He will be the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court.
Chase Strangio is Co-Director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project as well as a nationally recognized expert on transgender rights. Chase’s work includes impact litigation, as well as legislative and administrative advocacy, on behalf of LGBTQ people and people living with HIV across the United States.
How do you define what it means to be a feminist?
Chase: To me a feminist is someone who works to name and destabliize the ways in which systems of gender operate to inequitably distribute survival opportunities for different individuals and groups. Critical to this project is recognizing that gender does not just operate on individuals but is inextricable from systems of governance.
As a lawyer in an increasingly conservative political climate, how can lawyers protect constitutional rights and support vulnerable communities right now?
Chase: The role of lawyers, in my view, is always to delay or minimize the harm that the government and powerful institutions exact on individuals and communities. I do not believe that law provides the mechanisms through which we build the world we want, but rather, legal advocacy is a tool that we can deploy to try to create more space for those who are building transformative projects for our future.
In the US v Skrmetti case, you’re fighting against bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Can you break down how these bans impact trans youth and what’s at stake?
Chase: Over the past three years, 24 states in the United States have enacted bans on evidence-based medical care for transgender adolescents. State governments, like Tennessee, ban hormone therapy and puberty blockers only when they are prescribed to allow an adolescent to live, identify or appear “inconsistent” with their sex assigned at birth. In practice, this means that young people have been cut off from the medical care they need, leaving them and their loving parents scrambling. Cutting off this care is not an option for people so families are moving out of their homes, splitting up so one parent can take a trans child out of state, and even making plans to leave the United States to better protect their trans adolescent children.
In United States v. Skrmetti, the ACLU, Lambda and the law firm of Akin Gump represent three transgender adolescents, their parents, and a doctor who provided the banned care in Tennessee. When we sued Tennessee, the Biden/Harris administration also intervened to defend the rights of transgender adolescents. We are collectively arguing that banning this medical care only when it is used for transgender people violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. With the anti-trans rhetoric escalating and President-elect Trump promising to further attack health care for trans people of all ages, this case is a critical tool to try to limit the ability of government officials to just brazenly strip transgender people of medical care and rights.
What message would you like to share with young trans people right now?
Chase: For transgender young people right now, first I would say, thank you for being your beautiful selves, for finding strength to live and dream, and for embodying self-determination in the face of such cruelty and regression. I also want to say that I believe in the power of our community to care for each other and no matter what happens after January 20, 2025 and no matter what happens at the Supreme Court, we will love and care for each other.
What are some actions that our community can take to support this case?
Chase: To support this case we are most immediately asking people to spread awareness about the case and to show up outside the Supreme Court on December 4 at 10 AM to rally for trans young people. This will be a celebratory gathering in love and defense of trans life. And then critically, we need everyone - particularly cis allies - to resist narratives that posit trans people as a threat to others or somehow situate trans people as representing something too unknown or unsettling to support in contemporary politics. Trans people are people. Trans people are trying to live our lives. Obsessive attacks on trans people are about efforts to entrench the gender binary in ways that hurt all of us. We need to collectively mobilize against these regressive and divisive tactics in discourse and policy.
You speak about teaching communities what it means to live in a genderless society. What does that look like?
Chase: For me it is not about a genderless society. It is about challenging our assumptions about a fixed binary gender and exposing instead what gendered systems do to organize and reinforce power. I think we all have a role to play in being more critical about the operation of gender - not to make everything genderless but to make gender a site of play, reconstruction and reimagination.
With a second Trump administration on the horizon, many of us are struggling to be optimistic. What practices do you incorporate into your daily life to stay hopeful for a better future?
Chase: For me I still treat every day as a gift. An opportunity to celebrate those that I love and the blessing that comes with being queer and trans. There is no doubt that we are going to face terrifying times ahead and so I ground myself each day in the people who bring me joy, hope, comfort and inspiration.
