What does it mean to be visible in a job where you need to remain impartial? Today on the show, I speak with Michael Sonberg, a retired NYC judge who was one of the founding members of the International Association of LGBTQ+ Judges. We talk about Michael’s experiences as an openly gay judge and how the Association is helping to build community for LGBTQ2S+ members of the judiciary all over the world. We may be at the end of Pride Month, but pride and solidarity are a year-round practice.
What does it mean to be visible in a job where you need to remain impartial? Today on the show, I speak with Michael Sonberg, a retired NYC judge who was one of the founding members of the International Association of LGBTQ+ Judges. We talk about Michael’s experiences as an openly gay judge and how the Association is helping to build community for LGBTQ2S+ members of the judiciary all over the world. We may be at the end of Pride Month, but pride and solidarity are a year-round practice.
TIL-Michael Sonberg-V3-Ren
[00:00:00]Myrna McCallum: Welcome back to the Trauma-Informed Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Myrna McCallum, Métis-Cree lawyer, and passionate promoter of trauma-informed lawyering. As you know, I believe that law schools and bar courses are missing a critical competency requirement in their curriculum: trauma-informed lawyering.
[00:00:24] Becoming a trauma-informed lawyer will, among other things, challenge you to critically reflect on your personal behaviors, beliefs, and biases, call on you to positively transform the way you approach advocacy, guide your practice to avoid doing further harm to others, and ask that you commit to remaining open to learn new and old knowledge you didn't know you needed before beginning your career.
[00:00:47] Your education starts right here, right now.
[00:00:56]We are heading towards the end of Pride Month and with the climate we are currently in when it comes to perceptions of queerness, I've been thinking a lot about visibility this month. How do we stand up in solidarity with the LGBTQ2S+ community or make ourselves visible as community members ourselves?
[00:01:14] Can we take good care of ourselves and operate within our professional world while still taking good care of our community members? And what does that look like? This can be especially tricky in a position where you're expected to remain impartial. If you're a member of the judiciary, wading through those currents can feel precarious, but you are not alone. And finding others navigating the same waters as you can make a real difference.
[00:01:38] My guest today is Michael Sonberg. Michael is a retired judge and he was one of the founders of the International Association of LGBTQ+ Judges. Today on the show, Michael tells us the story of the association, how it came to be, and how it is helping to build community for LGBTQ2S+ judges. I only learned about that association, by the way, when I was invited to present to them last summer out in Los Angeles,
[00:02:05]where they were meeting at the same time the Lavender Law Conference was happening. It was pretty awesome. We will also hear some of Michael's story as an openly gay member of the judiciary and how he balanced visibility, advocacy, and impartiality. And you're gonna hear in the episode, I'm giving props for sure to Canada because
[00:02:29] I think in comparison to what's going on in the States right now, particularly the state of Florida, like we are doing much better than they are. However, given the violent events that happened on the University of Waterloo campus today, it is clear to me and probably so many others that we still have a long way to go and
[00:02:55] I'm hoping this episode will inspire you to think about what it means to be a member of the queer community, if you are queer, and what it means for you to be an ally if you are not, but you have friends and colleagues who are part of the queer community. Today's episode is really just to invite us all to reflect on the sad fact that so many people
[00:03:24]are still not safe in this country, or I guess like really right around the world and all because of who they love. So something to think about. And now on to my conversation with Michael Sonberg.
[00:03:46] Hi there, Michael Sonberg. You and I are connected because I came to Los Angeles last year to present on trauma-informed judicial practice for the International Association of LGBTQ+ judges. I didn't even know there was an association until my friend Amy, who is a judge, a queer judge in Nova Scotia, told me about it and she and Kristen had invited me to Hollywood.
[00:04:17] So, And then I got to meet a whole bunch of folks and learn a little bit more about this organization. So I'm really happy to have you on the podcast to talk a little bit about your life and your lived experience. So welcome. So tell us a little bit about you. I know you're retired now, but can you tell us where you sat for how long?
[00:04:36]Michael Sonberg: Sure. I've lived in New York my entire life, other than the three years I spent at law school, and I was a judge for a little less than 26 and a half years in New York City. The first 12 or 13 years of it were on the local criminal court as a mayoral appointee. In New York City, we have a very unusual system, which is the mayor gets to appoint judges to the local criminal court and to the family court.
[00:05:09] In the rest of the state, there is no separate local criminal court and the family court is elected. I. But in, in New York City, those are mayoral appointments and they don't have to be approved by anybody, which is particularly unusual in the states. Most appoint- judicial appointments have to be approved by someone, whether it's by a legislature or one house of a legislature, or the electorate at a-
[00:05:34] Uh, at a, an election that follows or something like that, or some, even Massachusetts has something called the Governor's Council that has to approve an appointment before the governor can make the appointment. New York City has none of that since 1980. 80 or so. 80, 81. We've had the mayor then, and every mayor since, has had an executive order, which sets up a selection committee, which is supposed to send the mayor three names for every vacancy on the courts to which the mayor can appoint, and then the mayor has to appoint one of the three.
