I became a Bear circa five weeks ago when I transferred to UC Berkeley in the spring of 2026. As someone who can’t get enough of the eclectic and dynamic “transition” experience, I gave UC Berkeley an open-minded first consideration, with wandering eyes and the most attentive ears. What I heard during Golden Bear Orientation was bright, sparkly and refreshingly conscientious: They issued a very elegant statement of “land acknowledgement.”

The cosmopolitan baddies I was grouped with spoke multiple languages, came from multiple different experiences and even shared my love for a good gag. We drew into a huddle with Sather Gate behind us, posing for our very own college-brochure selfie: “Say DEI!”

The multicultural friend group, the transfer and the tr—y are often deployed by campus to neutralize allegations of exclusion: I understand perfectly. It doesn’t mean that colonial acquiescence is a precondition for university involvement! Just because I’m keen on studying with the “best and the brightest” does not mean I’m colluding with the master!

Hidden away from a world of empty platitudes and tight smiles, under the duvet cover, asbestos ceiling and the shroud of night, the sort of fresh-off-the-boat transgender transfer starts tossing and turning in her sleep. “Am I selling out?” “Is my school pimping me out for social, cultural and capital capital?” “Do I live in a w—-house?”

I’d have to be blind not to see the cracks … 

…in my capacity for narrative edification, for example. The Muwekma Ohlone land, on which UC Berkeley erected the phallic Campanile, was wrested by the US in an unjust, coercive and greedy — simply put, a colonial — fashion.

It would have been swell to buy into the reconciliation story. 

“We all broke bread on Thanksgiving Day!” “Predatory settler? I barely know her!”

But UC Berkeley does not seem interested in dis-entrenching itself as a colonial enterprise. And neither am I interested in turning a blind eye.

I was less than delighted to learn that Cal instrumentalized the transfer student towards empire-building.

Anchor House, a $300 million monster of an edifice, was donated to the school by the Helen Diller Family Foundation in the name of “transfer pride.” Paving the way for a transfer-spangled banner to wave, they razed the rent-controlled property 1921 Walnut Street to the ground and displaced longtime tenants.

Besides rampaging through the East Bay, subsuming affordable housing complexes and fighting rent-control policies, the Diller Foundation also donated to the Central Fund for Israel with instructions on supporting Canary Mission, an online group that enthusiastically doxxes students and professors whom the organization claims “promote hatred against the USA, Israel andJews.”

Kyle Gibson, a campus spokesperson, shared in a 2024 statement that dedicating UC Berkeley’s “biggest, nicest, newest building to transfers signifies the importance of this population that sometimes feel like an afterthought.”

Gibson’s next statement that transfers are “first and foremost the priority of this building” feels like a product of campus’s public relations priorities rather than aspirations for transformation.

The bid for transfer upliftment reminds me of a picture: an IDF soldier posing on land flattened by airstrikes, holding a pride flag and pronouncing the occupation a crusade “in the name of love.”

“If the government is addressing LGBTQ-friendly domestic audiences in Israel or globally, then it whips out this pink-washing discourse in trying to portray Israel as a gay haven,” said Sa’ed Atshan, author of “Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique,” in a conversation with The Guardian.

Pinkwashing aptly describes UC Berkeley’s rationalization of Anchor House’s development, which took place over the remains of 1921 Walnut St.

Paul Wallace, a longtime tenant at 1921 Walnut St. and an activist in the group Save 1921 Walnut activist, expressed to Berkeleyside that he felt then-Mayor Jesse Arreguín had “sold them out” and had done a “180-degree turn, from unanimous council support for maintaining the eight rent-controlled units to accepting $920,000 from UC,” in favor of demolishing the building. According to Berkeleyside, some tenants had lived there for 25 years and one person was a member of their family’s third generation to inhabit the building. 

The idea of Anchor House titillated me when it first fell on my ears, as if it was screaming, “It’s for the transfer community! Anchor should be at the top of your list!” After looking over the approximated cost of living in that brutalist box, devoid of charm but replete with exercise balls and elevator music (call me a bitter Luddite, I couldn’t care less), I realized the “transfer community” is a commodity I have to throw money at. In decimating the long-term, real community that called 1921 Walnut St. home, campus lacerated Berkeley society and then stuck a pimple patch on it to clot the blood river.

Israel “pinkwashes” the genocide by pretending to care for the gays. UC Berkeley pinkwashes the colonization it reproduces by performing concern for transfers. UC Berkeley benefits from the Diller Foundation’s generosity and is therefore Canary Mission’s second cousin. 

If UC Berkeley, the wokest campus in the University of California nexus, and the progressive then-mayor Arreguín are also selling themselves and their constituents out, are we not just one big fat brothel? A beautiful one, without a doubt — with melanated, polylingual and eloquent metrosexuals. But a brothel nonetheless?

It certainly feels like a place where we — our land, bodies and integrity — are for sale.