Law Student Faces Expulsion for ‘Aggressive Pointing’ - Not The Babylon Bee

 Title IX laws were created to protect women from discrimination. Now they’re being used to punish acts once seen as ‘completely protected speech.’

When Houston Porter, a 28-year-old law student at Pace University, first walked into the college auditorium last month, he was surprised to see a packed house for the “Saving Women’s Sports” panel he was co-moderating. 

“Our events normally don’t get that kind of turnout,” says Porter, a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative advocacy group that sponsored the panel at Pace’s law school in White Plains, New York. “So it was exciting.”

But not long after, Porter’s world started “crumbling down”—with at least one professor shouting at panelists and another allegedly rushing the stage, followed by a Title IX investigation that accuses him of having “aggressively pointed” at a transgender student and misgendering her. Now Porter faces the possibility of suspension, expulsion, and even being barred from practicing law.

About two dozen students, plus two faculty members, attended the October 15 panel against Proposition 1, a New York ballot measure that promises to codify gender identity and gender expression as protected classes in the state constitution. Porter said most attendees showed up wearing trans pride pins, but he didn’t think anything of it. In fact, he says, his LBGTQ peers were “the exact type of people” he hoped would join the discussion.

Pace University’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law in White Plains, NY. (Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

For the first 45 minutes, the panel—which included a constitutional lawyer and two Republican state senate candidates—was civil, save for a few interruptions, Porter told me.

Then Porter opened the floor to questions and “the room kind of exploded,” he said. “There were a bunch of people in my face.”

Four attendees described to me the scene that unfolded. One called it “chaos”; Pace professor Randolph McLaughlin, who specializes in civil rights law, admitted to me that he shouted at the panelists: “You don’t recognize that trans girls are girls!” Another source told me Professor Margot Julia Pollans rushed the stage and “was yelling” at the panelists. (When reached by The Free Press, Pollans said she “did not” rush the stage or yell at participants.) 

A panelist told me security had to escort them to their car and, according to panel co-moderator David Skjerli, a chair was knocked over in all the “pandemonium.” Amid the madness, Porter said he recalls looking out and seeing acquaintances, classmates, and members of his flag football team lurching out of their seats to yell at him, their fingers pointed in his direction.

“I felt like I was about to get swarmed,” he said. “It was surreal.”

David Skjerli, a Pace University law student who co-moderated the panel on Prop 1. (Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

Nine days later, the situation became even stranger. Porter saw an email flash across his phone, titled “Notification Letter.”

“I felt scared, like time stopped. I was shocked,” he told me.

When he expanded the email, he saw a PDF attachment from Bernard Dufresne, the school’s Title IX coordinator, stating that Porter is being investigated for a potential act of “sex-based discrimination” against a transgender student who attended the Federalist Society event along with about two dozen members of the school’s LBGTQ+ affinity group. The charge? That he “aggressively pointed” at the transgender student and “purposefully referred to her as a man in front of classmates, law school faculty and administrators, and guests.” He now faces a disciplinary hearing that could result in community service, suspension, or even expulsion. He also worries that he won’t pass the “character and fitness” portion of the bar exam, which requires applicants in New York State to disclose any disciplinary actions against them. 

“Any type of punishment will be super detrimental to my reputation and to my professional career,” Porter said, wearing a suit and tie on a video call from his childhood bedroom at his family’s Westchester home. “It feels like my whole world is crumbling down. I feel like everything that I’ve been working toward might get destroyed over a misunderstanding.” 

The son of a Cuban mother and Filipino father, Porter told me he is paying his way through law school via a combination of scholarships, loans, and savings he made through previous dishwashing jobs. “I haven’t told my family yet,” he said. “My parents have sacrificed so much for me to go to law school—and they’re still sacrificing so much. I just don’t want all my family’s hard work to be for nothing just a semester and a half before I graduate.”

Porter told me the allegations against him are “not true” and a “mischaracterization of the facts.”

“There was so much noise, multiple people talking at once, so maybe someone in the crowd heard me say ‘sir,’ or call some individual ‘a man’ when they don’t identify as that,” he said. “But I didn’t say anything along those lines to the alleged person. I did say ‘excuse me’ to them and stood up, but I never made any gestures toward anyone.” 

Pace University’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law in White Plains, NY. (Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

The Free Press is withholding the name of the trans student who made the accusations against Porter. Pace’s Title IX coordinator Dufresne, who signed the letter—which was stamped with the university’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion department logo—did not respond to multiple Free Press requests for comment.

Skjerli, who co-moderated the panel, told me he was standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Porter when students in the front row began rushing toward the stage.