[00:06:09] And various mayors have worked, figured out how to, how to manipulate that to, to their convenience if they thought it was important to them. But I was appointed by New York's first African American mayor, David Dinkins in 1991. He had come to the annual dinner of the LGBT Bar Association the previous year, and in his speech talked about how he wanted to appoint gay men and lesbians to the bench, and in four years he appointed about seven of us and his first four appointments were
[00:06:44]two out lesbians, a very African-American man who was, who's my friend, who was my boss for a while, whose family was very heavily churched. And as one after the other, these women talked about their lesbian backgrounds. And then the third woman he appointed came out at that appointment ceremony, came out as a lesbian.
[00:07:04] She had been a state senator and her mother was a judge in one of our suburban counties. So out of his four initial appointments, three of them were gay people. He kept it up for the four years, much different from his predecessor, who had appointed I think four or five in 12 years. His successor, who was Rudy Giuliani, appointed two people in eight years.
[00:07:26] I was one of the two. I got moved over from a year to year appointment to fill an interim vacancy to a permanent appointment, and the other one was a friend of mine who had been an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, and my guess is that he had a lot of support from the district attorney, and I got appointed because I was in the pipeline and I happened just as the way the world turns.
[00:07:53] I happened to know a lot of the people on his, in his inner circle and in the selection committee. But we were it for eight years, and then since then, Mike Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio appointed significant numbers of lesbians and gay men. I have no idea what this mayor has done. He's appointed 20 people, and I'm asking questions of friends who are in involved in the appointment process as to whether they know if any of these folks are LGBT, but we don't know yet.
[00:08:21]Myrna McCallum:Why do you think it would be or should be a priority to appoint members of the LGBTQ2S+ community to the bench?
[00:08:32]Michael Sonberg: It's the same reason that you want a diverse bench in general, is that people who come to court should be able to see someone on the bench who looks like them, who shares demographics with them, tougher for gay people because the lawyers, when you start, may know
[00:08:51] That you’re LGBT and the institutional and on the criminal side, which is where I worked, the institutional parties, the prosecutors and the institutional defense organizations may have it in their file, but whether anyone bothers to check that file or alerts the law, particular lawyer who's gonna show up in front of you that you're LGBT, I've never figured out.
[00:09:17] I do know that when I, the first place I first worked, the judge has told me that he was a, a baby prosecutor in that office and that one of his first hearings, they said, you're gonna go down to the, I had a courtroom in the basement and go, you're gonna go see Sonberg in the basement. He's as queer as a $3 bill.
[00:09:36] Which they didn't know that he was deeply closeted and he was thrilled that he was gonna be in front of a gay judge. I would've been happier if they hadn't referred to me as queer as a $3 bill, and that the office at that point was incredibly homophobic, and that was not unusual for it to denigrate me that way.
[00:09:53] There had been one gay judge at a time. This is in the Bronx. One of the earliest appointees was a lesbian. Then there was another lesbian, then there was me, and then when they added the second Giuliani appointee, he came up to the Bronx as well. So for a while there were two of us in criminal court and they've had, and they've had other gay judges since.
[00:10:14] And the attitude in that office has gotten a lot better. Some of the homophobes have left. One of the bureau chiefs is gay and the district attorney who happens to be a former colleague of mine, makes it a point to show up every year at the LGBT Bar annual dinner. So she's clearly an ally, but at that point the court staff, particularly uniform-
[00:10:35] We have uniformed court officers that are employed by the court system in our courtrooms. On the criminal side, if you have a full complement, you should have five. Frequently, you only have three. Sometimes two. It's not supposed to open up a courtroom with fewer than two, but they historically have not been particularly supportive of LGBT people.
[00:10:56] There are very few openly LGBT court officers in the system.
[00:11:01]Myrna McCallum: I wanna ask you about activism, but before we get there, let's talk about homophobia. As I live in Canada, I'm on the West Coast, and the, I would say the experience for queer people here in Canada, at least, especially here on the West Coast, is very different from what we're seeing coming out of America, especially Florida right now.
[00:11:23] Did that lack of safety, did that ever, was that ever something that you felt when you were a sitting judge?
[00:11:31]Michael Sonberg: When I started, the word got out. I think there was something in the civil service newspaper when I first got appointed that I was, whatever the gay affiliation I had that was relevant was was there and people knew about it.
[00:11:48] And my sense is that there was some whispering about it, but nothing that that was particularly that, that had an impact on my ability to do my work. I did have a point -a long time after I started when there was a St. Patrick's Day parade in the Bronx, which for a long time didn't allow gay people to march, and a bunch of politicians had come up to the Bronx and protested that fact and got summonses returnable in criminal court for whatever.
