When the Supreme Court this week wades into the contentious issue of transgender rights, the justices will hear from an attorney with knowledge that runs deep.
Chase Strangio will be the first openly transgender attorney to argue before the nation's highest court, representing families who say Tennessee’s ban on health care for transgender minors leaves their children terrified about the future.
Arguments in the case come amid heightened pushback to transgender rights, including a presidential campaign where Republican Donald Trump put his fierce opposition front and center.
Strangio will bring months of intense legal preparation to the case as well as hard-won lessons from his own experience.
“I am able to do my job because I have had this health care that transformed and, frankly, saved my life,” he said. “I am a testament to the fact that we live among everyone.”
Strangio grew up outside of Boston and came out as trans when he was in law school. Now 42, he's an American Civil Liberties Union attorney whose legal career has included representing former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, challenging a ban on transgender people serving in the military and helping win an LGBTQ worker-discrimination case at the Supreme Court. He also is the father of a 12-year-old, the son of a father who supports Trump, and has a close relationship with his Army-veteran brother.
He's also an advocate, speaking out as a series of states banned gender-affirming health care for minors. The laws are part of a wave of restrictions on school sports participation and bathroom usage around the country. After the first openly transgender person was elected to Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., declared support for restricting bathroom use to sex assigned at birth.
Tennessee, meanwhile, will argue before the Supreme Court that treatments like puberty blockers and hormones carry risks for young people and its law protects them from making treatment decisions prematurely.
“Tennessee, like many other states, acted to ensure that minors do not receive these treatments until they can fully understand the lifelong consequences or until the science is developed to the point that Tennessee might take a different view of their efficacy,” state attorneys wrote in court filings.
Arguing for Tennessee is state Solicitor General Matt Rice. He served in 2019 as a clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented from the transgender worker-discrimination case Strangio worked on that term. The state attorney general's office did not make Rice available for an interview ahead of arguments, but his background also includes a couple of years as a minor league baseball player for the Tampa Bay Rays before he earned his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
The Biden administration is supporting the challenge to Tennessee's law, but the federal government’s position is expected to change after Trump takes office in January. Strangio said he'll nevertheless keep advocating for transgender youth to access health care that wasn't available when he was young.
“Many of us think about our childhood and young adulthood as lost years, when we were just simply disembodied from our core,” he said.
Major medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, oppose the bans and have endorsed such care, saying it’s safe when administered properly. Strangio also pointed out that many medical interventions for young people, like gastric bypass surgeries for weight loss, carry some risk and it makes sense to inform families and let them decide.
“There is harm that is compounded when we are forcing young people to be denied care that their doctors and their parents and they themselves all agree they need,” he said.
The Supreme Court is expected to decide the case by the summer.
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