As a Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant ponders her next move after receiving an apology from the school’s president, a campus group supporting LGBTQ students says they  should get an apology of their own.

A sign reading “Trans students deserve an apology” was seen Wednesday in a window at the office of the Rainbow Centre – an organization which provide supports for Laurier’s LGBTQ community and organizes events like the campus Pride parade and Queer Awareness Week.

The sign was posted following teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd receiving a public apology from Laurier’s president and a communication studies professor earlier this week.

Shepherd had faced a disciplinary hearing over playing a video for an undergraduate communication studies class. The video showed University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson arguing against using gender-neutral pronouns.

During the hearing, which Shepherd recorded, school staff members accused her of transphobia and said she should have explicitly condemned Peterson’s views.

An internal investigation into the incident was ordered after the issue surfaced in the media.  School president Deborah MacLatchy apologized to Shepherd Tuesday, saying her recording showed that what she faced “does not reflect the values and practices to which Laurier aspires.”

Speaking to CTV News on Wednesday, Shepherd said she appreciated the apology, but considered its sincerity “debatable” given it only emerged after the issue attracted national media attention.

She said she saw nothing in the school’s actions that suggested its administrators understood or agreed with her position.

“They have not really made a long-term commitment to sticking with free speech,” she said.

“They’re trying to convince me that some topics are just not appropriate for a classroom.”

Not allowing controversial viewpoints to be discussed and debated would be “against what universities are about,” she said.

Shepherd also took issue with the Rainbow Centre’s reaction, saying the organization made it seem as though supporting transgender rights and supporting free speech are in opposition to each other.

Administrators of the Rainbow Centre have argued that freedom of speech is being used as an excuse to justify transphobic behaviour in the response to Shepherd’s ordeal.

Toby Finlay, the centre’s administrative co-ordinator, says the debate has become disconnected from the initial argument over whether Peterson’s anti-gender pronoun stance should have been presented neutrally at all.

“These conversations that are framed as debates are really a conversation where one person is denying the existence of the other,” Finlay said Wednesday.

“Engaging in these quote-unquote debates is a request of trans students and an obligation for trans students to engage in a conversation about the validity of their identities and their experiences.”

Finlay says some of Laurier’s trans students have been dealing with “really transphobic and really hateful comments” both on-campus and online since the issue flared up.

They say the school shouldn’t have apologized to Shepherd until it knew exactly what had happened, and want to see the investigation include interviews with trans students.

“By not following through this investigation before issuing an apology, the voices of trans students are being silenced on this campus,” Finlay said.

For his part, Peterson says he considered the apology lacking because he saw it as MacLatchy trying to portray the incident as “an aberration or an anomaly,” which he says is not the case.

“This is not a one-off situation. This is standard practice at the universities,” he said in an interview.

“They’re doing damage control, but they’re not looking into the problem … with enough depth.”

With reporting by Natalie van Rooy