[00:12:20] They were doing and summonses were returnable in a courtroom where the, there was a non, uh, what we called a judicial hearing officer presiding, and he or she didn't have the authority to issue a bench warrant for someone who didn't show. So these people supposedly didn't show and they came to me cuz my courtroom was down the hall and asked me to sign
[00:12:42]warrants for these people who hadn't shown up. I smelled that this was, uh, uh, put up, uh, trap for the first place- I couldn't imagine that these eight or 10 significant politicians would ignore a court summons. They would've been there and they were awfully hot for me to sign these, to sign these warrants, and I overheard something which implied that they had a crew ready to go out, a police crew ready to go out and try to arrest these people on the bench warrants.
[00:13:13] And I looked at who the people were and they were all people I knew. So I said, I have to recuse myself. I can't decide this because this is someone I've known for years. This is someone who's a friend. This is someone you know who I've spoken to any number of times, et cetera, et cetera. And the officer who had brought them in, I heard, got on the phone and said, he won't sign them.
[00:13:36] He knows them all. We'll have to do something else, but we have to, can't do anything with this today. Unknown to them, the person who had to decide then what to do with these was my supervising judge who was a lesbian. And, uh, and she knew these people better than I did. She wasn't gonna sign bench warrants for them either, and I'm not quite sure what happened with them.
[00:13:56] Eventually they rescheduled the cases and these people all showed up, or she dismissed some of the summonses as not being sufficient or it got taken care of, but they were prepared to go out and, and do something nasty if they had the court's permission to do it. And also when I started the court officer's union, if anyone had HIV/AIDS, they would put on rubber gloves to take them out of the holding pen and bring 'em into the courtroom.
[00:14:23] And so there was something, uh, about cuffing them or uncuffing them that was gonna transmit the virus. And none of us liked it, but we couldn't tell the court officers not to wear rubber gloves. That was a decision that had to be made at a much higher level than ours, and eventually they stopped wearing them, but it, it all came out of ignorance.
[00:14:46]Myrna McCallum: When I hear a little bit about your experience, like in these early days - Can you tell me a little bit about whether some of that was the catalyst for the creation of the International Association of LGBT-
[00:15:00]Michael Sonberg:Well, let me first talk about- New York has an association that we, that I was one of the founders of, that started before we started the International Association.
[00:15:10] And we started our New York Association because there was a housing court judge who had HIV/AIDS and was clearly on the downward slide and, but he had personal resources and wanted to do at least some work from home. He bought himself a video phone, and this is 1992. So video phones in 1992 were cutting edge technology and he was prepared to-
[00:15:39]to give one to the court system so that he could conference cases from his apartment and not put himself at risk in being with people who might have infections that he could catch. And to deal with all the folks, the ignorant folks who would think that he was a risk to them. And the court system had said no to him and he asked if
[00:16:01]Some of the other gay judges could get, could do something with the court system, and we decided the best way to do that was to start an organization so that we could actually say the Association of Lesbian and Gay Judges would like to talk to you about this and think you should reconsider what you're doing and that kind of stuff.
[00:16:18] So that's why we, that's why we started our association in New York and we didn't succeed in for, on his behalf, but he got a lot of coverage in the mainstream press. The international association, the real founder of that was a guy named Steve Lachs, L-A-C-H-S, in Los Angeles, who was the first openly gay judge in the United States.
[00:16:39] He was appointed on September 18th, 1979. And then he and a woman who was the first lesbian appointed to the bench, who was a woman named Mary Morgan, who was up in San Francisco. And they had come up with the idea in probably late 92, early 93 to start an a, a national organization. And it, it wasn't so much-
[00:17:05]to deal with specific issues. It was out of a sense that judging is an inherently isolating job and you tend to- your relationship with your non-JD friends, particularly your lawyer, non-JD friends absolutely changes. Lawyers don't wanna hear your war stories about how idiotic lawyers are and, and there's a, and how much of them do you really wanna tell? Having someone to talk to-
[00:17:35] I was very fortunate where I was working was that we had- the top floor of our courthouse had all the chambers, it was both the criminal court and the family court were in the same building, different entrances because family court people can't be on the same floor as people charged with crimes. So they had, we had segregated floors, but, but judges could be on the same floor.
[00:17:57] And all the criminal court and family court judges’ chambers were on the same floor and we had a lunchroom that the criminal court judges pretty much took over and occasionally some of the family court judges would join us and we would sit and you could bring any question to the table that you had, which was really good when I was just starting out because I had lots of questions and people said, you might wanna look at this and this and this and decide what to do, but no one wanted to make your decision for you.
[00:18:28] And, and that was a great thing to have, but that's something that most judges don't have. Certainly not something I had when I moved to Manhattan. Even at that point, I'd been on the bench for 17 years and some of us, mostly refugees from the Bronx, in fact, started, uh, a weekly, uh, brown bag lunch where people could come and have those kind of conversations.
[00:18:48] And to have other people who you didn't first have to introduce yourself and come out to them, which is something, one of the really down part- sides of being queer is that, I'm 75. I've been out for, I've been with my partner for 43 years. I still find myself having to come out periodically. I- And it's always a little fraught.
[00:19:12] You always risk some degree of rejection. And to have people where that wasn't gonna be an issue, even though we only saw each other once or twice a year, it, it just created a place where you could feel safe and talk about issues that were a little different than the ones that your cishet colleagues had.
