Meet The Trans-Identifying Lawyer Arguing To SCOTUS That Kids Should Get Gender Transitions

The far-left group behind a massive Supreme Court case on child gender transitions is sending a trans-identifying lawyer to Washington, D.C., this week to defend transitioning children.

Chase Strangio is a woman who identifies as a transgender man, and the co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Project. She has undergone transgender medical treatments herself, which she has documented on her social media, and argues that children should also be able to access so-called gender-affirming care.

“Every aspect of gender-affirming care that has transformed my life,” Strangio told CNN, “I’m keenly aware that I want to preserve the ability for other people to access that care.”

“For me it is not about a genderless society,” she argued in another interview. “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.”

When the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti on December 4, Strangio will be the one presenting on behalf of the ACLU. The case deals with Tennessee’s law banning irreversible gender transition procedures for children — and it promises to be one of the most significant the court has looked at this term.

If the court rules for Tennessee, children across the United States will be protected from these irreversible procedures. Already, lawmakers throughout the country have enacted more than 24 laws protecting children from “gender-affirming care” and the activist doctors who push these procedures.

In the past, Strangio has challenged Trump’s actions against trans-identifying service members in the military, and another case, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, which the ACLU boasts, “resulted in a landmark 6-3 ruling from the Supreme Court finding the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on sex discrimination in employment extended to discrimination against LGBTQ workers.”

The ACLU has advertised that Strangio will be the first openly trans-identifying individual to argue a case before the Supreme Court, describing Strangio as “our nation’s leading legal expert on the rights of transgender people, bar none.”

“It’s hard to see the challengers’ feeble equal protection theory having sway with the Court, so it’s not surprising that they would prefer to focus on historic firsts over the actual merits of their case,” Judicial Crisis Network’s Carrie Severino told The Daily Wire.

(Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME)

Strangio didn’t respond to requests for comment from The Daily Wire, nor did the ACLU. Earlier this year, after Manhattan Institute Fellow Leor Sapir reported that Strangio had angered the ACLU by disrespecting LGBTQ leaders and acting without concern for the interests of specifically gay activists, Strangio deleted her X account.

Her presence before the Supreme Court may pose a challenge to some of the justices, given the debate surrounding preferred pronouns for people who identify as transgender. The ACLU and legacy media outlets, for example, use “he/him” pronouns to describe Strangio, though she is a biological woman.

Given the high-profile, controversial nature of the case, it is likely the justices will want to avoid references to Strangio’s gender altogether.

“To me, a feminist is someone who works to name and destabilize the ways in which systems of gender operate to inequitably distribute survival opportunities for different individuals and groups,” Strangio said in a recent interview with “Feminist.”

It is unclear why the website interviewed Strangio, who identifies as a man.

“Critical to this project is recognizing that gender does not just operate on individuals but is inextricable from systems of governance.”

 

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Strangio also argues that young people have been “cut off from the medical care they need,” referring to transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers, “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,” she argued, referring to parents seeking to help their minor children undergo irreversible surgeries or begin taking hormones that may destroy their fertility, increase mental health issues, cause cardiovascular side effects, and more.