On the “Transing” of Lesbians in the First Circuit Court of Appeals

Foote v. Ludlow

July 28, 2025

First, if you have time, please have a look at a stunningly beautiful letter from a mother to her son on the Substack of Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT).

This post is about the transing of a young lesbian against her parents’ explicit wishes, and the First Circuit Court of Appeals.

Lawyer Glenna Goldis has written about the First Circuit Court of Appeals on her Substack Bad Facts. In a December 2024 piece titled “Banned in Boston: Schools Censor Gender-Critical Views with Judges’ Approval,” she said:

This past June, two fascinating cases about “anti-trans” messages at public schools were decided by the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals. The pious court – which is based in Boston and covers Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico – endorsed censorship both times.

It’s no coincidence that two edgy “anti-trans speech” cases bubbled up in neighboring Massachusetts counties. The oldest, most frigidly progressive region of the country is pulsing with grassroots gender-critical protest.

This post is about freedom-hating local officials who use LGBTQ policies to take away the rights of students, teachers, and parents; the federal judges who let them; and the cranky yankees who are fighting back.

I grew up in Rhode Island and practiced law in Massachusetts for five years. My neighbors bickered about whether cats should be allowed outside, not who to vote for in presidential elections – because there was only one point of view on that. Recently I met up with a childhood friend who’s now a Harvard-trained lawyer in the area. She said she doesn’t have any Republican friends. She’s an affable person, not closed off to dissenters – there just aren’t any in her circles. None.

It’s not just that most of these people are Democrats. It’s that there’s only one type of Democrat in New England: the kind who believes in recycling. The most northeasterly crust of America lacks the convivial transactionalism of NYC; the religious liberals you meet in the South and Midwest; and the tree-eating anarcho-witches on surfboards that keep the west coast unpredictable (OK, I don’t really understand what goes on out there). Boston’s moral code flows pure and unadulterated straight from the Ford Foundation.

Her post was primarily about a case in which the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a boy named Liam had no First Amendment right to wear a t-shirt to school that read, “THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS.”

Frustratingly, the Supreme Court eventually decided not to take up the case.

Glenna calls the First Circuit Court of Appeals “pious” in its zeal to support all things gender. So I was not entirely surprised to stumble on a case in which a school transed a teenage girl who was telling school officials that she was starting to experience feelings of same-sex attraction, against the explicit wishes of the girl’s parents. The First Circuit thinks that’s just fine (the case is Foote v. Ludlow). Great, even. Read on to learn what I think about that.

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