U.S. v. Skrmetti with Chase Strangio

Hey, Fam, it’s me, Imara, welcome to the TransLash podcast, a show where we tell trans stories to save trans lives. Well, oral arguments for us versus schematic have been scheduled to begin on December 4, US vs committee is the case before the Supreme Court which will decide whether or not gender-affirming care for trans youth is constitutional. However, there is a chance that it will decide the overall constitutionality of gender-affirming care for all trans people in the United States. This fact and reality add to the strain that our community is feeling in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, but trans people are making their voices heard. On this groups are encouraging trans people from all backgrounds to be outside of the Supreme Court on December 4 to show solidarity and on the inside, ACLU attorney Chase Strangio will be the first trans person in history to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. That’s why there’s no better person to discuss this case and what it means, besides Chase Strangio himself. This is the question. This is the test, what is the next thing they’re going to take away from us? Now Chase and I recorded the conversation just days before the election, and if it had been afterwards, I don’t know how we would have gotten through it. All right, with that, let’s start it as always with some trans joy. You.

Gender-affirming care is under attack as these threats continue to escalate, we’ll need to get creative to make sure that trans kids continue to receive the care that they need elevated access. It is a nonprofit organization that provides free flights on private planes to help people access life-saving health care across the country, from abortion to gender-affirming care, their network of over 400 volunteer pilots are at the ready to fly clients within and across state lines. Here’s a pilot and the executive director of elevated access, Mike Bonanza, to tell us more. There was a pilot very early on who flew a parent and teenager, and at the end of the flight, the teenager jumped, jumped out of the plane, and ran over to the pilot’s side of the airplane. Said that was so freaking awesome. And so I don’t know if they’ll eventually become a pilot or not, but at the very least they got to have fun on that flight. In fact, the person I’m flying tomorrow, I’ve actually flown them one time previously, and they shared with me that they play flight simulators all the time. I’m like, oh, you know what, why don’t you sit up here next to me in the right seat and you can fly the airplane some on this trip, because, you know, why not? And so that just gives them an experience they never would have had before, and gives them a little bit of fun, even though they’re having to, you know, navigate all these different barriers that exist for them getting access to care. Mike Bonanza, you and all of the other elevated access pilots are trans joy.

Do you know a person or a group like Mike that deserves a shout-out for a future trans-Joy segment? If so, send us an email at translash_podcast@translash.org make sure to include their name, contact info and why you think that they embody trans joy, we might just use your suggestion in a future episode, and you can find the email to make a recommendation for trans joy in our show notes, in case you just missed it. And with that, let’s go to my conversation with the Chase train deal.

I’m so glad to be joined today by my friend and legal powerhouse, none other than ACLU attorney and nationally recognized expert on transgender rights, Chase, Strangio Chase is a true force of nature when it comes to defending and advancing trans rights across the country. He currently serves as the co-director for transgender justice at the ACLU LGBT and HIV project, where he’s been working for years on some of the biggest cases that impact our community. Chase is slated to hit a historic milestone in his efforts to defend and expand rights in our country, as we mentioned at the top of the show. Next month, Chase will become the first openly trans lawyer to argue in front of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of US versus COVID. He’ll be challenging Tennessee’s ban through that case on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Before joining the ACLU Chase, was the director of prisoner justice initiatives at the.

Rivera Law Project, his tireless legal and legislative advocacy has earned him some much-deserved recognition. Over the years, he was honored with the American Bar Association’s 2020 Stonewall Award and was named as times 100 most influential person in 2020 among many, many other awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees. Chase. Thank you so much for joining us at what is going to be an argument of and for your life.

