Texas professors sue Biden for the right to discriminate against trans students

Two Texan professors have filed a lawsuit against the United States government, arguing for their right to discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and abortion history.

The plaintiffs in the suit — Daniel A. Bonevac, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and John Hatfield, an economics professor at the same school — are represented alongside Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) on behalf of the state.

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The two professors are backed by America First Legal (AFL), a large conservative legal organization that files hundreds of lawsuits to whittle away LGBTQ+ discrimination protections.

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The professors claim that the Department of Education is infringing on their rights by enforcing nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ individuals and those receiving reproductive care. 

They allege that this infringes on their rights to free speech, Texas’s right to sovereignty, and is a misinterpretation of rulings like Bostock v. Clayton, the 2020 Supreme Court decision that declared anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination as a form of sex-based discrimination forbidden by federal law.

“Bostock allows discrimination against homosexual or transgender individuals, so long as it is done pursuant to rules or policies that apply equally to both sexes and would lead to the same result if the individual’s biological [sex] were different,” AFL wrote in its lawsuit.

Bostock is widely interpreted as protecting against any and all discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals, and has been interpreted as such in the vast majority of court cases across the country.

The professors further argue that discrimination against individuals on the basis of their gender identity and sexual orientation does not constitute a violation of Title IX, a landmark 1972 law that protects people from discrimination on the basis of sex. The law is widely used to protect LGBTQ+ individuals as well as people’s reproductive rights.

“A teacher or professor… may refuse to accommodate a transgender or nonbinary student’s demands to be referred to by the singular pronoun ‘they’ — so long as the teacher or professor refuses demands for such pronoun usage on equal terms from a biological male or a biological woman and would equally refuse to honor the transgender or nonbinary student’s request if that student’s biological sex were different,” the lawsuit states.

The administration of President Joe Biden has said that Title IX protections extend to discrimination against those who have received an abortion. 

Hatfield and Bonevac, however, argue that those who receive abortions are “criminals” and as such should not receive accommodations in class, and that they should be able to reject any teaching assistant on the basis of whether they have received an abortion.

“Plaintiffs Hatfield and Bonevac do not intend to accommodate student absences from class to obtain abortions—including illegal abortions and purely elective abortions that are not medically required,” the lawsuit states. 

“Nor will Plaintiffs Hatfield and Bonevac hire a teaching assistant who has violated the abortion laws of Texas or the federal-law prohibitions on the shipment or receipt of abortion pills and abortion-related paraphernalia,” the lawsuit continues.

Additionally, they lawsuit argueS against “cross-dressing,” a term they use to refer to transgender students and teaching assistants.

The two filed their lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas — nearly 500 miles away from Austin. This is most likely due to the proximity to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointee known for pushing an extremist conservative perspective on sexual issues. In April 2023, Kacsmaryk issued a ruling saying that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should pull the abortion drug mifepristone from pharmacy shelves.

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