The University of Pennsylvania named “non-binary transfeminine person” Alok Vaid-Menon as an LGBTQ Scholar in Residence.

The Ivy League school announced on Monday that the new residency, which is the first in the nation dedicated solely to “championing LGBTQ+ communities and scholarship,” was made possible through an “anonymous” $2 million donation.

“It’s a profound honor to be the Inaugural LGBTQ+ Scholar in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. In the face of escalating malalignment we see a widening chasm between the reality of LGBTQ+ lives and the misrepresentation of our communities in media and society,” Vaid-Menon said in a statement. “As LGBTQ+ scholars and artists we must continue to debunk anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation while also harnessing the power of LGBTQ+ storytelling to create a more inclusive and magnificent world. I’m looking forward to connecting with Penn students, faculty, and staff to celebrate the living poetry of our existence in these turbulent times.”

Vaid-Menon was identified as a “non-binary transfeminine person” who uses “they/them” pronouns in an interview with The Caravan. A website belonging to the incoming Ivy League scholar identifies Vaid-Menon as an “internationally acclaimed author, poet, comedian, and public speaker” who explores “themes of trauma, belonging, and the human condition.” Vaid-Menon has received awards from prominent LGBTQ organizations such as GLAAD and the Stonewall Foundation.

The new opportunity at the University of Pennsylvania will not be the first time that the artist has been paid handsomely by academia. Campus Reform reported that Vaid-Menon received $5,000 for a two-hour talk at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse to discuss the book “Beyond the Binary,” which encourages readers to “see gender not in black and white, but in full color.”

Vaid-Menon drew upon experience “as a gender-nonconforming artist” to demonstrate that “gender is a malleable and creative form of expression.” According to the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s Pride Center, Vaid-Menon told students that “true freedom isn’t choosing from pre-selected, societally-accepted options, but writing in your own option for who you are.”

The University of Pennsylvania’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center is the second oldest initiative in the nation dedicated to students who claim LGBTQ identity and administers the first fund on any American campus “supporting students making a gender transition.”

The elite postsecondary institution garnered national attention over the past two years as Lia Thomas, a man who claims transgender identity and competed on the school’s swimming team, sparked debate over males in female sports. Thomas won the NCAA Division I national championship in the 500-yard freestyle event and set a meet record in the 200-yard freestyle at the Ivy League Swimming and Diving Championships.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP

A female member of the University of Pennsylvania’s swim team formerly detailed the atmosphere of censorship that surrounded Thomas in an interview with The Daily Wire. “I think that there’s not really room for anyone to react to this situation in any way, other than saying they think it’s really progressive and the right thing,” she said. “If you want to tune into the livestreams and watch these podiums, not just the races, the podiums, and you look at the faces of the girls who are second, third, you see a smile, but they can only hold it up for so long. You can kind of see a little bit of sadness knowing that maybe they would be first.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) went on a tear Wednesday against Dr. Anthony Fauci over the longtime government health official’s resistance to the theory that COVID came from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

“He was trying to cover his backside, and everybody knows it,” Jordan declared during a hearing of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. “And that’s the part that ticks us off.”

“This is the highest paid guy in our government getting all kinds of money to tell us things that were not accurate,” Jordan continued. “We now know U.S. tax dollars went to a lab in China, a lab that was not up to code, a lab that was doing gain-of-function research, and that’s where this thing most definitely came from.”

WATCH: @Jim_Jordan DEMOLISHES Fauci’s COVID origins story pic.twitter.com/k9muabjAS7

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) March 8, 2023

New intelligence reportedly led the Energy Department to assess with “low confidence” that the pandemic likely began with a lab leak, a shift from its prior stance of being undecided. Some scientists and many Republicans have long claimed that the virus originated in a lab and that China has been engaged in a cover-up, which Beijing has denied. Other U.S. agencies and a preliminary World Health Organization assessment from 2021 have placed more faith in the natural emergence theory — a view that Fauci has favored.

A longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci became the face of the federal government’s response to COVID during the Trump and Biden administrations. He even became President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, a role in which he served until his retirement from government at the end of last year.

Republicans who have pledged to investigate Fauci have placed a major focus on federal funding for bat coronavirus research with ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci vociferously denies the work amounted to gain-of-function research. But money that went elsewhere also has attracted interest from investigators.

During his five minutes, Jordan raced through a timeline of events during the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020 and questioned why a pair of leading virologists appeared to flip from favoring the lab leak theory to rejecting the hypothesis without the emergence of new scientific data. A possible explanation, Jordan offered, was a grant for nearly $9 million. “There’s 9 million reasons why they changed their mind,” the congressman quipped.

Jordan also talked about how the government’s COVID task force kept former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, who was a witness at the hearing Wednesday, “out of the loop” for having a different view to not so quickly discount the theory that COVID emerged from a lab leak.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP

“Keeping him out of the loop probably — potentially could have harmed America —” Jordan said, before taking a moment to collect his thoughts. “That’s the thing that ticks us all off,” he went on to say before expressing how important it is to get to the bottom of COVID’s origins.