Mon, October 21, 2024
FILE PHOTO: The Time 100 Gala celebrating Time magazine's 100 most influential people people in the world in New York
By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) - An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer will make history in December as the first openly transgender attorney to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, opposing Tennessee's Republican-backed law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.
The ACLU's Chase Strangio, 41, represents a group of transgender people who pursued a lawsuit challenging the measure that prohibits medical treatments including hormones and surgeries for minors experiencing gender dysphoria.
In one of the most consequential cases of the court's current nine-month term, the nine justices will hear arguments on Dec. 4 in an appeal by President Joe Biden's administration of a lower court's decision upholding Tennessee's ban.
The Supreme Court on Monday ordered that the argument time for the ban's challengers be divided between the Justice Department and attorneys representing the original plaintiffs who sued the state. Strangio will present the arguments for these plaintiffs at the lectern in the ornate courtroom.
ACLU Legal Director Cecillia Wang called Strangio the leading U.S. legal expert on transgender rights.
"He brings to the lectern not only brilliant constitutional lawyering, but also the tenacity and heart of a civil rights champion," Wang said.
Strangio, who joined the ACLU in 2013, is the co-director of its LGBTQ & HIV Project, helping the organization oppose state laws targeting transgender people, including 12 legal challenges against the laws like the one at issue before the Supreme Court.
Strangio has represented people in high-profile cases including transgender student Gavin Grimm, who fought a Virginia school board to use the bathroom corresponding with his gender identity, and Chelsea Manning, a transgender former U.S. soldier who served time in prison for leaking classified documents.
According to the Justice Department, Tennessee is one of 22 states that have passed measures targeting medical interventions for adolescents with gender dysphoria. That is the clinical diagnosis for significant distress that can result from an incongruence between a person's gender identity and the sex they were assigned at birth.
Lawmakers supporting the restrictions have called the treatments experimental and potentially harmful. Medical associations, noting that gender dysphoria is associated with higher rates of suicide, have said gender-affirming care can be life-saving, and that long-term studies show its effectiveness.
Several plaintiffs - including two transgender boys, a transgender girl and their parents - sued in Tennessee to defend the treatments they have said improved their happiness and wellbeing. The Justice Department intervened in the lawsuit to also challenge the law.
The challengers contend that banning care for transgender youth violates the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment promise of equal protection by discriminating against these adolescents based on sex and transgender status.
In a written filing, the Justice Department highlighted that one of the law's "declared purposes is to enforce gender conformity and discourage adolescents from identifying as transgender."
The state asked the Supreme Court to let the law stand.
"Tennessee lawfully exercised its power to regulate medicine by protecting minors from risky, unproven gender-transition interventions," Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in a filing.
A federal judge blocked the law in Tennessee in 2023, finding that it likely violates the 14th Amendment. In a 2-1 decision in 2023, the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the judge's preliminary injunction.
The Supreme Court has confronted several cases in the past decade implicating LGBT rights. In 2015, it legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. In 2020, it ruled that a landmark federal law forbidding workplace discrimination protects gay and transgender employees. In 2023, it decided in a case from Washington state that the constitutional right to free speech allows certain businesses to refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
The First Out Trans Lawyer to Argue Before the Supreme Court Is Feeling the Pressure
Solcyré Burga
Mon, October 21, 2024
Chase Strangio speaks onstage during the 2024 New York #LWTSUMMIT on September 19, 2024 in New York City. Credit - Bonnie Biess/Getty Images for Lesbians Who Tech & Allies
One case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this term is historic not just because of the legal precedent it could set for LGBTQ rights, but also because of the identity of the plaintiffs’ lawyer. Chase Strangio is set to become the first out transgender lawyer to argue a case before the nation’s highest Court.
U.S. v. Skrmetti challenges a Tennessee law barring transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming-care. Strangio, co-Director for Transgender Justice with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, will be representing the Williams family of Nashville, two other anonymous families, and a Memphis-based medical provider to argue Tennessee’s law is unconstitutional.
The high court’s decision will not only have an effect on the more than 3,000 transgender youth currently living in Tennessee, according to a UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute report, but could also extend to the trans youth in 26 other states that have passed gender-affirming-care bans.
Strangio feels the weight of his responsibility—particularly given his personal connection to the subject matter of the case. “I have this deep, intimate and personal connection to the work that I do that can make it both harder, but also more significant, more motivating,” he says. “I feel a lot of pressure, personally and on behalf of my community, to continue to figure out the best strategic decisions.”
TIME spoke with Strangio ahead of the start of the Supreme Court’s term in October. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
How do you feel about becoming the first out trans lawyer to argue in front of the Supreme Court?
