The dreaded Federalist Society at Pace Law School decided to have a panel on New York’s Proposition 1. The program was packed and its moderators were thrilled at the prospect of holding such a popular event.

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.”

At first, it went better than one might have expected, with the panelists allowed to speak with only minor interruptions. But then the moderators opened the program to the floor for questions, Uh oh.

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.

This hardly seems surprising to anyone paying attention. Accepting the underlying premise of transgender ideology is an article of faith on most college campuses, which would seem to foreclose discussion by begging the question. Of course, this is collateral to the fundamental problems with Prop 1, which was the focus of the panel as one of its consequences would be to eliminate any question as to the right to transgender women from unconditionally participating in women’s sports.

This was not the Title IX sports question that was debated at the time of its enactment, but times change and, at least in the hands of the head of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, Catherine Lhamon, definitions of what constitutes sex disrimination unilaterally change with her bureaucratic whim. But I digress.

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.”

On the surface, there’s the problem of weaponization of Title IX, where due process goes to die and the word “impartiality” is never uttered. It is, of course, possible that Pace Law School’s Title IX coordinator will take a hard, cold look at the complaint and toss it out. And there is a possibility that pigs at Pace Law School fly.

But aside from the weaponization of the Title IX process. which protects students from sex discrimination from harassment that is so “severe, pervasive and objectively offensive” that it denies the victimized student of educational benefits. Even assuming that there is a factual basis for the allegations, despite witnesses disputing that any such thing occurred, and putting aside the kangaroo court aspect of Title IX campus adjudications, the accusation is 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.”

Did this deny a student of educational benefits? Whether transgender women are women was a question for discussion in the first place but even so, Pace Law School is deeming misgendering, assuming it in fact happened, to violate Title IX. Of course, it could also have to do with the “aggressive pointing,” which is almost as bad as stare rape, but the question remains whether there a complaint of pointing without the misgendering would be sufficient to invoke the process and punishment of Title IX.

The accused student denies both gesticulating and directing any such characterization to the accuser. Indeed, the notion of misgendering a fellow student is so deeply embedded in campus norms as to be nearly unthinkable these days, akin to calling someone a racial epithet. Even if discussions can be had on a theoretical level, which is called into question by what happened at Pace, it simply isn’t done on a personal level.

But is it a Title IX violation, of such harm as to deny an accusing student educational benefit and an accused student the possibility of completing law school and being admitted to the bar? Apparently so. And that’s the aggressive point being pursued at Pace Law School under Title IX.