[00:19:32] And we, no one ever felt it necessary- We have purposes in our charter and in our bylaws, but no one ever felt it necessary to even have to articulate why we were doing this. It was self-evident.
[00:19:48]Myrna McCallum: I totally can relate to what it is that you're explaining because I recently just had an event here in Vancouver where I brought together Indigenous people from all across the country and who were experiencing very similar workplace issues.
[00:20:03] And one of the first things that folks said is like, it is so nice to be in a space where we could let our armour down and we could talk about the unique experiences that we have. Tell me- Over the years that this association has been active, has it, have you seen it grown? Have you seen it change? Have you seen like different conversations come to the table?
[00:20:26]Michael Sonberg: Absolutely. When we met in April of 1970- in 1993, there were 25 of us and we, the meeting was right before there was a big march on Washington in April of 93. So that was our hook because there were going to be some events. The, there's an organization called the Victory Fund, which gives money to LGBT candidates in
[00:20:51]political races and including judicial races, and they were gonna have an event and people wanted to be there for the march on Washington. This was the start of the Clinton administration. We maybe had 50 to 75 names on a mailing list. We had a woman who was appointed in Denver, Colorado, to the bench and a friend of mine sent me a clipping from the Denver Post, which where she talked about how she thought she was the first openly lesbian judge in the country.
[00:21:23] And this is already like 96, 97. So I wrote a letter to the editor of the Denver Post, which got printed and she was forever after that not my friend, but cuz I embarrassed her and I tried not to. That wasn't the point. The point was, no, you're not the first. There are a whole lot of other people and you may be the first in, in your state, but you're not the first in the country.
[00:21:47] But just finding out who people are at this point. One of our past presidents, a guy named Dan Anders, who's in Philadelphia, scours the web regularly, I think has Google alerts for, for lesbian gay judges. And if anything gets picked up by the alert, will try to figure out how to approach this person and invite them.
[00:22:10] New York, just our, our governor just appointed, a trans man to one of the, one of the 11 different trial courts in New York, and it got some local press, but he's someone who I happened to know. I also, I happened to know his wife and I made sure that I pitched his, the need for him to join the organization before he got sworn in.
[00:22:32] We have, I forget how many, over 500 names on various lists, and about two hundred and forty, two hundred fifty dues paying members at this point. Mostly in the US and Canada, but sprinkles in other parts of the world and some in places that you wouldn't expect to find people. It's keeping your eyes and ears open and getting to people and then trying to
[00:22:55]convince them that there's some value in joining what's really a North American centric organization is sometimes a struggle. If we can get them to come to a meeting, then we have 'em hooked because these folks are the nicest, most congenial group of people that you will ever find.
[00:23:13]Myrna McCallum: I actually, I know that Michael, because I got to go and spend like a couple of days with them when I went to Hollywood last summer for the meeting that was also running alongside the Lavender Law Conference, and it was such a fantastic time.
[00:23:27] Everyone was so lovely and embraced me, which was fantastic. And. It was just such a beautiful experience, honestly. And so I'm guessing from what you're saying, a lot of it is really about just creating community.
[00:23:43]Michael Sonberg: Yeah. And there's a weekly Zoom call that's a“show up if we feel like it” event, there's a core group that gets together.
[00:23:50] Sometimes it's only two or three or four people, and sometimes it's 10 or 12 from all over the states, in Canada, we're very proud of the fact that we're not quite as US-centric organization as we had been. It never was the goal.
[00:24:03]Myrna McCallum: So, I wanna ask you a question about how active one can become or remain once they become a judge.
[00:24:12] I asked this question because I've known of some queer, queer lawyers who've been appointed to becoming a judge, and because being a judge is so many experiences being really isolating. Many experience, like sometimes they're the only one on the bench in the district or the area that they live, and so they become very hyper conscious about what they're participating in.
[00:24:36] And so even if they were every year participating in the Pride March, for example, they just feel maybe I need to stop going. Maybe I need to stop speaking about certain things. And I think that it leads to an even deeper experience of isolation.
[00:24:53]Michael Sonberg: Depends where you are. New York, we've always assumed that we could march.
[00:24:58] We never asked for an opinion and we could have asked for an opinion from an advisory committee, but we never saw that there was any particular provision in our rules that that would stop you from doing it. On Stonewall 25, there were a list of demands and the march went past the United Nations with this list of demands.
[00:25:18] Both on the United States and on the UN, and my decision was that was a little too political for us to march, but we also had decided that it wasn't appropriate for us to march in any of the marches on Washington. Because those were political events with agendas. The local pride marches tend to be more of community festive type things.
[00:25:44] But my friends in Massachusetts asked for- if they could march in their, in the Boston Pride March and were told they could not. The committee that made the decision saw it as political and that they couldn't.When I- the judges will, joke is probably not the right word, but when they retire they talk about regaining their first amendment right to free speech because you realize not long into the job that you've given up in, in the States, at least a, a big chunk of that in order to be a judge.