Yes, yes. That is, that is how it feels. And you know, it’s a unique position to be in and in some ways, and really happy to be talking to you about it. Thank you so much. It’s, it’s very Thurgood Marshall in a way, isn’t it? Well, you know, I would hazard to compare myself to Thurgood Marshall. But I do think that you know, one of the things that’s happened with the Supreme Court bar over the last few years is that, maybe longer than you know, the last few decades, even it’s become, it’s so professionalized, and so you have just people whose job it is to be experts at arguing in front of the Supreme Court, and one of the consequences of that is that you don’t have as many moments where the people who have been, you know, in the trenches fighting for their communities, are the ones that are appearing before the court. And that isn’t to say that there aren’t incredible advocates who are regularly appearing there, but there is something to be said about people who, you know, know, in their bones, the consequences of a major Supreme Court decision being the ones to, you know, sort of really stand before the justices to embody that exactly. I mean, you know, that’s been a problem with sort of American life since the 1970s is the growing you know, one might argue over professionalization of everything, which means that everything gets separated more and more from the people, which is why things seem to be esoteric and disconnected. So this is a welcome change from that. I wanted to start with the basics, like, can you just tell us first and foremost, what is US versus many? What is this case deciding? What’s the core question before the court? Because that’s what the Supreme Court does: it answers core questions about the law. So what’s the core question here? The core question before the court is, does it violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment for a state to categorically ban medical care for trans adolescents because that care is inconsistent with their sex? That is the question that is presented. That is the only question that you know sort of legally, is officially up there. And so the arguments themselves are really focusing on, whether is it constitutional or not, under one provision of the Constitution to ban this medical care, gender affirming medical care for trans adolescents and trans adolescents only. And so can you just explain for people who may not, you know, be thoroughly up to date on every amendment in the Constitution. What’s the 14th Amendment? So the 14th Amendment, it was adopted in 1868 it’s one of the Reconstruction amendments, the big three, the big three, and it has within it a clause that, in essence, says that all people should be treated equal, and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment has been used to secure, you know, general protections under the Constitution. So when the government is discriminating, the Constitution is, you know, a source of our protection. It’s a limit on the government. And so the equal protection clause has been used to, you know, fight back against racial discrimination in schools. Has been used to fight back against sex discrimination in, you know, benefits programs, in the educational program. So this is the mechanism through which a lot of civil rights has been litigated first and most significantly in the context of racial discrimination. Obviously, the Reconstruction amendments were, you know, first and foremost, geared towards responding to anti-black racism and the legacy of chattel slavery. And then over time, through the work of people like Pauli Murray and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Equal Protection Clause was interpreted as well to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, and those sex-based protections have been used to, in essence, ensure that expectations about how men and women are or should be aren’t used to discriminate. That is the essence of the sex-based protections and the equal protection clause as the Supreme Court has interpreted it. And so really, the question before the court is, do those long-standing protections under this provision of the Constitution extend to trans people when the government is discriminating against us because of our sex?

