Mr. President,

You must take immediate action to remove Gail Heriot from the United States Commission on Civil Rights, as her repeated comments and published writing have demonstrated not only a lack of legal and academic knowledge and expertise, but personal prejudice and bigotry against numerous groups of Americans which is antithetical to the very purpose of the Commission and which render her guilty of malfeasance and unfit to serve.

In a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee last week, one of the members of the US Commission on Civil Rights, Gail Heriot was entertained by the majority as an “expert witness” and issued the following statement with regard to the Department of Education’s recent guidance in enforcing the protection of transgender and intersex students under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

"We are teaching young people a terrible lesson. If I believe that I am a Russian princess, that doesn’t make me a Russian princess, even if my friends and acquaintances are willing to indulge my fantasy,"

The ignorance and malice belying this statement is astounding. Trans and intersex people have always existed, and as empirical measure confirms have always constituted 1-2% of the human population. In most societies throughout human history this basic reality was well understood and accepted. For most of human-kind’s time on this Earth we have never been regarded as mentally ill. The American Psychiatric Association and the DSM no longer categorize gender dysphoria as a mental illness, and they have formally apologized for ever regarding it (as well as homosexuality) as a mental illness and all the abuses that it led to, including discriminatory policies and torturous attempts to “cure” LGBT children and criminalize, stigmatize, and segregate them as adults. For Gail Heriot to imply that over three million trans and intersex Americans are simply delusional for living their lives and presenting themselves in accordance with the way their brains are structured, for her to state that she is fit to judge not merely our neurophysiology but our very identity and sense of self and to deign it a “fantasy” is beyond offensive- it is blatantly vicious and stupid, and to imply that these Americans cannot be trusted or believed in the very expression of their own identities is an insidious and stunning form of prejudice which is meant not only to deny us our rights under the law, but indeed to deny our very existence despite ten-thousand years of historical, medical and scientific evidence to the contrary in which Gail Heriot has absolutely no expertise whatsoever. And this appalling abrogation extends beyond trans and intersex Americans, as well.

Joining the other ultra-reactionary Republican appointee in a statement dissenting from the other six members of the Commission, Heriot goes on to argue that neither lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, nor intersex Americans should  be regarded as a protected class and that there is no Constitutional conflict or moral concern with state laws that allow both private and public accommodations and facilities to refuse service to, entrance of, or otherwise segregate and discriminate against these Americans. In her convoluted, contorted, and contradictory legal reasoning, any prejudice claimed as a  “sincerely held religious belief” by a member of a majority should not only be taken at face value without scrutiny, but regarded as sufficient ground to disregard the legal rights of any minority they dislike, yet at the same time she insists that trans and intersex children cannot even be taken at face value in the expression of their very own identity.

This line of rhetoric has been one espoused not by any experts, but by many fear-mongering political actors of a certain party recently, and it should be noted that despite being an ultra-right-wing Republican with a history of working and writing for various extremist reactionary “think tanks” opposed to civil rights legislation of all kinds, Heriot altered her registration and fallaciously claimed to be an Independent in order to circumvent legislative guidelines about the number of political partisans that may serve on the Commission at any given time.

Moreover, this is not the first time Gail Heriot has expressed personal prejudice towards one of the protected classes that the Commission, and the Civil Rights Act, are meant to defend. In a 2013 issue of the extreme reactionary magazine “National Affairs”, Gail Heriot published an article called “The Sad Irony of Affirmative Action”, in which she blatantly argues that not only should ethnically-based affirmative action not be continued, but that it is actually harmful to black and hispanic students because they are academically and intellectually inferior, and therefore it is damaging to their confidence and esteem to allow them to attend the same institutions as, and compete directly with white and asian students. She goes on to overtly contend that segregated schools are preferable and psychologically beneficial because “blacks are more comfortable around other blacks” and visa-versa, parroting the line of reasoning that was once used to justify slavery and subsequently Jim Crow on the grounds that some ethnic groups were simply less intellectually capable than others and therefore “built” for a different purpose and standard, and that it would be harmful to them and to the majority to  try to elevate these inferior people beyond their station in the world, stating:

“It is difficult to see how reducing the intellectual comfort that black students feel [by placing them] with whites can lead to greater black achievement. Yet this is just one of the many perverse effects of affirmative action and the academic mismatch it causes.”

What is perverse, Mr. President, is to have a seat on the Commission on Civil Rights of the United States filled by someone who openly concedes that she does not believe that all Americans are equal, that black and hispanic Americans are intellectually inferior and that LGBTQI Americans are mentally deranged- that only white, heterosexual, cisgender and intrasex Americans are deserving of the full protection of the law and all the opportunities that this great nation has to offer. To place such a person in a position of authority over civil rights protections is akin to elevating a serial murderer to a committee on the prevention of violent crime on the grounds of their “expertise” on the subject, and cannot be tolerated any more. The only expertise Gail Heriot has with civil rights is in denying them. The only professional experience she has with discrimination is in rationalizing it, justifying it, or denying that it even exists. Her very presence on a Civil Rights Commission is not only malfeasance, but a grossly insulting, Orwellian farce that must be brought to an end at once before she can abuse her position to do further damage.

THEREFORE, we the American people forward the following petition,

WHEREAS, the United States Commission on Civil Rights, created in 1957, is supposed to be an independent body that is charged with monitoring and making recommendations to prevent and safeguard against civil rights abuses,

WHEREAS, Gail Heriot secured her appointment to this Commission under false or misleading pretenses by attempting to mask her partisan political affiliations, status as a Republican political operative and electoral delegate in 2000, and work with extremist groups historically opposed to the very concept of civil rights protections,

WHEREAS, the very purpose and intent of reactionary Republicans who were and are opposed to the Civil Rights Acts in appointing Gail Heriot to the Commission on Civil Rights was to sabotage and undermine the work and goals of the Commission rather than further them, in a flagrant breach of the public trust and violation of the spirit and intent of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 which created the Commission,

WHEREAS, Gail Heriot was committing an act of perjury or gross malfeasance when she proclaimed herself to be an “expert” on gender identity and trans and intersex students despite having absolutely no knowledge of, or training or experience in the fields of biology, neuroscience, psychology, gender studies, or education,

WHEREAS, the President of the United States retains the authority under the charter of the Commission to dismiss a member, even one of the four appointed by Congress, at any time for cause given by reasons of gross misconduct, malfeasance, and/or neglect of and failure to discharge their duties effectively,

WHEREAS, to retain as a member of the Commission on Civil Rights a woman who openly espouses transphobia, homophobia, white supremacy, general contempt for any effort  or legislation meant to enforce the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and a belief that demographic and statistical minorities have no rights but that which the majority in each state will them to have; is not only a gross violation of the public trust, the purpose of the Commission, and the spirit of the law that conceived it, but a disgrace and insult to all those citizens who have fought through our history to secure freedom and equality under the law and all those Americans who have suffered needlessly in its absence under the yolk of the hatred, bigotry, prejudice, and oppression that she exemplifies,

LET IT BE RESOLVED, by all those signed below, that President Obama must immediately act to discharge Gail Heriot from her position, and all affiliated duties and responsibilities, as a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.