[00:26:17] I know from talking to judges in Israel that they think that they can’tjoin the- our organization period. That it's that they have rules that would not make that smart rule politically to do that. It might violate the conditions of their job. And so just that ev, every jurisdiction has its own set of rules in terms of what you can do.
[00:26:38] You have to be careful and you have to think about it when before you do something. I know I would get questions from my colleagues in New York about whether they were thinking about doing something and whether or not I thought that it was something they could do. And there's also, there's something in New York called an advisory committee on judicial ethics, and I would periodically call them and ask them for informal advice or sometimes for formal advice on whether or not something was permissible.
[00:27:06] But it, it slows you down sometimes and sometimes you really feel constrained and unhappy about the restrictions because you're really not participating fully in society. On the other hand, given that some would call it the best job in the world, it seems like it's a fair exchange, but there were some people just were so politically involved before they went on the bench and found the, the rules so constricting in a couple years, they leave.
[00:27:34] Just the, they're just too uncomfortable in having left all that piece of their, of, of their involvement in the community and their persona behind.
[00:27:43]Myrna McCallum: So yesterday I was listening to a, an interview with the first Native American astronaut who went up into space. And that was really cool for me because that's a member of my cultural community.
[00:27:56] And so the conversation came up about like how she resisted be, she didn't wanna be known as a Native American astronaut, she just wanted to be an astronaut. I hear the same thing in like the queer community. I don't wanna be known as like the queer lawyer or the queer judge. I just, or the trans judge. I just wanna be known as the judge and
[00:28:20]where identity intersects with the, your role or your title, what is, what has your feeling been, Michael, about those two things?
[00:28:32]Michael Sonberg: Because I was appointed in some part because I was openly gay, I've always thought it was part of my obligation to stay visible in the community to the extent that I could and never made any secrets about it on, on the bench.
[00:28:47] There really isn't a lot you can do or say, if I were picking, I tried, particularly in Manhattan, some number of cases that were, I guess you'd say gay cases on same-sex domestic violence, where I would hold my own relationship up as something to compare the conduct that, you know, that the defendant had just admitted to me that they had engaged in on, on a plea.
[00:29:14] You try to keep that out of your day-to-day business. Just- it complicates things and you don't know how defendants, particularly on the criminal side, how defendants are gonna react to the concept of a gay judge. You don't know what the lawyers have told their client and you try to stay away from it.
[00:29:31] I certainly had defendants who called me a, a cocksucker or a, or a faggot, uh, whether they did that just because it was a handy epithet or they did that because I had been told something, who knew I wasn't gonna ask. And I resolved that, that I wasn't gonna let me let it upset me. And I certainly never held anyone in contempt for doing that.
[00:29:53] In fact, there was a, in 2000, Newsweek ran a cover story called Gay Today and there the cover and the picture on the cover was a half dozen gay people in various jobs. A minister, a cop, then a, a military person. I was inside of the story, although not much more than like a two sentence quote and a couple of pictures.
[00:30:20] Yeah. It was wallpaper for the story and like within a week or two after that came out, I'm doing an arraignment and I have an unhappy defendant who as he's leaving, calls me cocksucker and I turned to my courtroom clerk and I said, I wonder if you saw my picture in Newsweek, which was a joke.
[00:30:38]Myrna McCallum: The experience that you're sharing,
[00:30:40] I don't know that I've heard quite anything like that happening here. Not to say that hasn't happened, who knows? But I'm curious about, as you bring this up now, like, I'm hearing a little bit about like a little bit of the burden that maybe queer judge judges carry as they appear in courtrooms and are interfacing with members of the public, some of who could be, whom could be very homophobic.
[00:31:05] But what, if any, have you experienced in terms of like meaningful allyship over the years or have you had those conversations with straight, straight colleagues who are like, how do I support, how can I support? What don't I know, but should know or do those conver, are those conversations not yet happening enough?
[00:31:27]Michael Sonberg: I've had some conversations where people came to me for, to educate themselves that ask questions. People, people are certainly willing to learn and I know it at the judicial education, they've tried very hard to, uh, our judges have to go to judge school for three or four days every summer, and they've tried to include some particularly trans stuff cuz that's what's gonna be,
[00:31:53]least familiar to people, particularly people who aren't in major urban areas. We have 1200 judges in New York. 600 of them sit in New York City, but 600 of them don't. And there are places in New York State where they probably don't see a lot of trans people coming through. Yeah.
[00:32:14]Myrna McCallum: Yep, definitely education is key.
[00:32:16] Not to say that Canada doesn't have a lot to learn and a long way to go, but I do love how we're having conversations here pretty regularly about trans issues, about pronouns. Hearing judges ask people immediately what are their pronouns? So they are identifying them appropriately.
[00:32:34]Michael Sonberg: Well let's, let me just tell you something that's happened here in New York.
