Chase Strangio Will Make History as First Trans Lawyer to Argue at Supreme Court

Next week, our guest Chase Strangio will make history as the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court. Strangio will argue on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project that Tennessee’s state ban on gender-affirming hormone therapies for transgender children is a form of sex discrimination. “Our hope is that the cultural anxiety about trans people … is not going to sway the justices from applying straightforward constitutional principles,” says Strangio about the case. We also discuss recent cultural backlash against trans rights as part of an “approach to gender that is regressive and dangerous.” The Democratic Party has been unwilling to provide a robust defense to conservative attacks on trans identity, says Strangio, ceding ground to the further loss of the community’s civil rights and protections. Yet even as trans people are “demonized” and blamed for structural problems in the U.S., he adds, “We have always resisted. We have always taken care of each other. No matter what happens, that is what we’ll do.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

When incoming Republican President Donald Trump returns to office, he’s vowed to target the LGBTQIA community. Our next guest will be a key figure in challenging this.

Next week, Chase Strangio will make history as the first openly transgender lawyer to make oral arguments before the Supreme Court as the justices consider Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming hormone therapies for transgender minors. The case argues the ban is a form of sex discrimination.

Last week, the Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson announced a policy banning transgender people from using some Capitol restrooms that correspond to their gender. This came after Republican Congressmember Nancy Mace introduced a resolution to ban transgender women from using women’s restrooms at the Capitol, then posted about it more than 300 times, in just a matter of a few days, on social media. This follows the election of Delaware Democrat Sarah McBride as the first openly transgender congressmember. McBride dismissed the Capitol bathroom bans as a distraction during a recent interview on CBS.

REP.-ELECT SARAH McBRIDE: Some members of the small Republican conference majority decided to get headlines and to manufacture a crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Chase Strangio joins us now, co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. In a week, again, he becomes the first openly transgender lawyer to argue a case before the Supreme Court, looking at Tennessee.

Welcome to Democracy Now! There’s a lot to discuss here. Why don’t we begin with this case, in which you’re going to make history?

CHASE STRANGIO: Well, good to see you, Amy. Thank you for having me.

We are before the Supreme Court at this moment when transgender people are under so much scrutiny. And this comes on the tail of 24 states banning evidence-based medicine for transgender adolescents. And that is why we are before the Supreme Court now. One of those states is Tennessee. Tennessee has categorically banned medical treatment for adolescents only, when that treatment is prescribed in a manner that Tennessee considers inconsistent with a person’s sex.

So, what we’re arguing before the Supreme Court is that, look, this is a simple example of sex discrimination. Our clients — so, if you take, for example, a transgender adolescent boy, he cannot receive testosterone to live consistent with his male identity, because he was assigned female at birth. Had he been assigned male at birth, he could receive that same medication for that same purpose. That is sex discrimination. And Tennessee has to justify it, which the district court concluded that Tennessee just simply did not. The courts across the country that have actually looked at the evidence have repeatedly found that the claims about the harms of this treatment just do not hold up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny. But, of course, we lost in the appellate court. We’re now before the Supreme Court making the case that this is just a plain and simple example of sex discrimination, and the fact that it’s sex discrimination against trans people doesn’t make it any less unconstitutional.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Chase, this comes in a period when the Republican Party used anti-trans ads throughout the presidential campaign. I’m wondering your reaction to the impact of those ads around the country.

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, it is astonishing to think about $250 million that have been spent focused on a group that represents less than 1% of the population. I think it comes out to, you know, almost $100 to $200 per trans person in the United States.

And obviously, there are sort of two fundamental things that happen as a result of those ads. The first is just the impact on trans people ourselves. We are living in a climate in which we are being demonized, in which we are being blamed for structural failures of this country. Talk about scapegoating, if you’re blaming trans people for everything from, you know, changes in education to school shootings to changing gender norms across the board. So, that’s one aspect of this.

