Trans Students at Warwick deserve to feel safe on their own campus and at the events hosted by their University. Warwick’s recent actions regarding their “draft” changes to the Trans Inclusion Policy has shown how the University truly feels about protecting minority groups when put under any pressure from external groups. We will not allow the University to gloss this over, so we are boycotting the University’s Pride Month Celebrations.

Warwick cannot pick and choose where it shows solidarity with the LGBTQUIA+ community at this University. It cannot be allowed to burnish its reputation by hosting events for Pride Month while seeking to eliminate Trans students and staff from public spaces across campus. 

Therefore, as groups representing Queer students at the University of Warwick, we will be boycotting the University’s Pride month celebrations. We urge all Warwick students and staff to do the same. Furthermore we will, where possible, be withdrawing from any planned collaborations with the University and ceasing new collaborations. We will be working with other liberation groups on campus to organise our own series of events that is not tainted by institutional transphobia, and which promotes intersectional liberation for all oppressed peoples. Our boycott on such collaboration with the University will continue until our demands are met.

We are shocked at the University’s decision to clearly cease their support for trans people, although not surprised, as they continue to refuse to divest from Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine. We recognise the importance of liberation for all peoples and all trans people across the world, and see these struggles as interconnected.

There is no Pride Month without trans people who have, throughout the history of intersectional liberation, been at the forefront of activism. As such, we condemn the University for their institutional transphobia which seeks to eradicate the histories of trans people and the reality of Pride Month. 

We demand the following;

• That Warwick reinstates the pre-existing Policy and apologise for the harm caused to students and staff.

• The University, when making a policy about trans students meets with the relevant representative groups. This includes, but is not limited too, the current SU trans officer; Warwick Pride and Trans* Soc as well as a relevant body to represent queer staff.

• Warwick ceases its repeated attempts to curb the voices of elected representative students and staff.

It is risible that the University’s decision to alter the Trans Inclusion Policy did not speak with any student representatives for queer groups, such as Pride or Trans* Soc or any other group. The National Union of Students (NUS) have clearly recommended that universities not change their existing policies on access to facilities. The University must realise that it will never be more reputationally advantageous to target its own students and staff members, to appease outside interests who wish to erase Trans people altogether.