ON BEING A TRANSWOMAN LAWYER…

By Danielle Joy Healey¹

I am a Senior Principal at Fish & Richardson P.C. where I specialize in intellectual property and related antitrust law. I am highly ranked in Chambers, Best Lawyers in America, Texas Super Lawyers, yada, yada, yada….² As a practical matter, however, those accolades are drowned out by the only label that has mattered since I transitioned in 2017: "transgender woman". Reflecting on my past life compared to my present circumstance, I realize now that being a white man gave me privilege I did not understand until I wasn’t one. And being a transgender woman puts me at the opposite end of the spectrum, something I never could have appreciated until I became one.

I have learned that true allyship and support is when someone with privilege is willing to take a risk by disrupting the status quo. I am grateful to my firm because it was one of the first large firms in Texas to publically embrace a transgender woman lawyer. If you have followed the news recently out of Texas you know that embracing a transgender woman in this place and time is risky business. Yet I know that even with this acceptance by my firm, that allyship has not been shared by the legal industry or even some courts, so that "transgender woman" label still dominates my practice. Today in Texas, this label is especially hard on me and other transpeople.

As a man, I always had business. As a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, in the peak of the patent litigation boom in the early and mid-2000s, I was working as much as 300 hours a month and spending almost all my time on the road, in depositions and in court. By 2007, I was spending about two calendar days per month at home. In 2008, I was asked to open Fish & Richardson P.C.’s Houston Office. Ultimately two of my partners and I, several associates, three paralegals, and our administrative assistants were in Fish & Richardson P.C.’s new Houston office that fall. Even after I cut back my hours in 2010 to work on myself and try other things (I wrote a book, a screenplay and made a movie in my family’s hometown in Sicily³), I had business.

But there was a difficult issue that I had lived with since I was a kid. When I was four years-old I asked my mom when my penis would fall off and I would become a girl. My mom said never, you are a boy. It was 1964. More than thirty years before the internet, and even a few years before the summer of 1968. As a four-year-old, I could not understand what was happening to me. My mother, and society, had no words, no frame of reference for the question I had asked.

I grew up with a secret life. Even as a young child, I felt compelled to dress in my sister’s clothes. I loved to play with my girl cousins. I asked my mom for a swimsuit with a top. I desperately wanted to be Mary Richards on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, although I would have been happy to settle for Rhoda Morganstern. I prayed every night for God to make me a girl, this was my singular wish every Christmas eve, and I was genuinely disappointed when I woke up each Christmas morning still a boy.

[Page 190]

By age thirteen, I realized I was a boy and would have to live with it. I needed to suppress this "girl thing" — I tried but never really could. Through high school, college and law school, I spent time alone, hiding, dressing as a girl, reading girl’s books and magazines. No one knew my secret shame. After I got to college, I tried to research my problem in the large libraries available to me at Brown University, but found pretty much nothing. I concluded I was a freak, sick. The only one with my problem.

As a young lawyer, I clerked for a federal district judge, and the law clerks and several of the courthouse staff became my "tribe" — we did a lot of fun things together. I became life-long best friends with the woman who was my senior law clerk. Yet even though I had this close friend and was part of this wonderful group, I lacked a life partner, and had resigned myself to being single. I had accepted that "my problem" would separate me from other people.

Unexpectedly, I was fortunate enough to meet a woman who loved me and whom I loved. We married at age 30, I travelled extensively and she came with me everywhere for the first five years of our marriage. At age 35, we had our first daughter, and at age 38 our second daughter. My career was sky-rocketing during the explosion in patent litigation that began in the mid-1990s. During this time, I had been able to largely suppress my cross-dressing and female conduct, but these feelings continued to haunt me. With a wonderful family and a strong career, I needed to find a cure.

Throughout my search for a cure, working was a wonderful way to cope: I genuinely loved practicing law, the more I worked the more money I made, and the more I filled my head with work, the less room there was for "my problem". I was working 2500 or more hours a year since the mid-1990s. I missed at least two years of my kids’ lives travelling, in trials, depositions and constantly focused on work. Yet even with the love of a wonderful woman and two great kids, a booming practice, and industry accolades, I still saw myself as a freak.

