I am heartened that I’m in the largest county in the state and the third largest city in the country, and we’re facing these issues, and educating judges about them.

In Chicago we get accused of being in a bubble. We’ve had great government here, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to the [rest of the country]. I was horrified with what happened to [Montana] Representative [Zooey] Zephyr. It felt like the trains were going off the tracks. It’s not been that long since we were fighting against totalitarianism. To think that the stifling of communication can happen here…

Again, Chicago is an area where we do, in my opinion, have an open mind on these issues. We’re more willing to fashion remedies and decisions in such a way so as to give transgender people a right to express themselves and to get the services that are necessary. I just joined the Domestic Relations Division – I have educated other judges about what happens with parenting time when kids are transgender, or when parents are transgender.

I always feel like you can’t visualize who a transgender person is until you know them. And you can’t know them unless you permit them to be visible. But once you know them and once you’re able to see the person, rather than the aura of whatever panic or fear you create around them, you become more accepting. I am very optimistic when I think about where we’ve come from, from my childhood to now. There’s a universe between then and now. There’s some backtracking, but I think that fear can gradually be eased as long as we keep an open mind. As long as we don’t shut down legislative action, and how democracy works. 

The more you include people, the more seats at the table you get…I was talking to [a trans person] a few years ago who ran for a really minor office, and she won the office. Maybe that’s not going to affect legislation, but it’s someone who’s in office who represents us. 

And in the Trump years… the courts were the first line of defense. We have to look at how judges are elected, and we have to support people with open minds in those positions. That will go a long way to help.

I think [the recent wave of bills] is a backlash, I think that it’s a distraction… [and] I think one of the reasons for the backlash is that people are getting confident. You can casually say, this is my wife, these are my children… And maybe [people] thought things were moving too fast. I, for instance, knew I was transgender at the age of four. When I told people at the age of 46, they had ten minutes to get used to it. I had been getting used to it for years. 

We need to give people a little bit of slack. Not to say that we should yield, but we need to give some people a little bit of leeway in our lives. There’s a certain knee jerk reaction sometimes. [But] if people are acting in good faith, then everything else is easy…  The key is to be visible and to be confident and to let people know that we exist – that we eat, we have mortgages, we pay the same high gas prices that everybody else does.