We Need to Stop Kyle Duncan — Now

by Airin Chen, Michaé Pulido, and Jay Wu

President Trump has received major pushback this past year in his attempts to enforce an anti-civil rights, anti-immigrant, and anti-LGBTQ agenda — including from federal courts, which have ruled against his transgender military ban and other discriminatory policies.

No wonder he bragged in his State of the Union speech of appointing “more circuit court judges than any new administration in the history of our country.” If the President’s judicial nominees advance, they will have a huge impact on the lives of transgender people and others being targeted by the Trump administration’s hateful agenda.

The U.S. Senate is poised to vote as soon as this week on a judicial nominee who has done more to demean and attack transgender people than even defeated nominee Jeff Mateer.

This is Kyle Duncan.

He’s up for a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a federal court that covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Appeals courts are the second-highest courts in the land — only the Supreme Court can override decisions that an appeals court makes.

This is the office of Schaerr Duncan LLP.

Duncan co-founded Schaerr Duncan after leaving the Becket Fund, which recently created a lie-filled anti-transgender website as part of its efforts to promote discrimination in health care.

At both firms, he has dedicated his career to limiting the civil rights of LGBTQ people — particularly trans people. He also has spoken multiple times before the Alliance Defending Freedom — a hate group that supports criminalization of homosexuality in the U.S. and abroad.

Schaerr Duncan has defended anti-trans parties in some of the most significant court cases involving trans rights in the last few years, including the proponents of North Carolina’s discriminatory HB 2 and the Gloucester County School District, which discriminated against student Gavin Grimm.

In the North Carolina case, Duncan filled the record with junk-science statements from quack “experts,” arguing that being transgender is a “delusion” and (contrary to the views of America’s leading pediatricians) that parents should discourage “transgender persistence.”

And for the last two years in G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board, he has been fiercely arguing that transgender students like Gavin Grimm are not protected under federal law and are “threats” to other students.

Duncan has not only been a harsh critic of the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decisions in Obergefell v. Hodges and United States v. Windsor — he has again and again taken to the airwaves to scaremonger about the “harms” caused by respecting LGBTQ families and promote discrimination against them. After Obergefell, he publicly questioned the legitimacy of the federal courts he now wants to sit on and called the case “an abject failure” that “imperils civic peace.”

This is the Senate floor.

As soon as this week, Senators could gather here to take a vote on Duncan’s nomination. This vote is the last step between Duncan and the currently vacant Fifth Circuit seat.

His nomination is of grave and urgent concern. Duncan will not be able to render fair and unbiased justice when faced with LGBTQ issues or when LGBTQ individuals enter the court he sits on. Nominees for lifetime appointments to the federal courts should meet the highest standards of professionalism and impartiality, and Duncan simply does not meet those standards. A man who builds a legal career around targeting the LGBTQ population is dangerous and has no place in a federal judgeship.

And this is you.

Call your senators now at (202) 224–3121 and tell them to stop Kyle Duncan from gaining a lifetime seat on an influential federal court.

Here’s an example of what you can say:

I am calling to ask Senator _____ to oppose Kyle Duncan’s nomination to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. I am transgender (or someone I love is transgender), and Duncan’s claim that being transgender is a “delusion” is offensive and harmful. His bias makes it clear that he has no place on the bench.

Visit NCTE’s judicial nominees action page to learn about other anti-LGBTQ nominees and what you can do to stop them.

You can find it here.

Airin Chen is a legal intern at NCTE.

Michaé Pulido is an undergraduate intern at NCTE.

Jay Wu is the Communications Manager at NCTE.