When I searched for information about myself and for others like myself, prior to the internet, the path led to pornography stores — mixed in with the racks of glossy sex magazines, there were a couple of crudely printed books — more like pamphlets — and newsletters with bad writing and grainy photos by other "cross-dressers". The fact I could only find information in grungy pornography stores reinforced my feelings that I was a freak. With the advent of the internet, I saw for the first time there were others like me, but the internet was a creepy place back then, and early on the sites that catered to transgender issues were more the pornographic than informational, so I took no comfort in this knowledge.

By age 44, I was overwhelmed. I went to spend time in Los Angeles for a week of intense therapy. Despite having numerous therapists and psychiatrists before, for the first time I told another human being about my real problem — who I was. This was liberating in a way: I had broken out of the prison of my mind and admitted out loud what I was feeling, had always felt. At the end of the week, the psychologist told me that since I had felt that I was female from age 4, and had been to therapists and psychiatrists, taken medication, had tried to wish it away and pray it away, it was finally time to accept that my feelings are not going to change. I am female at my core, in my heart and in my head.

[Page 191]

By accepting my issues, I was finally able to start dealing with them. I did not want to transition. But I wanted to find a way to get some peace sometimes. What I mean is that, for me, there was nearly always background chatter in my brain questioning my gender, I thought about it constantly, uncontrollably, causing me a lot of stress. This noise only quieted when I was presenting female. In fact, two months after I transitioned full-time, I suddenly realized the noise had stopped.

My coping involved spending time with my close female friends as a female. I talked to my wife about it. She did not like it, not at all, but she did not want to consider what might happen if I did not have a safe outlet for my feelings. Looking back, I was naïve thinking I could be both a man and a woman: I used to travel with two suitcases; one for day, and one for my true self when not working. In addition to visits with my girlfriends, I went to Silicon Valley a lot, and joined dinner groups with other professionals who were likewise trying to "manage". At one dinner, after a few minutes of conversation, I found the gal on my right and the one on my left were both lawyers, and we all three worked for the same large corporate client. My secret life was decidedly unglamorous: I was a middle-aged woman in dowdy clothes, having dinner in mediocre places with other professional ladies, or going to the occasional show or shopping trip with my girlfriends.

Fast-forward: By 2017, I could no longer cope. I had to transition. I don’t know why, but I had this feeling that if I did not transition, I would not live much longer, as if my lifeforce would escape from me somehow. My therapist said she had been surprised that I was able to cope with my situation for over a decade. The conversation with my wife was the hardest in my life. I had never been more depressed than when I inflicted that pain on her, I thought maybe it would have been better just to let my head explode and be done with it. I went back to Los Angeles for several weeks to work on my transition.

I told my firm. The firm was supportive, but this was an entirely new problem for them — and one for which there was little or no precedent in big law. They assigned a senior administrator to help me and the firm work through the issues of transition. Shortly before I was to leave L.A. to return to Houston, the administrator asked me if we should have a press release ready. Having been in L.A. long enough to deceive myself about what things would be like in Texas, I said no, why would anyone be interested or care. Perhaps because she lived in Boston, she agreed. Turns out, we were both wrong.

The people in my office were very supportive and kind. Some of them had worked with me at different firms for over twenty years. My long-term administrative assistant had to have known. She never said anything, but she had been discretely putting the boxes and catalogues delivered from Lane Bryant or Woman Within in my office for years. Another woman who had worked with me for years told me I finally looked like the person I was meant to be, and that she had never seen me really happy as a man. The day after I returned from my transition, I went to meet with a client, the client was a woman who had helped mentor me through my transition, so it was a good day. The next day I spoke at the annual State Bar of Texas Advanced Patent Law Seminar, and that is when the storm broke loose. Needless to say, as a well-known lawyer in my field, my arrival on stage with well-coifed hair, pretty make-up, and a pastel suit, caused quite a stir. I was splashed across the Texas Lawyer’s website the next morning, with (luckily) the one cute photo on my Facebook page and an article that supported me in living my truth.

[Page 192]

In fact, I received over 300 positive messages from colleagues, friends and other lawyers supporting me in what had been the most difficult decision of my life. There were more positive articles about me in the local and industry press. In the first few weeks, even months, I thought things were going to work out — until they didn’t. It was not the lack of support from my firm or collegaues that caused issues. It was something larger. The label of "transgender woman" in Texas carried with it a tremendous stigma, that has only grown worse over time.