And that is the core of what we are arguing here, that when Tennessee and 23 other states say you can’t get medical care because it is not consistent with how we understand your sex, that that is a form of sex discrimination that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits. And you know, we’ve been arguing this theory of these cases since 2021 when Arkansas became the first state to ban medical care for for trans adolescents, every district court in the first two years of the litigation over these bans, to hear the legal arguments, look at the evidence blocked these bans on our medical care. Very simply, sort of saying, Well, of course, this is sex discrimination. The law is saying you can’t do this because of your sex. And it was very straightforward up until we reached some intermediate appellate courts that, in essence, reversed those lower courts and set us on this course up to the Supreme Court to answer this question about these laws that are sweeping the country. Yeah. I mean, well, you know a couple of things, I think. One, even though this amendment was, you know, passed in the wake of the Civil War and about slavery, it’s also pretty clear that the people that voted for the amendment at the time understood that it would apply to a larger group of people, right, which is kind of the basis for expanding it. So, for example, immigrants, right? They knew that, like these, a lot of these amendments would apply to immigrants as well, such as the 13th, which is being born on US soil, and the 14th equal protection under the law, which was really important. And also, I think that one of the things about this equal protection idea, right, is that you can’t single out a specific group of people and then single out things that apply only to them, and say we can ban that specifically, right? That’s what makes this potentially unconstitutional, and why you guys were winning the cases in the first couple of years. Is that? Right? Yeah. I mean, I think fundamentally, the idea is you can’t just arbitrarily treat someone differently because of who they are. That’s sort of the core of what the promise of equal protection is, and then what the courts have over the last in particular, you know, 100 years done is say that, yes, this is a radical equality promise for everyone. But there are certain times when it is the province of the judicial system to look more closely at what the majoritarian branches are doing. And so hold on by I’m just majoritarian. You mean it’s like Congress and legislator exactly so. So the point being that, you know, the role of the judiciary historically has been to protect minorities from majoritarian rule, and the way that the cases have developed over time is that the courts have said, Okay, when, when the government uses race to treat people differently, there’s good reason for us to look closely at the use of race based classifications. There’s a long history of discrimination. There’s reason to be suspect. And so over time, this doctrine developed, which has, you know, been called strict scrutiny and and strict scrutiny is, in essence, the court saying, when the government discriminates based on race, we as the courts are going to look very closely at what the government is doing and say, are you really doing something legitimate, or are you doing something for an improper purpose? So that is the strict scrutiny that attends to these race based classifications now in the 1970s and this was a real centerpiece of justice. Ginsburg’s work was to say, well, we need this heightened level of scrutiny for sex too. There’s reasons why, when the government is drawing lines based on men and women or based on expectations about men and women, that there’s a long history of discrimination. There too, and in the 1970s the court said you’re right, in essence, and that it’s not going to be as suspect as Race. Race gets something called strict scrutiny, and then sex gets something called heightened scrutiny, or intermediate scrutiny. And so for the last 50 years, the court has said, it is inherently suspect for the government to differentiate based on sex. So if, for example, you have the Virginia Military Institute that is limited to men in its admissions, we are going to require that the government come forward and say that we have a good reason for this, and that’s one of the most famous cases sex discrimination cases that Justice Ginsburg decided as a justice so the essence of what we are fighting about today is, shouldn’t the courts take a closer look in these contexts, when state governments across the country are singling out trans people with the very same types of sex based assumptions that we’ve seen in the law for the last 50 years that caused the courts to be suspect and suspicious in the first place. I think the important thing about this, other than being deep in the weeds of how constitutional law works, is that this is really a case about the legacy.

