(Reuters) - Valerie Jackson, a transgender woman who was allegedly forced to reveal her genitalia to employees at the Dallas County jail in 2016 when she was booked into pre-trial custody, is suing Dallas County, former Dallas sheriff Lupe Valdez and several other Texas officials in federal court in Dallas for violating her constitutional rights. In September, her case was reassigned to the newly-installed U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr. Jackson’s lawyers immediately moved for Judge Starr to recuse himself.

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Jackson and her counsel contended that Starr, a former assistant Texas attorney general, had demonstrated actual bias against transgender people, signing AG opinions in cases that, in their view, sought to restrict LGBTQ rights and refusing to answer questions in his Senate confirmation process about equal rights for the LGBTQ community. Their recusal motion also argued that Judge Starr’s previous advocacy would give rise to the appearance of bias, requiring his recusal.

Last month, Judge Starr declined to step aside. His recusal opinion analyzed each of Jackson’s assertions of bias and explained why, in the judge’s view, those assertions were unfounded. “A well-informed, thoughtful, and objective observer -- aware of all the facts and circumstances described in this opinion -- would not question this judge’s impartiality in applying precedent and the law to this case,” the judge wrote.

Judge Starr did not immediately respond to a phone message I left with his courtroom deputy.

On Friday, Jackson challenged Judge Starr’s decision in a mandamus petition at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Her lawyers, Scott Palmer and Sean Cox, argue that the judge improperly offered an assessment of the truth of Jackson’s accusations of bias in his recusal opinion. Under the provision requiring recusal for actual bias, they said, judges are only supposed to weigh the legal sufficiency of the allegations, which they are bound to accept as true. By disputing Jackson’s allegations and defending his own history, they said, “Judge Starr went far beyond that which is permitted.”

The Dallas assistant district attorneys who are defending the case against the city officials did not respond to an email about the mandamus petition. (They did not brief a position on the recusal motion in the trial court.)

Mandamus petitions, as you know, must clear an extremely high bar and it seems unlikely that the 5th Circuit will grant this one. But it’s worth paying attention to the proceeding for what it might portend about civil rights litigation in the wake of judicial appointments by President Trump. Judge Starr’s nomination was opposed by such civil rights groups as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Alliance for Justice – but he’s hardly the only recent nominee to have faced accusations of bias in the Senate confirmation process. Will recusal motions become routine when these judges are appointed to oversee civil rights cases – followed by mandamus petitions when those motions are denied?

Jackson counsel Palmer told me he didn’t think he had a choice but to ask for Judge Starr to recuse, and to follow up with the 5th Circuit after the judge’s opinion explaining his decision to stay on the case. “I didn’t want to pick a fight with a federal judge,” he said. “But there was no way I could look my client in the eye and say, ‘Don’t sweat it’ with this judge.”

Jackson, whose driver’s license says she is a woman and who, according to her mandamus petition, has “had her gender legally changed to female,” was detained in November 2016 for carrying a firearm in an airport. At the county jail, she alleges, she was first directed to lift her shirt to show her breasts. After doing so and subsequently disclosing that she is transgender, she was asked if she had completed sex reassignment surgery. She said she had although in fact she had not. (Her lawyers said she “wanted this unnecessary and humiliating harassment to end.) She was then allegedly escorted to an enclosed corner of the intake area and told that she had to pull down her pants and underwear to prove that she did not have a penis.

Although she was offered the option of being examined at a hospital, Jackson alleged that jail officials told her that process would add hours to her confinement. She ended up being placed in a cell in the men’s holding area, where she said she was subjected to harassment by male prisoners.

Jackson alleged that the county jail officials who handled her intake failed to follow Dallas’ stated policy for transgender detainees. She has accused the city and individual defendants of violating her due process and engaging in a pattern of constitutional violations by failing to adequately train and supervise staff to be sure they followed the stated policy.

The city has moved to dismiss the case, arguing among other things that Jackson cannot establish a pattern of violations and that she has not shown the city or top officials had knowledge of allegedly inadequate training.

After her case was reassigned to Judge Starr, Palmer said, he was dismayed to read about the judge’s previous work for the Texas AG, which included advocating against the Obama administration’s directive that public schools allow transgender students to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity. Jackson’s lawyers also found 2015 remarks in which Starr said in a panel discussion on the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling that county clerks might have a First Amendment right to delegate marriage licensing duties to co-workers if they object to gay marriage for religious reasons.

In addition, the Sept. 19 recusal motion cited Judge Starr’s written responses in the Senate confirmation process to questions about the rights of LGBTQ people. The motion said Starr “refused to answer” whether the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to treat transgender people equally, whether history and tradition should not limit the rights of LGBTQ individuals and whether the government has a compelling interest in ending discrimination against the LGBTQ community. Judge Starr “has fervently fought against equal rights for members of the LGBTQ community, and specifically transgender individuals,” the recusal motion said. “A clear bias/prejudice exists.”

In his opinion declining to step aside, Judge Starr rejected the premise that his advocacy for the Texas AG could be construed as bias – not just because he was taking positions on behalf of his client but also, he said, because Jackson misconstrued those positions as expressions of prejudice rather than as principled legal arguments that have been endorsed by the 5th Circuit. Judge Starr similarly cast his Senate confirmation answers as a principled reluctance, in compliance with the judicial code of conduct, to opine on issues in pending cases. “The facts alleged in Jackson’s affidavit neither evince a personal bias nor would convince a reasonable person that a personal bias exists,” Judge Starr wrote. (Interestingly, the judge did not use gendered pronouns to refer to Jackson in his opinion, except in two instances in which he quoted her recusal motion. In other opinions issued by Judge Starr in the same time frame, he did use gendered pronouns to refer to both men and women appearing before him.)

His opinion said his decision was based on the legal sufficiency of Jackson’s allegations. But her lawyers said in their mandamus petition that Judge Starr had strayed from U.S. Supreme Court and 5th Circuit precedent by presenting conclusions about the truth of Jackson’s allegations of bias. The petition quoted the Supreme Court’s 1921 decision in Berger v. U.S.: “To commit to the judge a decision upon the truth of the facts gives chance for the evil against which the section is directed.”

“We just don’t think the law allows him to engage in a dialogue and say, ‘Here’s why you’re wrong,’” Palmer said. “We filed the mandamus petition because we think cooler heads should prevail.”