Mick Hartley

An article reprinted at The Glinner Update, written by lawyer John Smoot, documents the astonishing hold that gender theory has over the legal system in Massachusetts. Apparently there's an online course that's mandated for every trial court employee:

The court’s mandatory course teaches the following:

A person’s sex is “assigned” at birth based on physical characteristics.

A transgender person is a person whose gender identity is different from the sex assigned to that person at birth.

Gender identity is a person’s sincere belief regarding their own gender.

Gender exists on a spectrum. A person’s gender identity could be anything: male, female, a combination of male and female, non-binary, genderqueer, bi-gender, gender fluid or some other undefined category.

Identifying as transgender is not a choice. It is a biological and psychological imperative.

Employees and judges in the trial court may wear pronoun buttons indicating the manner in which they prefer to be called (“he/him/his”, “they/them/theirs”) in order to be inclusive of people who are transgender and “demonstrate respect for each individual's choice of pronouns.”

As Smoot argues, this is deeply disturbing:

There is a serious problem in the court system, but it is not with the interactions between court staff and transgendered people. The problem is that the court has adopted an ideology which casts doubt on its impartiality, harms women and children, and runs contrary to truth.

First, let’s be clear that the court’s gender doctrine is not about an extension of gay rights. When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (“SJC”) ruled on same sex marriage in 2003, the court added male-male and female-female to the male-female structure of marriage recognized in the Commonwealth. Unlike today, the SJC did not deconstruct the biological reality of male and female. And families in our court were all treated the same, subject to the same rules, whether male-female, male-male, or female-female.

Feminist Jane Clare Jones notes the distinction this way:

“The key thing to understand about trans rights activism is that, unlike gay rights activism, it is not just a movement seeking to ensure that trans people are not discriminated against. It is, rather, a movement committed to a fundamental reconceptualization of the very idea of what makes someone a man or a woman.” (Emphasis in original.)

The trial court’s promotion of this new understanding of male and female is gravely problematic….

But read it all. 

What's even more worrying is that the article was labelled "hate speech" and removed by Linkedln.