Of our sex protections more broadly, that is the court going to roll them back and say, No, we want to allow for more sex based stereotypes in the law? Or is the court going to say this is just the straightforward continuation of everything we have always been suspect of, which is that governments should not be telling people what kind of man and what kind of woman they can and cannot be. So that’s the jurisprudence piece of it, right, in terms of like what the questions are and all of the rest of it. And when you say heightened scrutiny, you mean that courts basically don’t like it when it seems like certain groups of people are being singled out by legislators, and they want to look under the hood of what’s going on, and so that’s what they’re essentially doing in these cases. Can you talk a little bit about why? Then, if this is the case, everything that you said is true, how have these laws been able to stand that is, how have they gotten out of lower federal courts than when you all have filed lawsuits like, what’s been the basis for upholding these laws under the Constitution? Then if there are these heightened scrutiny and equal protection questions that come up, yeah, I mean, the way that the courts have, in essence, upheld them, is to say it’s not about sex at all, that you don’t get that heightened scrutiny. And instead, this is really just about, you know, medical procedures, and it’s not about sex. And when it comes to the regulation of medicine, the legislatures have broad latitude, and we’re just going to go ahead and let the states do what they want to do, and it’s sort of a hands off approach. We don’t want to look any further. They said they had a legitimate reason. That’s good enough for us. And that’s a really, you know, dangerous place to be in, because if, at the end of the day, the only level of scrutiny you get is a court to say, was it even remotely rational? And we argue it’s not even remotely rational. But that is a very deferential standard that gives states a huge amount of latitude to regulate in the context of medical care for trans people, because these lower appellate courts have in essence announced that this isn’t about sex at all. This is just about a medical procedure that happens to be limited to a group of people, but that is not an equal protection violation. This is just the regulation of medicine. Nothing to see here. Go forth states and so that’s really what we’re fighting back against, right? And we know from the history of how these laws developed that that’s just fundamentally not true. I mean, even though the Christian Nationalist Movement has done a really good job of disguising these questions of being about medicine through pseudoscientific groups like the American College of Pediatricians and others, that essentially, they’re doing it because it is about trans people. I mean, we know that from the record, yeah. I mean, I think that’s what’s so frustrating, is that it’s so transparently not the way medicine is regulated, also, in addition to the fact that these are template laws that were shipped across the country that were part of larger packages of other types of laws targeting trans people that had nothing to do with medicine. It’s also the case that in all of these states, when there is genuine concern about an area of medical practice, they don’t go from, you know, sort of no regulation to categorical bans. You know, medical care does have standard ways in which it’s regulated, even medical care that people have concerns about. So if you look at something like the opioid epidemic, it’s not like opioids are banned as legislators, as regulators, impose controls on doctors in order to address legitimate concerns about over prescription and you look at something like, for example, gastric bypass surgery, which is available to both minors and adults, there was concerns that People were not given enough information about the potential consequences of those surgeries. They did not ban those surgeries. What they did is they imposed informed consent requirements on the doctors who are performing them. So it is so anomalous in terms of a medical regulation, so that also just tends to undermine the idea that this is just the typical exercise of the state’s police power to regulate medicine. It just is not it doesn’t look like that. It doesn’t feel like that, and it’s not consistent with any other context. So that’s how we’ve gotten to this point anyway, and why you’re going to have to go to argue before the Supreme Court from a legal standpoint, tell us about the people at the heart of this case, who you all were representing the minors and their families, specifically in Tennessee, Tennessee has passed more anti trans legislation than any other state in the country with each passing year, that legislation getting more and more draconian. So for example, this year, there’s a ban on taking your kid out of state to get gender affirming care as a parent, for example, one of the things that passed. So can you talk to us about the atmosphere and about the people at the heart of this case, the kids and their families? Yeah, I mean, so at the end of the day, this really is about.