And then, the other is that this rhetoric — and, I will say, the post-election legitimizing of it by Democrats — is what creates the policy realities that we’re living under, the policy realities where you have 550 anti-trans bills introduced in a single year, resulting in the stripping away of healthcare that people rely on, resulting in Representative Mace targeting transgender people’s ability to access restrooms in federal buildings. This is a cascading reality of material harm for our community on top of the rhetorical and cultural harms that it is bestowing upon us.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a clip from one of Trump’s presidential campaign TV ads for those who didn’t see it, this particular one with transphobic messaging that aired, I think it was, over 15,000 times.

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: Surgery.

MARA KEISLING: For prisoners.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: For prisoners. Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access.

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Hell no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that.

DJ ENVY: And Kamala supports transgender sex changes in jail with our money.

NARRATOR: Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports. Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.

DONALD TRUMP: I’m Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message.

AMY GOODMAN: “Kamala is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.” And yesterday, Kamala Harris spoke, and a bunch of the senior members of her staff spoke out on Pod Save America, and a lot of the discussion in that conversation was about how they dealt with these ads. I’m very interested, Chase, as you say, that you are faulting the Democrats in how they’re dealing with this, that they are normalizing this. Explain.

CHASE STRANGIO: Well, so, it’s not even that they’re normalizing it. What they’re saying is that the Harris campaign did too much to support trans people, which is a hard pill to swallow, since they did nothing. You know, Kamala Harris did not respond to the ads. She did not make any affirmative statements in support of trans people throughout the —

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, that’s very interesting, because apparently they floated the ad first, the Republicans, to see if there would be a response. When there was dead silence, they just went for it.

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, so they went for it. And then, in the aftermath of the election, you have this postmortem in which you have Democrats — you know, pundits, as well as politicians — speaking out and saying, “Well, part of why the Harris campaign lost is because they were too supportive of trans people.” But what did they do? Nothing. And so, the obvious, you know, takeaway from that is, well, they should have just joined in the attacks. They should have said, “Yes, it is. Of course we should exclude trans girls from sports. Of course we should deny people in government custody of medical treatment.”

These are constitutional norms that they are sensationalizing because — and playing into people’s misunderstanding about trans people and our bodies. And they played on that misinformation, and they played on that fear, in a campaign that was both about trans people and also about gender more broadly. And what trans people represented in that was the instability of gender roles that were causing so much anxiety. I mean, that’s why you saw Vice President-elect Vance talking about the role of postmenopausal women is to care for children. Childless cat ladies, you know, should — or whatever else he said about that to demonize people who aren’t playing the proper gender roles. It wasn’t just about trans people. Trans people were a very specific focus, but this was a broader commentary on an approach to gender that is regressive and dangerous for everyone.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Chase, in your arguments on the Tennessee case before the Supreme Court, what are you — especially given the large conservative majority on this court, what will you be looking for in terms of the kinds of questions that the justices will ask or what hope you might have of swaying some of the conservative justices?

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, so, you know, at the end of the day, this really is a simple argument about a law that tells us 10 times over on its face that it’s about sex. It says you can’t do something if it’s inconsistent with your sex. And Tennessee comes in and says, “Well, that’s not really about sex.” But that sounds a lot like the arguments that the employers raised in the case of Bostock, where the question was: Is it because of sex to fire someone for being transgender? And that was a conservative-majority court that said 6 to 3 that that is because of sex, that if you are firing someone because they are transgender, that means you are firing someone assigned male at birth because they identify as a woman, and you are not firing someone assigned female at birth because they identify as a woman. The same is true here. We’re making that same argument. We think it is as clear in this context as it was in Bostock. And our hope is that the cultural anxiety about trans people, the demonization of our healthcare, is not going to sway the justices from applying straightforward constitutional principles that have been applied for 50 years.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re arguing this case — this is unusual, isn’t it? — alongside the Biden administration.

CHASE STRANGIO: So, it is not totally unusual. You often have a situation where private parties will bring a case, and the United States will intervene, or the United States can weigh in at the Supreme Court as amicus.