[00:32:36] I'm proud that I have some small piece of this, we had a, we have various fairness, gender fairness committees in all through the state named different things in different parts of the state. And there was one in the lower Hudson Valley where one of the people on the committee had come up with the idea of doing a bench card for judges dealing in LGBT issues.
[00:33:02] And particularly acknowledging the fact that they were gonna have to deal with people who vi identified as non-binary. And among the things that this bench card said was that rather than address your jurors or potential jurors, as ladies and gentlemen find some other non-gendered words to use, like people or folks.
[00:33:30] And so this had been passed by this local committee. It had gone to the Office of Court Administration and they were considering adopting it. The state court's LGBTQ Commission of which I'm a member, had it on its agenda for a Friday in January, but that Friday in January was also the annual meeting of the State Bar Association where I was a member of its House of Delegates.
[00:33:57] So I figured it'd probably more important that I'd be at the house meeting than at the the commission meeting. And one of the things on the agenda, uh, the house meeting was for the House of Delegates to adopt the, this bench card and I'm sitting there and no intention to speak on it cause it doesn't look like it's getting any opposition.
[00:34:19] I didn't think it would. And a guy who's a past president, who's in his mid-late eighties, partner at a big midtown law firm stands up and says, I don't understand this. If in the, if you've had no one who's identified themselves other than as a male or a female in the other pieces of the questionnaire, why do you have to
[00:34:46]not use, ladies and gentlemen, since you clearly don't have anyone who's not a lady or a gentleman. This other language I find awkward and why should a judge have to do that? So I thought at that point I probably needed to open my mouth because this guy was a past president. People take some reliance on what he has to say.
[00:35:08] So I stood up and explained that the idea is to make people comfortable and someone may not have disclosed previously that they consider themselves to be non-binary, but that may be how they consider themselves and the, and it doesn't hurt to say, folks or people rather than, or members of the jury, rather than say ladies and gentlemen, that's just, it's just language that we're used to using and there's no reason we can't
[00:35:32]switch away from the language that we're used to using. And it passed overwhelmingly. And in fact, after it passed in our House of Delegates, New York took that to the American Bar Association's annual meeting, which was a month later and proposed it at, at the ABA annual meeting and the American Bar Association passed it as well.
[00:35:53] It's training people. Every judge in New York has this bench card. Now what they'll, what’ll they do with it? Who knows, but we have something called an advisory committee on judicial ethics, and someone wrote and asked for an opinion on a situation where they had a-a party who identified who wanted to use they/them pronouns and that this judge found it very awkward to use they/them pronouns and could they write a decision using he/him pronouns?
[00:36:24] And the answer was, no, idiot. That, that this person said that's what they use. That's your obligation to do, is to respect the party and to use the pronouns that they've said they wanna use. But it's-judges tend to be much older than the general population. New York, you have to practice for 10 years before you can get on the bench and a significant percentage of people come on the bench or prac- I practiced for 20 years before I came on the bench, and that's not unusual.
[00:36:55] And people get into ruts and think that the only way to do things is the way they've always been done and which is one of the problems in the law, is that people say, this is how we've always done it. Why should we do it differently?
[00:37:09]Myrna McCallum: I’m really glad that you brought that up because I hear that in so many conversations in law on the judiciary, like this is how we've always done it, and I think that when we take that position or that perspective, then it really closes the door on innovation.
[00:37:23] It closes the door on so many good things that are changing, like it- COVID 19- I don't know how it was in America or in New York, but here, like there was such a resistance for a long time to invite technology into the courtroom. And then COVID 19 happened and so many hearings started to go online, and then folks started to see, oh, the efficiencies that technology allows and they've adapted.
[00:37:52] I don't think that would've happened, but for the pandemic and. But yes, there is this stronghold of, but this is how we've always done it.
[00:38:01]Michael Sonberg:And people don't take the time to explain to people what's beneficial about changing how you do it. That's, and just giving a dictat saying, if someone says they wanna use they/them pronouns you use, they/them pronouns.
[00:38:13] Yeah. That's not a very satisfactory way to deal with it. You say that there are people who are uncomfortable. Using he/ him or she/her pronouns, that they don't consider themselves either. And if the question isn't, whether that makes sense to you or whether you understand it, the question is making this person comfortable and respecting their wishes, and it doesn't cost you anything to do it this way, so do it.
[00:38:41] Don't get on your high horse and talk about your comfort. That your comfort isn't the issue. The issue is the comfort of your parties, the comfort of your jurors. That's what your job is to make everyone in the courtroom comfortable, not you. You are the least important party in person in terms of making comfortable, but that's- someone has to be there to give that message.
[00:39:02] People who have a serious job to do, who take who you hope are taking it seriously, and they're entitled to understand why you want them to do something a certain way, to the extent that it's not explained to people and that you don't tell them. It's honouring the humanity of the people in front of you.
[00:39:21] That's something people ultimately understand.
[00:39:24]Myrna McCallum: Yes, definitely. I'm just thinking as I'm listening to you, Michael, about how important lived experiences is because I know that if I didn't have some wonderful trans folks in my life, and if I wasn't a member of the LGBTQ2s+community, there were things, there are things that I just wouldn't even know to raise or talk about or contribute or share, share with others.
