A professor at Mayo Clinic medical school is suing his employer, alleging that a department head threatened to fire him over media interviews in which he criticized the federal government for being slow to allow the use of convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19 and said that testosterone gives men an athletic advantage over women.
Dr. Michael Joyner, an anesthesiology professor, filed the lawsuit Monday in a Minnesota state court against the Mayo Clinic and Mayo’s College of Medicine and Science.
Also listed as defendants are Dr. Gianrico Farrugia, Mayo Clinic’s president and chief executive officer, and Dr. Carlos Mantilla, the chair of the anesthesiology and perioperative medicine department who took issue with Dr. Joyner’s use of “idiomatic language” during media interactions and threatened the professor’s job.
In one of the two interviews, Dr. Joyner told CNN in January that he was “frustrated” with the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) “bureaucratic rope-a-dope” and called the federal agency’s guidelines a “wet blanket” that discouraged doctors from giving their immunocompromised COVID patients convalescent plasma, or blood plasma collected from people who have recovered from COVID.
According to the lawsuit, the day after CNN published that story about convalescent plasma, “Mayo initiated a disciplinary process against Joyner for his interview comments because they criticized the NIH, and Mayo administrators were worried that NIH would retaliate by cutting their funding.”
Two months after the CNN interview, Mayo suspended Dr. Joyner for a week without pay, demanding that he “discuss approved topics only” with reporters and “stick to prescribed messaging.” The medical school also warned him that he must change his behaviors when talking to media or he would be let go.
“In his 36 years at the Mayo Clinic, Joyner had participated in hundreds of media interviews without incident,” the suit read. “Yet in March 2023, Mayo disciplined Joyner for media interview statements regarding his own research and conclusions.”
“Joyner’s punishment included a one-week unpaid suspension, denial of any salary increase at his next annual review, and the threat of termination for failure to comply with the Mayo Public Affairs Department’s preclearance and oversight of any media interviews,” it continued. “These sanctions represent a direct and ongoing attack on Joyner’s academic freedom.”
In the other interview, Dr. Joyner was asked by The New York Times about the role of testosterone in physiological development. The Time’s story concerns Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer who claimed America’s top collegiate trophy after he started competing on the women’s team following two years of testosterone suppression treatment.
Regarding puberty’s impact on athletic competitiveness, Dr. Joyner told the Times that a divergence can be observed as soon as the testosterone surges into theboys. “There are dramatic differences in performances,” he said.
“There are social aspects to sport, but physiology and biology underpin it,” the professor said in that story, published in May 2022. “Testosterone is the 800-pound gorilla.”
The interview with the Times allegedly prompted Mayo to send an email in October 2022, right before Dr. Joyner was about to give a lecture about sex differences in human performances, warning him that there were “concerns” about his “unprofessional statements” on that topic.
The email also noted that Mayo “support[s] the LGBTQIA+ community” and that Dr. Joyner should only “share evidence-based data and information,” although in the same article, a Harvard University professor explicitly agreed with Dr. Joyner’s observation that there is indeed a testerstone-driven “large performance gap” between post-puberty male and female athletes.
“In other words, Mayo’s promises of academic freedom and freedom of expression were limited by the perceptions and sensitivities of favored interest groups,” the lawsuit alleged. “Joyner was no longer free to discuss his scientific findings on sports performances if those findings could be perceived as offensive to a particular patient population.”
Dr. Joyner, backed by the non-profit advocacy group Academic Freedom Alliance, is asking for monetary damages and an order that the defendants “cease their retaliation and interference with Joyner’s communication about his research.”
In response to the suit, the Mayo Clinic emphasized that it didn’t discipline Dr. Joyner for statements he made about testosterone or transgender athletes.
“Mayo disciplined Dr. Joyner for continuing to treat coworkers unprofessionally in violation of Mayo policy and for making unprofessional comments about the National Institute(s) of Health’s (NIH) guidelines for convalescent plasma,” it said in a statement. “Dr. Joyner’s comments about the NIH were not the expression of a scientific opinion, as is protected by our academic freedom policy. Instead, his comments were the unprofessional venting of his personal frustration with the NIH’s decision not to recommend a therapy he had championed.”