One of my long-term clients gave me tremendous support, I was leading a large patent litigation in Chicago for it, and there was no question that I would continue in that role. But things were not going to be all roses: Shortly after I came out in 2017, a client I had done significant work for in recent years fired me — but then reluctantly had me work for a few months longer on pending matters at my replacements’ requests. This work wrapped up by mid-2018. My Chicago case settled about the same time. By the end of 2018, I was out of work, and had not been hired or asked to work on anything new other than a few one-off or limited projects — a record dry-spell for me for sure. For the first time in my career, I was scrapping for billable hours and lucky if I could scrounge up 20 or 30 hours of billable work in a month. I recall driving in my car with my wife and she asked me if I had thought post-transition things would get so hard, I told her I had thought about it, but after the support I had gotten at first, I was surprised I could not get hourly work. My wife told me she had expected me to lose my business, she reminded me that in Texas the establishment was against me, regardless of how many people I knew who supported me.

The problems went beyond specific client relationships. For the first time I was facing discrimination: I was assisting with a case in Texas state court in 2017 and 2018. The case was hotly contested, there were frequent hearings. At each hearing I attended, we lost. Most cases are like basketball games, each team goes back and forth putting points on the board. In this case, we had a "tea party" Republican judge. And the only hearing where we got some traction was one I could not attend. In late 2018 the case settled. In a twist of fate, and a blast of karma, in November 2018, the Democrats swept Harris County and all the Republican judges up for election lost to their Democratic challengers — the "tea party" judge was replaced by a gay man in January 2019.

That said, I did have success in federal courts. In 2017, I argued my first appeal to the Federal Circuit as a woman and won. In 2018, I was hired to do another appeal — this time in the Fifth Circuit. The client told me he had tremendous respect for me as a lawyer and was confident in my abilities, but that he would likely have someone else do the oral argument because he was concerned about how conservative Fifth Circuit Judges would react to a transgender woman. Ultimately, he did not have anyone else to argue, I offered to do it for free, so I got my second argument post-transition. I won this case too. I am 2-0 in U.S Courts of Appeals as a transgender woman.

Despite these wins, as 2018 dragged on, hourly work remained elusive even though I felt I was everywhere giving speeches and presentations.⁴ I made pitches that I thought had gone very well, but nothing. Still, nature hates a vacuum, and it filled my practice with pro bono advocacy. I was busy, but not generating revenue. I realized people with no

[Page 193]

money are not as picky about their lawyers as people with money, so by summer of 2019, I retooled for contingency work. It took me an enormous amount of unbilled time, but by 2020, I had contingency cases on file.

I also became an advocate for my community. I took on pro bono cases for LGBT people, and became a "go to" lawyer for transgender people in Texas. I got an emergency call about a transwoman facing deportation to Honduras, which would have been a death sentence. I visited her in detention the next day, and within 60 days had secured asylum for her. I had worked on an amicus brief for the National LGBTQ bar in a case filed to stop the City of Houston from making payments for spousal benefits to same-sex couples. I had worked with Lamba Legal on remand from their en banc 7th Circuit win in Hively v. Ivy Tech,⁵ the first court to hold sexual orientation was protected under Title VII’s provisions against sex discrimination. My firm supported these efforts, and I am grateful for it.

In early 2021, I had a break-through. A lawyer I was working with in a Bar group arranged for me to be hired hourly on a new patent infringement case to be filed in Houston. My first new hourly patent case in years. I was over the moon when I filed it, but then crashed hard back to earth when I saw it had been assigned to a federal judge in Houston who was openly anti-transgender.⁶ Worse, the judge had recently been admonished in a Fifth Circuit opinion for giving a suit by a female professor against her former University the back of the hand, dismissing it at the case management conference.⁷ I was crushed, after all this time and work, I finally got hired hourly and now I would have to pass the case off to one of my colleagues. I had known this judge since 1986, and had tried two cases in his court as a man, but I knew as a transgender woman I could not appear in front of him.

