Last month, a conservative panel of judges on the 6 th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the First Amendment grants professors a right to intentionally misgender trans students in class. The decision, authored by Donald Trump-nominee and Mitch McConnell protégé Amul Thapar, had a triumphant tone: Thapar depicted himself as a champion of free speech combatting the “classroom thought police” at modern universities who seek to turn their campuses into “enclaves of totalitarianism” by prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ students. Advertisement The facts tell a much more nuanced story than Thapar’s simplistic tale of academic freedom versus totalitarianism. The case centers on professor Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio. In 2018, Meriwether misgendered a trans student, known in litigation as Jane Doe, in class; she asked that he use her correct pronouns and honorifics in the future, but he refused. The university found Meriwether in violation of its nondiscrimination policy, which requires professors to use students’ preferred pronouns. Meriwether refused to comply with the policy, and following an investigation, the university placed a “written warning” in his file noting his noncompliance. The professor, backed by the viciously anti-trans law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, then sued—dragging Jane Doe into the center of a years-long legal dispute that she desperately wished to avoid.