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The University of Connecticut’s Vergnano Institute for Impact is once again recruiting high school students for its annual “Queer Science” conference. The next one-day event is set for Saturday, October 17, 2026, at the Storrs campus.
According to the institute’s website, Queer Science is “a one-day conference designed to support the success of high school students who are or are allies of LGBTQIA+ students in CT.” It is “facilitated by proud LGBTQIA+ students and researchers at UConn” and promises “a positive day filled with STEM activities and lab tours.” High school-aged students who can get to Storrs are eligible. Teachers and Gender-Sexuality Alliance club leaders bringing groups are told to email coordinators separately.
The registration link points to a form asking participating minors for their pronouns, a “chosen” name, and whether they want their parents to know they signed up for “Queer Science.”
That combination — a public university collecting gender-identity information from 14- to 18-year-olds and appearing to offer a parental-secrecy option — is the part that should concern Connecticut parents.
The program has been running for several years. Organizer Anna Marie LaChance, then a UConn chemical engineering Ph.D. student, learned about the University of Minnesota’s Queer Science model at an oSTEM conference in 2019 and began planning a UConn version. In-person plans were delayed by the pandemic in 2020. The first conference was held June 11, 2022, drawing 43 high school students. UConn and the institute have treated it as an annual event since.
UConn’s own coverage has described the day as a chance for LGBTQIA+ teenagers to see “people who are like them in all fields of science” and to “celebrate science — and themselves.” Past years have included fly-genetics workshops, solar telescopes, microscopy, sheep-brain dissections, pathobiology lab tours, and an egg-drop contest. Organizers have emphasized that only queer people should staff the event so attendees are “surrounded by people who are like them in terms of gender and sexuality.”
The institute, originally launched as the Vergnano Institute for Inclusion with a $3 million gift from alumni Mark and Betsy Vergnano and later rebranded for “Impact,” supplies funding, including catered meals. Additional partners have included UConn’s Rainbow Center and the national nonprofit oSTEM.
The Queer Science page also includes links to the Rainbow Center, whose stated mission is to use “an intersectional lens” to advocate for “queer- and trans-spectrum communities.” The Center’s offerings have included a gender-affirming closet, an annual drag show, pronoun guides, a gender-inclusive restroom map, and materials on creating gender-inclusive classrooms. oSTEM describes itself as a professional association for LGBTQ+ people in STEM.
That “intersectional lens” is not a neutral description. Intersectionality, as coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw and adopted across campus DEI offices, treats race, sex, gender identity, and sexuality as interlocking systems of domination. Institutions are viewed as machines that reproduce “cisheteropatriarchy,” racial hierarchy, and other named oppressions at once. The result is a hierarchy of voices: some identities are presumed to see power more clearly; others are presumed to benefit from it and therefore to need correction.
The resemblance to Marxism is not a coincidence. Classical Marxism organized history around class conflict and the seizure of capital. Intersectionality keeps the same conflict structure—oppressor groups versus oppressed groups, ideology that conceals domination, the demand that institutions be reconstructed rather than merely opened—and relocates the engine from economics onto identity. Class becomes one more axis instead of the primary one.
A public university that funds STEM days for high schoolers through an institute that partners with a center advertising this lens is not just offering lab tours. It is introducing minors to a political theory that sorts them by identity, treats parental authority as potentially suspect, and presents ordinary science as something that must be delivered inside that theory.
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