but for any public university students at risk of being silenced by campus censors,” J.T. Morris, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment group that filed a lawsuit on behalf of the student group, said in a Monday press release.
The conflict began in March 2023, when Spectrum WT, an LGBT-focused student club, sought permission to use Legacy Hall, a university venue, to host a drag show that would raise funds for the Trevor Project, a charity that addresses suicide in the LGBT community. While the university had allowed a wide range of events to take place in Legacy Hall—including religious events, a congressional candidate forum, and a local livestock show—the university’s president, Walter Wendler, stepped in to prevent the drag show from going forward.
“Does a drag show preserve a single thread of human dignity? I think not,” Wendler wrote in a university-wide email. “As a performance exaggerating aspects of womanhood (sexuality, femininity, gender), drag shows stereotype women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others and discriminate against womanhood. Any event which diminishes an individual or group through such representation is wrong.”
Later in the email, Wendler even admitted that the show is First Amendment–protected, noting that he would oppose it “even when the law of the land appears to require it.” That month, FIRE filed a lawsuit alleging that Wendler’s actions obviously violated the First Amendment. However, a district court denied FIRE’s request for a preliminary injunction.
FIRE appealed, and on Monday, the 5th Circuit sided with the students, finding that while the lower court which reversed the injunction “held that it was not clearly established that all drag shows are inherently expressive and therefore implicate the First Amendment, and President Wendler’s cancellation of the drag show was not objectively unreasonable given the show’s ‘potential lewdness,'” the drag show was in fact “protected expression” whose censorship must pass strict scrutiny.
“President Wendler did not argue, either before the district court or on appeal, that restricting the intended drag show would survive strict scrutiny,” wrote Judge Leslie H. Southwick, in the majority opinion, adding that “the plaintiffs have shown a substantial threat of irreparable harm to their First Amendment rights absent an injunction against President Wendler.”
Despite several attempts to crack down on drag performances in recent years, this latest court decision affirms what everyone—even Wendler himself—knew all along: Just because you don’t like drag doesn’t mean you can ban it.
