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If you do a simple Google search of Turning Point USA, you would be met by this message on their main page that reads, “TPUSA is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to identify, educate, train and organize students to promote freedom.” This seems innocent enough. I mean, who doesn’t love the idea of promoting freedom?

However, this claimed agenda on student freedom is juxtaposed by the TPUSA stands students were forced to walk past this week on The Plaza of the Lory Student Center. Signs with the face of Chloe Cole, a known de-transitioner, were labeled with such slogans as, “Exposing the Trans Agenda,” and, “THE truth not YOUR truth.” These statements made me ponder what exactly the TPUSA agenda truly is as well as lit a fire in me to do my part to expose it.

Freedom, as defined by the Oxford Languages, is “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.” As an organization that claims to organize students to promote freedom, it baffles me at what a simple Google search could educate one on. Their anti-trans campaign is absolutely in direct hypocrisy of their own mission statement. If freedom is the right to act without hindrance, isn’t the opposition to allow others, specifically adults, to choose — yes, to choose is indeed an action — how they identify with their gender directly in violation of this?

Furthermore, TPUSA hosted this de-transitioner in a Colorado State University classroom March 27.  I can understand protecting First Amendment rights on the quad, as it is public space, but I do not understand reserving space within our university for such an event. How is this campaign not bordering the line of hate speech? Talking to my fellow peers who identify as trans, they feel directly under attack, especially with Transgender Day of Visibility taking place March 31. How can we as a university claim consistency when we follow unconstitutional bans on such language regarding DEI and the climate crisis but allow an anti-trans group to preach in students’ safe spaces?

How does the removal of gender-affirming care and maps of gender-neutral sites without informing CRCs — which, yes, have since been reinstated — prove to be more in line with freedom and the First Amendment? How can we claim we are protecting our constitutional rights when it comes to hosting a hate group that isolates and ostracizes an already marginalized group on campus but not when it comes to giving these marginalized people basic freedoms?

I ask you, CSU, what side of history do you want to be on? The side that protects freedom only for the few? I believe we are better than that. If Rams protect Rams, why are we leaving so many of our student body behind and in persecutive darkness?

If you stand for freedom, I will stand with you. The actions of such organizations like TPUSA do not promote freedom; they promote control and the deletion of populations of people that have always existed within human history.

My friends, I warn you: If you only stand for freedom for people who look like you, feel like you and have lived like you, you set cracks in the foundation to be persecuted in the ways of which you persecute others. Freedom for some is freedom for none. Which will you choose?

Giovanna Paterno, Colorado State University student

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