Human being. So it’s about three transgender adolescents and the parents who love and care for them, and a doctor in Tennessee who has been banned from taking care of her patients by prescribing these medications for the patients who need them. And so I think one important detail is we filed this lawsuit on behalf of these individual families and one doctor the United States intervened on our side. So that’s how it became us for scrimeti at the Supreme Court, instead of the families versus scream, although the initial case is captioned LW versus scrimeti, because we were the parties that initially sued the government of Tennessee, the Biden Harris administration intervened on behalf of the families, arguing that the law violated equal protection. And the sort of way that the case has made its way up to the Supreme Court, it’s captioned United States for many, which is important, I think, to note, because Tennessee, in its briefing before the Supreme Court, very much wants to cast this case as a case about the federal government displacing the state government. But what this case really is about is about the state of Tennessee government displacing the decision making of families and doctors. So it is the government of Tennessee that has come in and said that you parents who have loved your children since birth, who have cared for them, who have recognized in them deeply painful experiences of distress for years and found medication that your child and you and your doctors all agree is necessary. And the government is coming in and saying, We know better. We are taking this option off the table. And so that’s what is at the heart of this case is the government of Tennessee removing from these families the life saving treatment that has transformed their children’s lives. And you know, for example, our client, John Doe, started asserting himself and recognizing himself as a boy when he was two years old. He is only known as a boy in all aspects of his life, and he has been relying on this medication for years, and after, you know, six years of mental health treatment, after multiple specialists, after parents who themselves struggled and researched, and then you have the government of Tennessee acting like these are rash choices being made by individual eight year olds When that is could not be further from the truth, and that is the story of these families that we are bringing before the Supreme Court. Yeah, it’s also so fascinating, because the way these cases work, right? So you’re arguing on behalf of several people or several groups of people, but it impacts 10s of 1000s of families across the United States, yeah, you know, all of these kids, all of their families, it is about these people, and it’s not about them at the same time. It’s about something much larger. Yeah, it’s, I mean, to think about, you know, how brave it is for the families that do come forward at a time when there’s so much hostility. And yes, two of them, at least, are using pseudonyms at most of our clients across the country have increasingly opted to be anonymous for their own protection, but in essence, they’re standing in for 1000s of families and young people across the country who are being displaced by these types of laws, who are being forced to flee their homes because of these types of laws, who you know, the families themselves have had to split up with one parent taking a child out of state and another parent staying behind with other children and so, so you have this case. At the center of this case are these three families, but this is an experience that hundreds upon hundreds of people are experiencing across the United States and and thankfully, we do have what are, what are called friend of the court briefs, in which other families have told their stories before the Supreme Court, so they recognize that this is not just three people in Tennessee, or, you know, 300 people in Tennessee, but hundreds upon hundreds of people across the country who are having these experiences. And I do, you know, when I think about this case, and I think about this court, and I think about myself as a parent at the end of the day, I believe in my heart that every single one of the justices on some level can relate to the idea of just wanting to take care of someone that you love. And often those decisions are painful and personal and complex, and the idea that the government is going to impose insurmountable barriers to being able to make and execute those decisions is, I think, upsetting to many people, and hopefully the stories of these families, in addition to the legal arguments, will resonate with at least five members of the court so on that particular point. I mean, let’s be extremely polite about it. You’re not facing the most friendly court that you could have faced in arguing this case for a variety of reasons. My question is, even if they’re inclined to say that the Equal Protection Clause doesn’t apply to this, how do they do so in a way which doesn’t wreck.