Sadly, when this incident occurred, I realized that even though my experiences with the federal judiciary post-transition had been very good — and very successful, there was more than one anti-transgender federal judge to contend with in Texas. For example, a President Trump appointee to the Fifth Circuit, who formerly represented parties against Gavin Grimm in his landmark case for transgender students’ rights, wrote a long opinion on why it was not appropriate to use female pronouns when referring to a transgender woman litigant.⁸ Another Judge appointed by President Trump went out of his way in dictum in another case to denigrate transgender rights,⁹ and that judge likewise was

[Page 194]

dismissive of a transgender litigant in another case.¹⁰ The Fifth Circuit also refused to recuse a trial judge (also appointed by President Trump) in the Northern District of Texas in a case by a transgender woman based on his known transgender views and prior work as a lawyer against transgender rights.¹¹ This anti-transgender bias is not representative of the Federal Judiciary in Texas or the Fifth Circuit as a whole, I have received wonderful support from colleagues on the bench, and done well in motion practice and appeals, but it is still undeniable that a random case assignment caused me problems because of who I am.

I had actually been involved in a minor controversy in the spring of 2020, when a University of Texas Law Review, the Texas Review of Law and Policy ("TROLP") published an issue with three offensive anti-LGBTQ articles. One article advocated "conversion therapy" for LGBTQ people — a practice condemned by major health professional organizations and banned in 18 states because it can drive "patients" to deep depression (or worse).¹² Another argued for banning transgender women from female restrooms as a women’s rights issue.¹³ The third article does not cite a single judicial opinion in its 283 footnotes, as it argues against transgender people in society.¹⁴ Because this "hate speech" was printed in one of the law school’s official publications, the articles can be accessed via its webpage. I was asked by an LGBTQ student group to help convince the law school to disavow this hate speech. The law school would not do so, maybe it was because of academic freedom, or maybe because the advisory board of TROLP included Texas Governor Abbott, Senator Ted Cruz, The Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, Nathan Hecht, and several U.S. Fifth Circuit and recent appointees to the federal district courts.¹⁵

During the regular session of the 2021 Texas legislature and what is now the second special session, I have spent many hours researching and drafting position papers in opposition to anti-LGBTQ legislation, including bills to prohibit transgirls from playing on women’s sports teams. I wish this was an anomaly, but anti-LGBTQ bills, and anti-transgender bills especially, have been a constant in each legislative session since 2017, when the Governor and Lt. Governor pressed for a "bathroom bill" that would bar transwomen from using the female restroom. The summer of 2021 has so far included

[Page 195]

two special legislative sessions called by Governor Abbott on key conservative priorities — "election integrity" and transgirls in sports. Nonetheless, two candidates have announced they will challenge Governor Abbott in the Republican primary in March 2022 because he is too "liberal" and fails to protect "Texas values". Coincidentally, perhaps, shortly after his second primary opponent announced in July 2021, Governor Abbott had the agency responsible for child services declare certain types of medical care for transkids to be child abuse.¹⁶ I dread that the level of anti-transgender rancor is likely to build to a fever pitch by the primary.

I also really started confronting some hard issues as a litigator: Would my presence hurt my client in front of a conservative juror? You may have read about Waco, Texas now having about 20 percent of new patent cases in the U.S. The second biggest employer in Waco is Baylor University, which is home to the conservative Baptist George W. Truett Seminary.¹⁷ Baylor does not consider same-sex marriage or transgender identity to be valid.¹⁸

Waco is not just in the Bible-Belt, but it is also heavily Republican. The 2020 Texas Republican party platform explicitly says, "We oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity".¹⁹ Some of the counties around Waco were carried by the Republicans in 2020, by nearly a 90 percent margin.²⁰ The Southern Baptist Church has a large following in Waco, and its public position is, "we oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity."²¹ The Judges in the Waco Division are terrific people and wonderful

[Page 196]

judges, but I am concerned about whether I can appear in front of a jury there without negative fall-out to my client.²²