[00:39:50] And so this, the lived experience piece is, it's so critical because if, and I would say the judiciary historically, maybe on both sides of the border has always had a longstanding practice of pulling the same types of people from the same types of pool, which is why for a long time it has been very cis, very white, very male, very straight, right?
[00:40:11] And as we like, the value in diversity and inclusion is to bring those lived experiences.
[00:40:19]Michael Sonberg: But Myrna, the important thing there, and this is a horse I've been riding for a long time, but, and p- and people, I don't think I've made the sale yet, but it's why I think that in my era, the peop- the gay people who went on the bench were people out, who had community involvement before they went on the bench.
[00:40:39] They weren't just people who were gay. And now more and more it's folks where their exuality is, what's the genitalia of the person they go to bed with at night. And that's, and maybe they have a friendship circle that's also mostly people of the same sexual orientation, but that doesn't bring you the same experiences as involvement in other organizations.
[00:41:04] And I know that I know a lot more because I've been on this state court LGBT commission because, um, I go to events that the New York LGBT Bar Association runs. I just went to one last week, which was out people in the Latinx community and I had a rough idea of what that was about, but hearing people actually talk about it, they're- the things that you learn that way.
[00:41:31] One of the things that I think is really important for LGBTQ2S+ judges is that they have involvement beyond just living in that same-sex or whatever relationship, that's not enough, that there needs to be some organizational involvement. Some place where you meet people from your broader community whose experiences are very different from yours, particularly people with limited resources.
[00:42:04] You don't want the only poor people you meet to be the ones who show up in front of you on the, when you're on the bench. It's important to hear people who tell you the things they haven't been able to do because they can't run- rub two coins together.
[00:42:17]Myrna McCallum:Yeah. Community. So I'm hearing a little bit about community.
[00:42:20] I'm also hearing about being like truly involved. Building relation, I would say building relationships, actually having relationships with people, listening to them and not listening to respond, but listening to learn how other people, how their lived experiences inform the space that they take up in society.
[00:42:40] And I think that's where connection happens. And maybe that's part of what you're talking about is creating connection.
[00:42:46]Michael Sonberg:And, but the question is, how do you get people who identify as other than heterosexual, how do you get them to have those connections beyond the ones that they would ordinarily form?
[00:43:04] Unless you belong to some organizations which have a fairly wide reach, otherwise you're just gonna see people represented on, on streaming services and-That's, that's a wider range of folks than you would've seen on, uh, a network TV show 20 years ago. But it's still, it's not meeting them face-to-face and getting a sense of what their lives are like and how different their lives are than mine.
[00:43:31] And I'm thinking about that, not necessarily, you know, don't know what any of this means and how it impacts, but I have some friends whose, you know, whose circles are just, whose queer circles are just narrow and, and really don't understand people other than gay men and lesbians. Anything else beyond that?
[00:43:51] And I guess they probably can understand bi people. They probably don't know any bi people cause it's the, there, there are more bis than there are anything else, than there are fewer out bis than there are anything else just because of the dynamics of that community. But things, they say things about trans people, which clearly comes from the lack of any experience with trans people.
[00:44:13]Myrna McCallum: I think we're having like a little bit of a full circle moment, Michael, because like when we started this conversation, we were talking about why it was important to be visible and a member of this community when you were, when you were appointed to the bench and. Why that's important to you, why that matters.
[00:44:33] And now I'm hearing you say, how do we increase, like, uh, yeah, increase opportunities for connection, relationship?
[00:44:51]Michael Sonberg:I think specifically on the judiciary, the way to do it is to appoint more people who come from these communities and who are actively participants in these communities. The, the pipeline though, for those folks is so narrow.
[00:44:54] And that's part of the problem is getting these folks first through college, then into law schools, and then convincing them that there's something worthwhile in their coming onto the bench, which frequently is less lucrative than practice might be. It's a totally different set of demands from practice.
[00:45:16] It separates you from that community in a way that practice doesn't. You know, and you know it. And I don't know how you accomplish that. That's the part of- this trans man who just got appointed to the bench, had a lot of people pushing for him, but it doesn't hurt that his wife is Mike Bloomberg's niece.
[00:45:38] And that he's been around for a long time in a lot of different organizations since he transitioned. He's a great guy and he'll do a, and he'll do a super job, but he has advantages that, you know, that most trans people in this situation wouldn't have.
[00:45:54]Myrna McCallum:Yeah. I haven't asked you about something, and before we close I wanna ask you about this because we haven't talked about it yet, and it's
[00:46:03]really trauma. You're on the Trauma Informed Lawyer podcast and trauma- I've heard people say like that they reject and they resist the law. They reject and they resist justice that feels like injustice, especially for folks who have are- who are members of marginalized communities of which there are many, and within that is of course also members of the queer community.
