m boulette wins aba’s stonewall award

The American Bar Association announced that m boulette will be one of three recipients of the 2026 Stonewall Award. Named after the Stonewall Uprisings that have become synonymous with the modern queer rights movement, the award:

[R]ecognizes those lawyers, members of the judiciary, and legal academia who have effected real change to remove barriers on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression in the legal profession and the world, nation, state and/or locale, and to recognize those who have championed diversity for the LGBTQ+ community, both within the legal profession and impacting the greater human universe.

m will be recognized at the American Bar Association’s joint spring conference in San Diego alongside Judge Maite D. Oronoz-Rodriguez, the first openly gay chief justice of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court, and Paul Smith, the veteran Supreme Court advocate who won the 2003 landmark case Lawrence v. Texas and, in the process, put an end to laws criminalizing queer love.

m’s recognition arises largely out of their work for Minnesota’s trans community during the first year of the second Trump Administration. 

Through 2025, m has worked as one of dozens of volunteer lawyers to make confidential name-changes and gender-marker corrections available to everyone who needs them. They’ve provided grounded, fact-based information on the status of trans rights in Minnesota and the United States. And they’ve pushed to make all gender-affirming court cases confidential so trans Minnesotans don’t have to live in constant fear of being doxed with their own court records.

This award not only means a great deal, the values behind it motivate this firm and our mission. Maybe most importantly, it reenergize us for the work and resistance still ahead. 

You can read more about the Stonewall Award and all three recipients here.