Even though I am lucky to be surrounded by supportive colleagues, family and friends, I have had a couple of problems in public life. After speaking at a patent law seminar in Texas in 2018, I was using the ladies room. A man came storming in after me, because apparently his daughter told him there was a man dressed as a woman in one of the stalls. After that, in Texas, I won’t use a restroom when there are kids around. I took to doing open mic stand-up comedy in 2019, and it seemed that almost every time I showed up at an open mic, anti-transgender jokes would follow. My daughter came with me to an open mic one night, and she was both scared and appalled after this happened. I persist in doing these events because I enjoy them, and I feel it is important to show people what a transgender person is like in real life — besides, those impromptu transgender jokes inevitably are poorly thought-out and bomb. Still I know my wife worries anytime I go to do an open mic. Prior to my transition I had been a practicing Catholic, giving generously to the Church, but when I went to a friend’s funeral mass shortly after my transition, I got a lot of hugs, but I also got some very ugly looks: That was the last time I set foot in a Catholic church.

Yet, these issues are not all specific to my life in Texas. Even in liberal Massachusetts, where voters supported a transgender rights law by a 2 to 1 margin, there were still nearly 1 million voters who cast their ballots against my rights.²³ And why is anyone voting on my rights anyway? What’s up with that? Sadly, in Houston, the opposite result had been reached in a 2015 election to repeal a city ordinance that included protection for transgender rights.²⁴ In that election, 61 percent of the voters cast their ballots to repeal a law that protected transgender people.²⁵

When I was a young lawyer, I was fortunate enough to work on a large trial with a well-known, successful trial lawyer. He told me that a jury trial is an exercise in exploiting other people’s prejudices. Ifjury trials are about exploiting prejudice, then am I going to be able to go in front of a jury for a client again?

The facts that I am now confronting are that anti-transgender policies seem to have become a litmus test for Texas Republicans. The Texas Republican Party has in fact

[Page 197]

pressed for three special sessions to attack transgender rights.²⁶ Although not part of the National Republican Platform, and certainly not leveraged by every Republican politician, the party has mobilized powerful people and groups against transpeople, not just in Texas, but other places as well. The propaganda is that we are mentally ill or "faking it" for some unknown advantage — but being transgender is a life of disadvantages and no one would transition unless they had no other choice.

Given my experience, what about the legal industry’s "diversity and inclusion" movement? This movement has definitely benefited me in that it has meant I have kept a seat at the table — although in a meeting I attended shortly after I transitioned, somehow I got shuffled to the end of the table…. If a firm is determined to achieve diversity it can spend the money to hire diverse people and to implement initiatives to get diversity. But even with substantial investments in diversity, real inclusion requires more than money, it requires disruption. I cannot appreciate how other groups feel they have been impacted, but for transpeople in forward-thinking companies and national law firms, I think we feel that at best we have achieved toleration, perhaps, as in my firm, an acceptance of our situations. But internal acceptance is not the same as inclusion in the external business of a company or a firm. Where many organizations falter in our industry and other industries is that they count on inclusion following diversity, as if by some algorithm a certain number of diverse people will be included in meaningful roles. But there is nothing natural about inclusion — if it were normal behavior it would not be an issue—so it takes work.

Lawyers have a terrible paranoia that each case could be the last case, and this makes work and staffing a "zero-sum" game. And, frankly, a team that has had success in the past likely sees no reason to switch things up to include anyone new in the future. Moreover, some clients have cultural bias, and they may implicitly or explicitly signal to their firms that certain types of diverse lawyers are not welcome in their offices (or on their cases). But where opportunity is foreclosed by external forces, firms need to leverage their client base to create inclusion elsewhere. The fact is I still see in Texas that the majority of teams on patent cases are all male and all white — firms should be asking their team leaders, why? Inclusion is hard. It requires risk-taking — of a kind that lawyers prefer to avoid: perhaps lawyers think inclusion in Texas is tough and that is just the way it is — perhaps, but "it" won’t ever change until someone changes "it".

Inclusion can benefit our clients, whether they realize it or not: For example, juries are not made up exclusively of middle-aged white men, typically the opposite is true. Transgender people have a unique perspective on people that can be useful in any scenario. They might know and appreciate what it means to be privileged and how it impacts thinking, while they likely also know what it means to have no privilege, and how that impacts thinking. Further, transgender people have a unique ability to understand at a deep level

[Page 198]

how men and women perceive and feel things differently: This is a result of 2 things: 1) being "in the room" at different times in our lives with the guys or the girls; and 2) the fact that to successfully hide we had to learn how to blend, before and after transition, so we spent time studying how each sex does things, rather than just naturally doing them.

