#131 The Social Justice Lawyer Who Flunked Her Own Bias Test

Joni Watke has spent decades championing LGBTQ+ rights. She's a social justice advocate to her core. So when she took an implicit bias test and discovered she had a measurable preference for white people, she was mortified — and spent days trying to convince herself the results were wrong. Then she realized that if she couldn't say it out loud, she was part of the problem. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman talks with Joni Watke, Nebraska family law attorney and founder of Academy LGBTQ, about what it actually means to show up for marginalized clients — in the courtroom and in the classroom. Joni didn't set out to become an LGBTQ+ advocate. She fell into family law through her uncle's practice, and it wasn't until a DOMA ballot vote in 2000 — when she realized the opposition wasn't a fringe minority — that something shifted. That awakening led to 30 years representing same-sex couples and transgender clients through an increasingly hostile legal landscape. She walks through why a birth certificate alone doesn't protect parental rights, why hospital visitation documents belong in every same-sex estate plan, and why transgender clients in certain states now face jail time simply for using a public restroom — part of more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills pending across the country. Her training work through Academy LGBTQ meets all of this with science rather than politics. But what ties her practice and her teaching together is a willingness to keep discovering what she doesn't know, and do something about it.