Georgia ACLU leader, Maya Dillard Smith, resigns after transgender bathroom incident, ‘My children were visibly frightened’
The African-American leaders of that Georgia state chapter of the ACLU has resigned, citing her own daughters’ “frightened” reaction to biological males using the women’s restroom. The “hierarchy of rights” the ACLU chooses to defend or ignore, she wrote, is “based on who is funding the organization’s lobbying activities.”
Maya Dillard Smith, the interim director of the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, tendered her resignation detailing her experience in a bathroom: “I have shared my personal experience of having taken my elementary school age daughters into a women’s restroom when shortly after three transgender young adults, over six feet [tall] with deep voices, entered,” she wrote.
“My children were visibly frightened, concerned about their safety and left asking lots of questions for which I, like many parents, was ill-prepared to answer,” she continued.
In a statement, she said that the ACLU has become “a special interest organization that promotes not all, but certain progressive rights.”
She did not elaborate on the group’s funding.
Dillard Smith is no conservative, earning a degree in economics from Berkeley and a masters degree at Harvard, while working for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the California Supreme Court. She is a 2003 graduate of the program Emerge America, which states its “goal is clear: to increase the number of Democratic women in public office.”
But this self-described “progressive” who called herself “unapologetically black” cannot go along with the ACLU’s transgender legal agenda.
“I found myself principally and philosophically unaligned with the organization,” Dillard Smith said, describing herself as a “progressive” who called herself “unapologetically black” but cannot go along with the ACLU’s transgender legal agenda.
“I understood it to be the ACLU’s goal to delicately balance competing rights to ensure that any infringements are narrowly tailored, that they do not create a hierarchy of rights, and that we are mindful of unintended consequences,” she said in a statement.
“I believe there are solutions that can provide accommodations for transgender people and balance the need to ensure women and girls are safe from those who might have malicious intent,” she said.
Dillard Smith has already started a new website, Finding Middle Ground, dedicated to creating a “safe space” to discuss the new, red-hot national issue.
“How can we ask these kinds of questions without being called a homophobe?” the video asks. “How do we prevent predators from preying on kids in bathrooms?”
The website features a young black girl standing near a swing set, clasping its chain as she shares her own feelings. “I don’t want him to be uncomfortable in the boy’s bathroom, either,” she said. “I don’t want them to be uncomfortable anywhere. But what about me, too?”
A transgender activist, a biological male who goes by the name Cheryl Courtney-Evans, responded to the resignation by calling Dillard Smith “lazy,” “ill-educated,” and a “b–ch” who needs to sit down and “STFU.”
“What am I doing in a men’s room looking as luscious as I am, putting myself in danger?” the transgender activist asked.
Is this true? Has a statement been issued?