An activist said Texas Christian University blocked her from speaking on campus, arguing the school is discriminating against Christian and conservative events. But the school says the event was never booked to begin with.
Chloe Cole, an advocate against gender-affirming care for minors, said she was invited to speak at an Oct. 7 event hosted by the school’s Turning Point USA chapter. TCU officials declined to give them a space to host the event, according to Cole, who then took to social media to post about the cancellation.
Her post led to vows from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, an Austin Republican running for state attorney general, to probe the situation. Paxton suggested the private Fort Worth university had suppressed free speech.
“This doesn’t look like free speech to me,” Paxton wrote on X. “I’m going to look into this.”
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TCU officials pushed back Wednesday on the characterization that the school canceled the event or blocked Cole from speaking.
“TCU never canceled this event as it was never booked,” Kathy Cavins-Tull, vice chancellor for student affairs, said in a statement.
Cavins-Tull said the space the Turning Point USA chapter requested after Sept. 18 for the event with 700 to 1,000 people “was already booked with another student event.” The school “explored options” before notifying the group on Sept. 25 “that a secure space was not available given the short notice, but we offered to find another date or space for the event.”
TCU officials said they reached out to Paxton’s office after seeing his social media post to “provide accurate information regarding the scheduling conflict on their requested date of the event.”
The offices of Paxton and Roy did not respond to multiple requests for comment over email.
Cole is a leader of the embattled “detransition” movement. The 21-year-old, who used to identify as transgender and now identifies as a woman, has been visiting colleges to “end gender ideology,” according to a social media post.
The Turning Point USA chapter identified “several rooms that were available,” but they “kept being denied access to them,” Cole told The Dallas Morning News.
Cole said school officials never gave “a clear reason as to why they were rejecting us.” She regards it as “a discriminatory act against conservative and Christian events on their campus.”
“It seems to be in line with a broader pattern of denials and really just discouraging faculty and students from having these events, while other kinds of events move more quickly,” she said. “They regularly host these big public gatherings, especially for athletic and community events, and they show capacity in a very short time frame when leadership wants to have those events.”
The president of TCU’s Turning Point USA chapter did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Cole recently spoke at events hosted by Turning Point USA chapters at the University of Texas at San Antonio and Texas State University — part of a series of talks planned prior to co-founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September.
The upcoming event, which Cole expects 2,000 people to attend, is now scheduled to be hosted at Birchman Baptist Church in Fort Worth next week.
Paxton’s post came a week after he joined other state attorneys general in demanding public colleges and universities uphold free speech and protect conservative voices on campus in the wake of Kirk’s death.
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In a letter to presidents and deans, he asked schools to confirm that policies around using school facilities and security fees are “content-neutral and viewpoint-neutral.”
“Any twisted radical attempting to weaponize the tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to silence the conservative movement will be exposed, stopped, and held accountable,” Paxton said in a Sept. 22 release. “The patriotic voices of the young people in the conservative movement are louder and stronger than ever, and I will not allow any school to quiet them.”
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