Joint Statement of the Members of SFDU. Released Sep. 19, 2025.

Last Wednesday, an assistant dean at a public American university was publicly shamed and doxxed by a user on X for the offense of not showing sympathy after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Within two hours, a U.S. Senator reposted the doxxing and called for the dean’s termination. The dean was fired no later than the next day. Such disciplinary firings constitute institutional censorship.

We hope that the University System of Georgia does not intend to follow this example in Georgia public higher education.

Would we as workers be punished if we were to publicly acknowledge the 2023 video in which Charlie Kirk made the following statement about transgender people?

“These people are sick. … Someone should have ‘just took care of it’ the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and 60s.”

Should we as workers be censored and punished for calling out extremism as we see it?

This is a crucial juncture for the University System of Georgia and for this country.

We, Socialists For a Democratic Union, stand ready to defend transgender and LGBTQ communities as extremist right-wing propaganda and policies continue to intensify, predictably increasing the likelihood of terrorist attacks against our communities.

We stand with the Human Rights Coalition in denouncing the Trump administration’s attempts this very month to abolish gun ownership by people who are transgender.

If we in the trans community are silenced, if our means of defense against being violently attacked are stolen, and if we are demonized and dehumanized while those who, like Kirk, label us “abominations to God” are canonized and uncritically celebrated–then our survival will depend equally on our commitment to defiant resistance and on the courage of those who pledge to stand with us. 

“If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.”

We, echoing our Comrades and their “Open Letter to Progressive & Revolutionary Organizations from Your Transgender Comrades”, are asking that:

• Organizations which claim to support trans rights show solidarity with their trans comrades by publishing statements acknowledging and condemning the current attack on trans people in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, and
• Cis individuals who claim to support trans rights show solidarity with their trans comrades by publicly talking about the attacks against us or help us spread knowledge of this open letter through person-to-person conversations with your peers.