The first thing that comes to mind is that it signifies for so many communities, things are so far behind where they should be. In 2024, no group of people should be having their first experience of anything, and it is always a function of structural discrimination and barriers to access to various spaces that make it so much harder for people, and certain groups, to have access to different spaces. To the extent I'm the first out attorney arguing before the Supreme Court, it's also not surprising that I would be a white trans masculine attorney, because, again, these are all just functions of the systems of power that make it easier and harder for different people based on the bodies that we inhabit to access different spaces.
So on some level, the first thing I feel is sort of sad about the state of the world. And then the second thing is I think about all the other advocates for trans people that have come before me. In particular, I think about Pauli Murray, who was likely a trans lawyer, certainly a gender nonconforming and queer, Black lawyer, whose work laid the groundwork, not just for Ruth Bader Ginsburg's work, but also for Thurgood Marshall's work, and set the contours for so much of our constitutional arguments and work.
Are you planning to reference the historic nature of your oral arguments in front of the justices?
I don't know the answer to that. I think it's something where it can be very vulnerable.
The case you’re arguing, U.S. v. Skrmetti, could have serious repercussions on the ability of trans youth to access gender-affirming-care, but could also go beyond the scope of that. Do you feel a personal connection to the case?
I certainly feel a personal connection to this case. The central arguments are about not just the legitimacy of trans healthcare, but about, in some sense, the legitimacy of trans people, as members of civic life and public life. I think it just wouldn't be possible to feel more connected to it. It has everything to do with my experiences in the world and my prospects for living in the United States in the future. So that is central to how I experience the legal arguments, but also the material consequences of the case. For all the healthcare cases in particular, I truly unambiguously believe that the only reason I've been able to have the rich, and full, and really beautiful adult life that I do have is because of gender-affirming medical care, and I feel that my experience is a refutation of the arguments that are being made.
Seeing that this is personal to you, does that make preparing for this more difficult than if it were a different subject matter? Does that weigh on you?
My entire career has involved issues and cases that feel intimately connected to my own life and everyone I love and care about. I don't even know what it would be like to work on something that you're only engaging with in some abstract way. I have this deep, intimate and personal connection to the work that I do that can make it both harder, but also more significant, more motivating. I feel a lot of pressure, personally and on behalf of my community, to continue to figure out the best strategic decisions. But these are not individual decisions. These are big, large, collective decisions, and so that is all just part of the work. And I feel really lucky, more than anything else, to be a part of it.
In terms of, what does it feel like to tackle it in the presentation of the legal arguments in court, I have always felt that it requires a certain degree of compartmentalization. I think we all do what we can to navigate that experience of compartmentalization in our advocacy when we're advocating on behalf of our own communities.
Throughout your career, you’ve been involved in litigation about LGBTQ+ rights. Based on your experience, could you name one thing that worries you and one thing that gives you hope about the future?
Everything worries me about the future right now. We have this election, we have this Supreme Court case, we have this escalatingly vicious public discourse around transness and trans people. At the same time, my community and the brilliance and beauty of trans people, it gives me hope every day. It gives me faith for the future. It gives me a sense of endless possibility.
How does the transgender rights movement compare to other politically charged movements, like Freedom to Marry?
Looking at the LGBTQ+ movement broadly as it relates to gay and lesbian people versus where we are with trans people, I think this is really an inflection point. Are we about to have a Bowers v. Hardwick moment? A moment where the Supreme Court legitimizes government discrimination against trans people?
Is it going to be a Bowers moment, or is it going to be a Bostock moment? Is it going to be a moment where, rather than say the government can discriminate against people, the court says, ‘No, the laws that exist, the constitutional protections that exist, apply to trans people, just like they apply to everyone else.’ That really is what's at stake here. What is the trajectory of the next 15 to 20 years? Because if they do rule against us, I think, like with Bowers, it will be a case that will seem wrongly decided and overturned. But hopefully we don't have to go through that period again. And it's not just affecting trans people, it'll affect all LGBTQ people. It'll affect all people who experience gender-based discrimination.
What message do you have for the transgender community?
I always want to say two things to trans people in this moment. The first is, I'm so sorry that this set of relentless political, cultural and legal attacks have been escalating over the last, in particular, 10 years. It is painful and it's frustrating. And we collectively have to hold and honor each other's vulnerability and pain in this moment.
The second thing I'll say is, we have a long and rich history as trans people of leading resistance movements, not just for trans liberation, but for collective liberation more broadly, and that is going to continue. And this Supreme Court fight, critical as it is, is just one piece in a long struggle in a long and rich history of resistance, and so we will continue to collectively mobilize no matter what happens.
Correction, Oct. 21
The original version of this story misquoted Strangio. He said "Bostock moment," not "bus stop moment."
Contact us at letters@time.com.
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