The medical decision making process for everyone, and give state governments the arbitrary power to decide who gets medical care and who doesn’t depending on who they are. Like, is there a way that they could square that? Are they just backed into a corner here, that even if they’re inclined to do one thing, it’s really hard for them to do it? Yeah, I mean, I think they’ll find a way to do it if they want to rule against us. Like, us. I think they’ll say, Look, this is an equal protection violation. This is just the medical procedure. They’ll contort the language in order to say it doesn’t really deal with sex, even though the whole point of the statute is to limit what you can do based on your sex. I can imagine them doing that, but I think we should all be very mindful of whatever they say is the limiting principle, it will not, in fact, be the limiting principle. And I think to illustrate that if you, if you go back to 2022 with the Court’s decision in Dobbs, overturning Roe v Wade, the justices in Dobbs, who are in the majority, SWIR up and down, that Dobbs was limited to the context of abortion. It was, you know, this was a unique context. And the reasoning of this Court’s decision is limited to abortion. Justice Alito says that in the majority opinion, within a week of Dobbs, you had every single state government defending bans on medical care for trans adolescents and adults of various sorts, saying, under Dobbs, we have a right to do this. So Dobbs became another entry point for them to justify this, and the way that they have tried to do that is to say, in essence, Dobbs creates exceptions to other principles in the context of medicine. And so they’ve they’ve said in our litigation, well, yes, sex discrimination and sex based classifications by the government are usually suspect, but when it comes to medicine, there’s a different rule. Now, the Supreme Court has never said that, and they didn’t really say that in Dobbs, but are they going to say that? Now, it’s possible this is an opportunity for the court to quite significantly expand Dobbs into new areas of law, into new exceptions and erosions, and I think we should be very concerned about that, because the limiting principles that the court announces in one context are only are only true up until the next context in which they they blow past them, and the court can and will, as we’ve seen, do what it wants. And this is another test in Dobbs. The central test was, do we still have a fundamental right to abortion? The court said, No, there is no fundamental right to abortion. I think now the question is, did that open the door to another erosion, and that erosion is, are equality principles and protections based on sex subject to limitations that we did not think existed before? And we’re saying absolutely not, those protections are universal across context. The Constitution limits government discrimination in medicine, just as it does in education, just as it does in any other context in which the government is is eroding our constitutional protections, including our equality protections. That said, this is the question, this is the test. What is the next thing they’re going to take away from us on this particular point about basically blowing the doors open and permitting a whole host of things to occur that weren’t seen as being able to be allowed as before. It’s hard for me to believe, given everything that I know about the legal strategy that’s been deployed here and the legislation and how that’s come about, that a ruling against gender affirming care for young people would not quickly open the door to similar types of restrictions for all trans people like it’s hard for me to see that only being applied to people under the age of 18 or 16 or wherever they might Draw the line. Yeah, I think that’s an absolutely legitimate fear, and that’s actually one of the many reasons why we thought that we needed to take this case to the Supreme Court, because the lower court opinions were already being used to legitimize expanded attacks on care for adults, and that was happening in majority of circuits across the country that were representing the states where these restrictions on care and bans on care for minors were were being enacted, and so if the court says these are neutral lines, they’re not sex discrimination, then that reasoning, as far as I see, it applies as much to restrictions on care for adults as it does for restrictions on care for minors. And that’s, you know, one of the things that’s that we’re trying to explain through our briefing and likely at argument, because the other side is saying, Look, this is just about young people not having the ability to make these decisions, put aside the fact that it’s their parents who are making them. That you know at the end of the day, nothing about their reasoning and their rationale is limited to restrictions on care for minors. It is an argument that extends with equal force. If SB one in Tennessee said no hormone therapy inconsistent with sex period, not under 18, their arguments would be exactly the same. And we want the Supreme Court to understand that and not be fooled by this idea that this is about protecting children, when at the end of the day, this is about enforcing norms of gender full stop. They say it on the face of.