[00:46:27] So you, I have found that you get two, two types or in, in this like law school, you get folks who- I am coming into this because I. I want to be visible. I wanna be representative. I wanna participate and maybe be one of those folks who helped to change the law and its treatment of my community. And then you get others who are like, I wanna understand it, but I wanna go and do other kinds of activism.
[00:46:55] I definitely don't wanna be a lawyer. I cannot contribute to that. I cannot contribute to an oppressive pat- patriarchal, paternalistic system that clearly doesn't wanna change. These are the couple things that I've heard and, and I would say at its root, the common experiences there has usually been like a traumatic experience because of the laws that were created that impacted these individuals.
[00:47:21] And what, if anything, around the subject of law as trauma has been something that has been on your mind, if ever either throughout practice or throughout your time sitting on the bench as a member of the gay community?
[00:47:38]Michael Sonberg: I don't know that there's anything I would identify as a result of being a member of the gay community.
[00:47:47] There certainly were occasions where someone was charged with a crime that because of their prior record had a mandatory incarceratory component. And nothing that I could do about that other than articulate my own belief that if I didn't have to, if it weren't required of me in terms of what the charge was and what this person was able to plead to, that there was a mandatory incarcerate- that I had to impose an incarceratory component that I would not, that I didn't think that anything about them or the facts of this case required an incarceratory component, but, and certainly-
[00:48:34]because I've been thinking about trauma that I've sustained, and I think I'm pretty fortunate and listening to the trauma that people have lived through and have bottled up that the trauma that, you know, where it got reported to the police and, and yes, I understood why they were still upset by it, but those, I didn't feel the same way about it as the ones where they had never told anyone about it.
[00:48:59] They told the parents about it and that was the end of it, or that they- Where they reported it and it was, wasn't believed, and that was the end of it. At that point too, those were really hard.
[00:49:11]Myrna McCallum: How did you cope, Michael? What was your coping mechanism? So those really hard cases and hard listening days?
[00:49:19]Michael Sonberg:Particularly when I started working in Manhattan, which was my last nine years, eight years I walked to and from work and it was about a half hour-
[00:49:32] 35 minute walk and that walk home at night was really a mental health exercise because that gave me an opportunity not to think about these things, but to, to do something that, get some exercise and to be out in the air. And even if it was hot and stinky and I'm sweating like a pig, to, to push past it and try and some things, I would come home and talk to my husband about-
[00:49:58]those kind of things. I wouldn't, you know, un, unless there was un, unless it ended up having some humour involved, it just, I interviewed young lawyer, young lawyers, new lawyers who wanna get admitted in New York, and I talked to a woman who the day after her 18th birthday, she went out and got drunk and she came home and her father was a lawyer and he was pissed at her for getting drunk, and he insisted she'd go to the local police station and blow into an alcohol sensor and she blew over the limit and she got a summons for underage consumption.
[00:50:34] I said, can I repeat this story to other people? She said, sure. I said, cuz normally you can't talk about what people tell you. It's a confidential conversation. And I said, it's such a wonderful story. What an asshole your father was. Yeah. And you have my permission to tell him that I said so. But most of them weren't, weren't smile stories and you just, you, if you dwell on it, it just eats you and it's- picking a jury
[00:50:58] So it's different from the stories that you hear during of what happens. That's the facts of the trial. Those are harder to get past.
[00:51:07]Myrna McCallum:Yeah, definitely. So yeah, find the humour in the ones that are, have some humour and take a walk. Take some time for yourself. Work it out. Like whether it's just a brisk walk home or shaking it off or whatever it is, and you just can't hold onto it, that's what sustains you.
[00:51:35] Thanks very much to my guest, Michael Sonberg. Michael is a retired judge on the director's board of the International Association of LGBTQ+ Judges. Like I I said, when I started this episode, I just wanted to remind folks that here in Canada, we still have a long way to go to protect members of the queer community and the events that took place today are just further evidence that we still have a lot of work to do, and as much as we want to uphold and shine a light on the fact that gay marriage is still protected in this country, that Pride
[00:52:16]and Pride marches are alive and well in many parts of this country,we still have a long way to go, and when members of the queer community hear acts of violence occurring within our country, I believe it creates a feeling of a lack of safety for everybody. So I just invite folks to have conversations with family members and friends who are queer about what their lived experience is because, and how they're impacted by the events that took place today.
[00:52:53] And I guarantee you will learn something that you just didn't know. So allyship. It's important just as much as we wanna celebrate diversity in this country, and just as much as we want to invite in diversity in this country by ensuring that our judiciary and our bar and all these other spaces are representative of the public we serve, we also need to consider what it means to be an ally, a really good activist
[00:53:26]ally, so I'm gonna leave you with that thought.
[00:53:33] Thanks for listening to the Trauma-Informed Lawyer. I'm your host, Myrna McCallum. Find out more about the show and listen to past episodes at thetraumainformedlawyer.simplecast.com. You can also access all of my episodes on most podcast platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. This episode was edited by Ren Bangert and Cited Media Productions.
[00:53:56] I also want to note that this episode was recorded on the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of the Tsleil-Waututh people.