The University held a virtual “Pride Month Kickoff” event Monday afternoon. The 30-minute event, which took place on Zoom, featured numerous prerecorded statements from students, faculty and staff members celebrating their work to promote LGBTQIA+ rights at USC and across the country. 

Alyssa Alegre, the University’s LGBTQ+SC Center Supervisor, introduced President Carol Folt, who began her remarks by highlighting the University’s recent efforts to expand LGBTQIA+ resources and support. 

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“At USC, we’ve been celebrating your power all year long,” Folt said. “This commencement, for example, I had the privilege of awarding an honorary degree to trailblazer and incomparable athlete, Billie Jean King. She is, of course, a tennis legend, and she’s been a champion for equality and social justice on every front. And now, she’s officially a Trojan.” 

Folt went on to applaud the University’s recent move to double the square footage of the LGBTQ+ Student Center in the Wilson Student Union, as well as the newly renovated building for the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries — the largest repository of LGBTQIA+ materials in the world.

Folt said the LGBTQ+ Student Center’s upcoming 20th anniversary, as well as the growing number of anti-LGBTQIA+ bills across the country, made it “very important” for her to expand the space. 

“We want to offer at USC a wonderful sense of connection and community to combat the damage of those misguided bills,” Folt said. “At the relaunch of the center, Trojans passed out stickers that read, ‘You belong at USC.’ And I want to say that again to everyone here — you belong at USC.” 

Folt also noted that 2024 marked USC’s 11th year of offering gender-affirming care through Student Health. 

Dr. Laura Taylor, the medical director of the USC Gender-Affirming Care Program, spoke after Folt, and said that she felt the program’s work was becoming “more important” in light of the “increasing number of legislative attacks on best-practice medical care from states across the U.S. and from around the world.”

“Bans on the provision of evidence-based medical care for adolescents and young adults, bathroom bills, bills excluding trans people from sports, and limiting support offered in schools through the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bills have all created an environment where our patients and communities experience exclusion, chronic stress and fear about the future, even though we are lucky to live in a state where these rights are currently protected,” Taylor said. 

Matthew Hernandez, the patient navigator for the USC Gender-Affirming Care Program, also spoke at the webinar about the importance of patient navigators in gender-affirming care programs and about his own experience as “an undocumented trans man” who started his medical transition “when ‘gender-affirming care’ was not a term yet, and when access to healthcare for undocumented folks was nearly impossible.” 

“Due to these unfortunate experiences and events, I was able to create paths for myself and others, and that is why it is so important to have trans patient navigators because we are able to identify gaps, fill in gaps and create new paths for access to care,” Hernandez said. “This is highly life-saving for many folks, and I am just so proud to be part of this big movement.”

Jason King, the dean of the Thornton School of Music, was the last person to speak at the event. 

“Celebrating pride also means acknowledging the vital role of activism, organizing and dissent in holding institutions accountable, and making the world a more humane and inclusive place,” King said. “Happy Pride Month, USC. Let’s make this a time of celebration, of learning and of unity.”