“I don’t understand why people are going after Houston,” he said, adding that there’s now a rumor that Houston called the transgender student a “fag”—a claim Skjerli emphatically denies, saying “I didn’t hear him say that word at all. I don’t know where they’re getting that from.”

Title IX is a 1970s-era provision originally intended to equalize educational and athletic opportunities for female students. But in recent years Title IX has been “weaponized” against students, often male, for offenses like drunken sex, stalking, and “emotional distress,” sometimes even by former girlfriends, KC Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College specializing in Title IX disciplinary proceedings, told The Free Press.

“Savvy students recognize that they can use the Title IX bureaucracy to punish opponents on campus, or simply people that they don’t like,” he said. “Instead of resolving issues through dialogue, or saying, ‘Hey, you’re a jerk,’ it’s become, ‘I’m going to invoke the power of the school against you.’ ”

Johnson says that in 1972, when Title IX first passed, the idea was to root out “systemic issues” of harassment or discrimination against girls and women. Now, under the Biden administration, a student’s gender identity is also protected under Title IX. Decades of small changes to the policy, all of which have gradually broadened what constitutes a Title IX violation, have allowed students to “make a tenable claim of sexual harassment for what in just about any other context would be viewed as completely protected speech,” Johnson said. 

Title IX applies only to educational institutions that accept federal funds. Although Pace is a private nonprofit university, its most recent tax filing states it took in $15,880,130 in government grants in 2022. 

“When Congress passed Title IX, they never could have dreamed that a case like this would be invoked,” Johnson said of the claims against Porter. 

A Title IX investigation accuses Houston Porter of having “aggressively pointed” at a transgender student. (Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

When I told Tricia Lindsay, an attorney who served as one of the three panelists at the Federalist Society event, about the Title IX investigation Porter now faces, she said, “He did nothing wrong.” 

“Most of the yelling was coming from the adults, not the students,” said Lindsay, who’s running as a Republican for a state senate seat and has been an outspoken critic of Proposition 1. “The professors were more of the problem than the students.”

“Academia used to be an environment where you could have a dialogue,” she added. “We talk so much about diversity and yet, when there’s a need to really honor diversity, we don’t have it. There is no diversity because we don’t respect diverse viewpoints.”

Pollans, one of the two professors in attendance, countered that claim, boasting that Pace is “an institution that genuinely respects different viewpoints” and trains its students to “listen to each other.” She added: “I was really proud of the many students at the event who did just that.”

However, when Porter emailed her a few days after the event, asking to withdraw from one of her classes because of her hostile reaction to the panel, she replied in an email seen by The Free Press, “Last week’s event did not unfold as any of us would have liked, but I hope that we can move forward from it and strengthen our community.” Porter said he went ahead with the withdrawal because he “did not feel safe in a class with her.” 

Pace University’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law in White Plains, NY. (Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

Meanwhile, Pace professor McLaughlin said the panelists expressed “bigoted” views, although he was not seated close enough to Porter to hear his precise comments. Over a phone call, he told me that “members of the community had to sit there and hear their transgender colleagues being referred to in a misgendered way. They were onstage referring to trans girls as boys,” he said of the three panelists. “That’s misgendering them.”

McLaughlin told me that being anti–Prop 1 is a “legitimate point of view.” But he “won’t defend” a person’s “right to treat people of different groups differently.” 

“You have no right to question someone’s race or gender. Period. Stop. What gives you that right? What gives you that right?”

“If you have a position, then you need to be able to defend it in public and by the courage of your conviction,” he continued. “And if you can’t do that, then maybe you shouldn’t be holding confidence.” 

A Pace University spokesperson declined to comment on the charges against Porter, stating that “We are aware of the matter in question, speaking with the people involved, and following our internal process.” The spokesperson added that the school “respects differing perspectives and encourages expression” but does not “condone harassment or intimidation when parties disagree.” 

Porter, who is now in his third year of law school, said he wants to become a legal advocate for affordable housing. He had hoped law school would be a “marketplace of ideas,” but instead found that “if you don’t agree with the majority’s thinking, then the students will turn on you, the faculty will turn on you, and administration will turn on you.” 

“We knew the subject was touchy, but we wanted just to foster a professional discussion, and we wanted people who disagreed with us to come because even if they continue to disagree with us, we still have to talk, you know?” he said, adding that the school had previously held multiple events in support of Proposition 1 that went off without a hitch.

“It’s really scary that the future generation of lawyers who are supposed to hear both sides before they make a decision are basically convicting me without hearing my side of the story,” he said. “It makes us all better lawyers when we understand what the other side is saying, even if we may disagree with them.”

 

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