What is a little bit unusual here is that you really have us as coequal parties in this case. We are splitting the time, with the solicitor general going first, and I will go after her, and making this argument, both of us, that this is a law that violates the Equal Protection Clause and that the court, if it is going to faithfully apply its precedents that say that when a government discriminates based upon sex, that it is the government’s burden. It’s Tennessee’s burden to show that the statute that they’ve passed is constitutional, and they have failed to do that. So we are in it together up until January 20th.

AMY GOODMAN: And then what happens? I mean, is there any possibility that this wouldn’t happen by January 20th and then the Trump administration would not be there next to you?

CHASE STRANGIO: So, that’s absolutely right. We fully expect the Trump administration to switch positions. That is not unusual also. There will be other cases in which the administration switches positions. This case was originally brought by the transgender adolescents and their parents, who we represent, against the Tennessee officials who are charged with enforcing this law that bans their healthcare. The parties will still be there. There’s no reason why the court would in any way be stripped of jurisdiction. So, we move forward past January 20th; it’s up to the Supreme Court, of course, what happens next.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to what’s happened in these last few days in Congress, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson speaking to reporters last week after South Carolina Congressmember Nancy Mace introduced this resolution to ban transgender women from using women’s restrooms at the Capitol, after the election of Delaware Congressmember Sarah McBride, the first openly trans congressmember. This is what he said.

REPORTER 1: Can you address the issue of the new bathroom?

REPORTER 2: Can you talk about the policy that you just issued?

SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: Yeah, I’m not sure what more there is to say.

REPORTER 1: Is it enforceable?

SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: Yeah, like all House policies, it’s enforceable. But we have single-sex facilities for a reason. And women deserve women’s-only spaces. And we’re not anti-anyone. We’re pro-women. And I think it’s an important policy for us to continue. It’s always been the — I guess, an unwritten policy, but now it’s in writing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, it’s an unwritten policy, but now it’s in writing. This is the House speaker, Republican Johnson. And I wanted to ask you about Nancy Mace, this campaign she is on. But it is new. Last year, in 2023, Congressmember Mace, during an interview with CBS News, proclaimed she was, quote, “pro-transgender rights and pro-LGBTQ.” Now she’s putting up little paper signs that say “biological” above the signs that say “women’s room.”

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, so, I think one thing to keep in mind is that the cultural discourse and the popular culture norms shift what happens in law and policy. If you look at the tenor of the conversations in this country, it’s shifted so far against trans people that now we have proposed bans on transgender people using restrooms in all public buildings. A few years ago, let’s say in 2019, the question of trans people in restrooms had really died out. It was something where the proponents of those bans admitted that all of their claims were fabricated, that there was no evidence that there was any harm or violence by allowing trans people to use restrooms that align with who they are, which of course they do, we do, all the time. And this idea that there is some unwritten rule in which people are surveilled out of restrooms is just simply not true. It is not enforceable, as we know. But this escalation is a product of the ways in which our public discourse has shifted so dramatically around gender and around trans people.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you nervous about next week? You are making history, Chase.

CHASE STRANGIO: You know, of course I’m nervous. I’m nervous because I am always nervous to do right by my community. The stakes are so high, where this argument is happening in the period of time after the election, before the inauguration, a time when trans people are feeling so vulnerable, a time when, you know, I hear every single day from parents who are asking me if they have to leave the United States. And so, that is what I’m carrying with me. You know, I’m nervous for December 4th. I’m nervous for 2025. We don’t know what we’re up against.

But I guess the two things I’ll say are that, one, this case is a fight to put a limit on what government officials can do to target trans people across the board, and we are going to fight with everything that we have. And then, the other thing I’ll say, specifically to the trans community, to the people who love trans people, is we have always resisted. We have always taken care of each other. No matter what happens, that is what we’ll do.

AMY GOODMAN: Chase Strangio, on December 4th, he becomes the first openly transgender attorney to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Chase is co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. We thank you so much for being with us. We hope to talk to you after you make your arguments.