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 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.
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.”