The statute, they say Tennessee has a compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex and prohibiting treatments that could cause them to be disdainful of their sex. They are not hiding the ball here. What can trans people do around making their voice heard around this issue, if that’s what they so choose to do. You know, this is a court proceeding. It’s legal. You know, they’re going to be a small number of people in the room that day, small number of people who afterwards, get around the table, nine of them, and have the initial discussion about where they think they are, and then go back and forth with briefs. So this is a small group of people. What do you think that people can do? If anything. I mean, I think people can do a lot, and I actually think, as I did in 2019 when the court was hearing the arguments in Bostock, and as I have in every single major Supreme Court case concerning civil rights, that at the end of the day, this is a public fight as it is illegal one, because the justices make decisions in the context of the world in which they live, and so we need them to see a world in which ruling against trans people would be catastrophic, a world in which it is counter to every principle that we hold dear. You know, that’s not to say that necessarily works, but it does move the ball and win or lose, it moves the ball for the community. So I think a few concrete things that trans people and people who love trans people can do. One is to continue to be loud and clear about what this healthcare is, what it means to be trans and how we are out here in the world, living our lives already. There is nothing new about being trans. There is nothing new about this healthcare and sort of being a example and disruption of the false narratives about us that are out there. I think that is critical, because the proliferation of ananti-transiscourse requires a counter-discourse requires us to be leading that counter-discourse, as you Amara, have so, you know, essentially been leading. We need more people by your side doing that we just do so that’s number one, whenever it feels safe and appropriate be a messenger of your experience. I think that that’s really important, and encourage the people in your life to do the same. We need parents to do the same. We need colleagues to do the same. We need people to be out there in their various contexts, being fully embodied and trans and loved and cared for. So that’s always true, and I think that’s especially true now. I think on December 4, we want people outside that courtroom. The other side is going to show up, and we just simply don’t want it to be a world where the court is able to think, Wow, this is a real 5050, split in this country. This is a contentious issue, and it’s not something that people are comfortable with. The idea of trans people existing, the idea of trans people getting our health care. We need to be a force. We need to be a force outside that courtroom, just as we need to be a force in the narrative. So December 4, you know, there’s going to be a huge rally outside the Supreme Court in DC. We need trans people. We need people who love trans people to be out there. And then I think the other thing is that, you know, we also need to continue to build the structures and support for people, because regardless of what happens in this case, we have to be able to continue to support and care for each other. States are acting to roll back our rights. Are acting to exclude us from public space, and even if we win, which would obviously be critical, it’s not going to change a lot on the ground in an instant, we need to be able to ensure that people are moving in ways that they can feel safe and protected. We need people to set up, you know, systems of transportation and care to get people where they need to be, so that that work is going to, you know, be ongoing, and the earliest likely we would have a decision, in this case, is not until June of 2025, like people are living under these bans right now, and we need to be able to be organizing to protect and care for the people who are suffering under them. Lastly, one of the implications what we’re talking about is how the legal is ultimately personal, and for you, that’s going to be very much so that day, the legal is not only personal to you, as you said, as a trans person, as a parent, but this is also your profession, right? And something that is detached is going to be condensed and condensed in a history-making moment for you. So in this moment of it being all of those things, right, the legal is the personal for so many different reasons. After you stand up, after the Solicitor General, look those nine justices in the eyes, and you know, let the words, may it please the Court leave your mouth. What do you think is going to be the personal feeling that you have of both having to stand there at the highest level of your professionalism and at the same time be debating the essence of your humanity, facing off on the other side against people who refuse to to see that. I mean, this is something I sit with a lot because this is a common occurrence. Obviously, in my work, it’s not I mean, obviously, this will be my first time before the Supreme Court as an oral advocate in this way. But you know, I go into state legislatures all the time and testify in committee hearings when I am hearing the most vile misrepresentations and cruel things about about trans people, I cross-examine and depose experts who fundamentally don’t believe trans people should exist, the same experts who are being used by the state of Tennessee in this case and I have argued before courts that I know will have ruled against me, will rule against me in this fight that is so central to everything about me as a human being. So that is something that I am, I am used to. I think obviously in this context where, when you enter the Supreme Court, it, in and of itself, just has that feeling of you were, many people were never meant to be in that space. It is a space that has been occupied by the very sort of, you know, most limited constructions of the elite, and over time, that has a lot more and more people have been able to enter the doors, but only in a very limited way. And so whenever you are in that space, and whenever you are representing a community of people that was never meant to be there, I think it is both powerful and destabilizing. A little bit it’s sort of holding that those sets of truths and trying to be as best of an advocate for your community as you can be knowing that so much is being projected onto you, so much misinformation, misunderstanding and dehumanization in that moment, you never have the sort of privilege of just being a lawyer. And that is something that I think many lawyers from you know, sort of historically excluded and currently discriminated against communities feel it’s like you are never just a lawyer. You are the trans lawyer, or you are the black trans lawyer, or you are the disabled lawyer. People’s experience of that obviously affects the theater of the courtroom very significantly. And I think to suggest otherwise, it’d be to do a just huge disservice to the nature of law and how law is made through its very performative elements, so I’m thinking about those things. And then, you know, obviously, like, it’s, it’s not lost on me that we’re having a conversation about health care, that the health care is the very reason I will be standing there in that, in that moment, like there is no version of me that gets to the Supreme Court that has the life that I have if I didn’t have access to this health care that now the governments are seeking to take away. That is the driving force of my my fight, and I say it often, but in 2009 I had top surgery. It was the single most transformative and one of the very best things that has ever happened to me. Changed my life. It enabled me to be a lawyer. Enabled me to be a confident advocate, and it drove me to say, I will never stop fighting for other people to have that which I had, and this will be such an embodiment of that, and obviously be carrying with me all the people who made it possible for me to have those things, and hopefully leaving space for the next generations of people to continue to have and expand. You know, the things that we have? Well, Chase. Thank you so much for your work and your commitment. I think that you will be entering that court with so many other people, whether or not they are there physically or not, and there are so many people I know who are listening, who are glad that you’ll never stop fighting. Thank you so much. Thank you Imara. And I mean, I just want to say, you know your work and your example and the space that you create every day is drives me, motivates me, and makes me feel like this. So thanks. Oh, thank you so much. Likewise, we’ve been in a lot of conversations over the years. So, so appreciative for you. That was ACLU attorney J Strait, you.

Thank you for joining me on the TransLash podcast. Now listen all the way through to the end of the show for something extra. If you like what you heard, please go to Apple podcast to rate and review us. You can listen to TransLash wherever you get your podcast. Check us out on the web translash.org to sign up for our weekly newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, X, and Instagram, at translash media, like us on Facebook, and tell your friends the TransLash podcast is produced by translash Media. The translash team includes Oliver-Ash Klein and Aubrey Calloway. Xander Adams is our senior sound engineer and a contributing producer. This episode was engineered by Lucy Little. The music you heard was composed by Ben Dragi and also courtesy of Z UK records, the TransLash podcast is made possible by the support of foundations and listeners like you.

So next week, I am looking forward to Facing Race. Facing Race is the conference that’s put on every two years to discuss where we are on racial justice and all of its intersections. It is always right after the election, which is a very curious choice, but I think this year will be a good place for people to gather and assess what’s happened in the process, together in person.