Realistically the focus of D&I is on other groups with a more public history of oppression and exclusion, and that are bigger, where more good can be done faster. If you put all the transpeople in big law in a room it would not be a crowded room — so maybe toleration, with a dollop of acceptance — is the best we can hope for today. But the out transgender lawyers are just the tip of an iceberg of trans, queer, and even gay lawyers who are deeply closeted and are suffering. I regularly get calls from closeted transpeople — or passable transpeople who are in "stealth mode" — both groups suffer by having to live a secret. One issue for D&I is to encourage people to live their authentic life — to be who they are — abandon their secrets. Many LGBTQ people — and I dare say the great majority of transgender people — in law live with the secret for fear of losing their practices: I don’t blame them.²⁷

What do I miss most about being a man? Pockets. That is really it, maybe comfortable shoes, although cute shoes are more important sometimes (often times!) than comfortable shoes. And, yes, I do miss my "white male power pack", not just at work, but in everything in life. (The "before and after" stories I could tell!) I did not realize how much privilege I had enjoyed in my life. But do I regret transition? No. The constant gnawing at my soul, the buzzing in the back of my head, the ever-present discomfort, are gone. I still have stress, and problems, but in the past, while there were things that brought me joy (mainly my family), today I live in joy. Joy is, in fact, my chosen middle name. And what of the future, I don’t know, though I am in L.A. again this summer, and the headlines back home in Texas are scary….

[Page 199]

——–

Notes:

^1. Ms. Healey is a Senior Principal at Fish & Richardson P.C. in its Houston office.

^2. https://www.fr.com/team/dj-healey/.

^3. http://leavesofthetreethemovie.com/.

^4. I did get some work from colleagues and even from firm clients that tried to help me out, but while this felt good, it did not provide many hours.

^5. 853 F.3d 339 (7th Cir. 2017) (en banc)

^6. Dorothy Atkins, Trans VA Worker Calls for Judge’s Recusal In Bias Suit, LAW360, Apr. 24, 2017, https://www.law360.com/articles/916616/trans-va-worker-calls-for-judge-s-recusal-in-bias-suit

^7. Alison Frankel, Houston judge Lynn Hughes is pulled off another case as 5th Circuit revives prof’s discrimination claim, REUTERS (February 1, 2021), https://www.reuters.com/article/legal-us-otc-hughes/houston-judge-lynn-hughes-is-pulled-off-another-case-as-5th-circuit-revives-profs-discrimination-claim-idUSKBN2A13T3.

^8. Debra Cassen Weiss, 5th Circuit denies transgender prisoner’s request to use female pronouns, change court records, ABA JOURNAL, Jan. 22, 2020, https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/5th-circuit-denies-transgender-prisoners-request-to-use-female-pronouns-change-court-records.

^9. Joanna L. Grossman and Grant Hayden, Holy Dictum: Federal Judge Rejects Protection Against Transgender Discrimination in "Elegant Aside", VERDICT, Feb. 26, 2019, https://verdict.justia.com/2019/02/26/holy-dictum-federal-judge-rejects-protection-against-transgender-discrimination-in-elegant-aside.

^10. See also Maxwell S. Kennerly, The Fifth Circuit Abandons The Rule Of Law To Spite A Transgender Inmate, Litigation and Trial Blog (March 31, 2019), https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2019/03/articles/attorney/transgender-inmate/.

^11. Alison Frankel, Transgender plaintiff asks 5th Circuit to review Trump appointee’s refusal to recuse, REUTERS, Dec. 16, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-otc-recuse/transgender-plaintiff-asks-5th-circuit-to-review-trump-appointees-refusal-to-recuse-idUSKBN1YK23Z; see also Opinion on Merits Appeal, Jackson v. Valdez, No. 20-10344 (5th Cir. Mar. 29, 2021), withdrawn and replaced by Opinion, Jackson v. Valdez, No. 20-10344 (5th Cir. May 18, 2021). It is also worth noting that this Judge is on the board of advisors for TROLP.

