A University of Louisville professor who was fired for speaking out against allowing trans-identified minors to obtain body-mutilating surgeries has reached a settlement totaling more than $1 million with his former employer.
The legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom announced that the University of Louisville agreed to pay $1.6 million in damages and attorney’s fees to settle a lawsuit filed by former psychology professor Allan Josephson.
Josephson was terminated in February 2019 over his participation in a 2017 panel criticizing the performance of life-altering surgeries on trans-identified youth hosted by the Washington-based conservative public policy think tank Heritage Foundation.
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Josephson was demoted in the wake of his appearance at the Heritage event.
Last September, a federal appeals court ruled that Josephson’s case could proceed to trial and that university officials could be held personally liable.
“I’m glad to finally receive vindication for voicing what I know is true,” Josephson said. “Children deserve better than life-altering procedures that mutilate their bodies and destroy their ability to lead fulfilling lives. In spite of the circumstances I suffered through with my university, I’m overwhelmed to see that my case helped lead the way for other medical practitioners to see the universal truth that altering biological sex is impossibly dangerous while acceptance of one’s sex leads to flourishing.”
Travis Barham, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, said, “Free speech and common sense have scored a major victory on college campuses.”
“As early as 2014, Dr. Josephson saw the truth behind dangerous procedures that activists were pushing on children struggling with their sex. He risked his livelihood and his reputation to speak the truth boldly, and the university punished him for expressing his opinion — ultimately by dismissing him,” the attorney said.
“Public universities have no business punishing professors simply because they hold different views,” Barham continued. “Dr. Josephson’s case illustrates why — because the latest and best science confirms what he stated all along. Hopefully, other public universities will learn from this that if they violate the First Amendment, they can be held accountable, and it can be very expensive.”
In recent years, more than two dozen states have passed measures to ban trans-identified minors from obtaining some or all types of so-called “gender-affirming” procedures and drugs due to concerns about their long-term effects.
Additionally, the National Health Service in the United Kingdom announced last year, after several months of research, that it would stop providing puberty-blocking drugs for children with gender dysphoria, except for when the drugs are part of a clinical trial.
“We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty suppressing hormones to make the treatment routinely available at this time,” an NHS spokesperson said at the time.
The American College of Pediatricians warns that puberty-blocking drugs that are often prescribed to youth with gender dysphoria can lead to “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility.” Meanwhile, ACP lists potential side effects of cross-sex hormones prescribed to trans-identified children as an “increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan.”
While most efforts to ban gender transition procedures for minors have taken place at the state level so far, the federal government has taken a renewed interest in prohibiting the life-altering procedures now that President Donald Trump has taken office. In an executive order signed shortly after he took office earlier this year, President Donald Trump established it as official U.S. policy that the federal government will not “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another.”
Although it vowed to “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit these destructive and life-altering procedures,” the executive order stopped short of issuing a nationwide ban on the procedures. Instead, it instructed the heads of executive agencies to “take appropriate steps to ensure that institutions receiving Federal research or education grants end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