^12. Emilie Kao & Monica G. Burke, Masterpiece Cakeshop and Authentic Pluralism in a Post-Obergefell World, 24 TEX. REV. L. & Pol. 97 (2019).

^13. Kevin Stuart & DeAnn Barta Stuart, Behind Closed Doors: Public Restrooms and the Fight for Women’s Equality, 24 TEX. REV. L. & POL. 1 (2019).

^14. Ryan T. Anderson, Neither Androgyny Nor Stereotypes: Sex Differences and the Difference They Make, TEX. REV. L. & POL. 211 (2019).

^15. I wrote an editorial published in the Daily Texan simply to make a record somewhere that these articles were nothing more than hate speech. Danielle Healey, An Objection to anti-LGBTQ hate speech, DAILY TEXAN ONLINE, Apr. 28, 2021, https://thedailytexan.com/2020/04/28/an-objection-to-anti-lgbtq-hate-speech/.

^16. Eric Coulehan, "In response to Abbott inquiry, Texas DFPS says gender-affirming surgery is child abuse", KTSM.com, Aug. 11, 2021, https://www.ktsm.com/news/texas/in-response-to-abbott-inquiry-texas-dfps-says-sex-reassignment-surgery-for-youths-is-child-abuse/.

^17. Baylor University Media and Public Relations, Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary is an orthodox, evangelical school in the historic Baptist tradition that equips God-called people for gospel ministry in and alongside Christ’s Church by the power of the Holy Spirit, Aug. 19, 2021, https://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=219068.

^18. Baylor University, Student Policies and Procedures, Statement on Human Sexuality, https://www.baylor.edu/risk/doc.php/343044.pdf ("Baylor University welcomes all students into a safe and supportive environment in which to discuss and learn about a variety of issues, including those of human sexuality. The University affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God. Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm. Temptations to deviate from this norm include both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior. It is thus expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.").

^19. REPUBLICAN PARTY OF TEXAS, REPORT OF 2020 PLATFORM AND RESOLUTIONS COMMITTEE 23, Item 246, https://www.texasgop.org/platform/. Item 248 explicitly condones conversion therapy, which has been outlawed in 18 states and is explicitly condemned by the medical community. Id. at Item 248.

^20. Jackee Coe, Map Shows how Texas counties voted in 2020 presidential election, EL PASO TIMES, Nov. 11, 2020, https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/politics/2020/11/11/map-shows-how-texas-counties-voted-biden-trump-2020-election/6241745002/.

^21. SBC, On Transgender Identity, June 1, 2014, https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/on-transgender-identity/.

^22. Other than Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Houston, the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio, the Republicans won Texas in 2020 with a margin of 52.1 to 46.5 percent in the presidential race, and 53.5 to 43.9 percent in the U.S. Senate race. See https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/texas/ (last accessed August 21, 2021).

^23. Massachusetts Ballot questions, 3 – Gender Identity Rights, The Boston Globe, Nov. 8, 2018, https://apps.bostonglobe.com/elections/2018/MA/race/?raceID=24875.

^24. This was the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, known as "HERO".

^25. Cumulative Report — Official – Harris County — General and Special Elections — November 5, 2015, https://www.harrisvotes.com/HISTORY/20151103/cumulative/cumulative_9.jpg.

^26. This occurred in 2017 with the Texas Bathroom Bill, which was killed at the end of the special session by procedural measures. D. Montgomery and M. Fernandez, Texas Bathroom Bill Dies Again, Raising Republican Acrimony, NY Times, Aug. 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/us/politics/texas-bathroom-bill-dies-again-raising-republican-acrimony.html. Bills to deny transgirls the right to participate in womens’ sports were introduced in the first special session in 2021, which failed for lack of a quorum when Democrats protecting voter legislation fled to Washington, D.C., but is back on in the second special session. Senate Bill 2, of the 87^th Legislature, Second Special Session.

^27. Consider for example, there are about 100,000 lawyers in the Texas Bar, statistically, roughly four to six thousand or so would likely be gay, and about 500-900 transgender. I doubt there are four to six thousand out-gay lawyers in Texas, and at most there are maybe a dozen out transgender women lawyers. This means a lot of people are living in fear and distress.