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Chase Strangio: [ . . . we] should be very concerned about the idea that the government is going to pick a form of medical care that it does not like and, over the objection of the medical community in its state, the parents who love and care for their adolescent children and the adolescent children themselves, make it wholly unavailable and, in some cases, criminal. That is an alarming proposition, and it is drastically divergent from every single other context in which medical care is regulated.

Alex Lovit: By the end of June, the Supreme Court will release all of its decisions for the current term. One of these cases, United States v. Skrmetti, will decide whether state governments have the right to ban crucial medical care for trans people. A ruling in favor of the states would be a catastrophic attack on civil liberties, undermining basic rights that should be available for all Americans.

You’re listening to The Context, a podcast from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to make democracy work for everyone and why that’s so hard to do. I’m your host, Alex Lovit.

My guest today is Chase Strangio. Chase is the co-director of the LGBT and HIV Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. He was one of the advocates who argued the Skrmetti case before the Supreme Court, making him the first openly trans lawyer to appear before that court.

Today Chase will walk us through the specifics of the case, but he’ll also tell us how to do something besides bite our nails while we wait for the Court’s decision because how we respond matters. It’s up to us to build a society and a country that’s affirming and inclusive of trans people. That’s something no court can do. Chase Strangio, welcome to The Context.

Chase Strangio: Oh, thanks so much for having me, Alex. Good to be here.

Alex Lovit: So we’re going to be talking about the U.S. v. Skrmetti today. This was your first case arguing in front of the Supreme Court—which I’ve never done, but listening to the audio of the case, it must be stressful. The Justices are not shy about interrupting. You’re trying to carefully respond to them; but in some sense, you’re also talking to history, you’re talking to the country.

So my question is: What advice did you get going into that case? And what advice would you give to lawyers arguing in front of the Supreme Court for the first time?

Chase Strangio: I think, in some sense, it was advice that I accumulated over time as an advocate in other cases. Prepare. Be ready to have a conversation but know that everything you say can lead you in a direction that you don’t want to go.

I had been at the Supreme Court, not arguing cases but litigating cases, several times before. And so I had watched the process. I had helped prepare other people for oral argument, and that obviously helped me prepare for the argument in Skrmetti.

I think the best piece of advice that I got from the many, many, many people who helped me prepare was that, at the end of the day, you’re going to get a lot of advice, and a lot of that advice is going to be conflicting. And that’s one of the hardest things, is one person says, “Absolutely do this,” and the next person says, “Absolutely don’t do this.”

You do have to trust your instincts because, at the end of the day, you’re the one that’s going to be standing up there. You want to be able to feel, on the day of the argument, that you trust yourself completely. And especially [to] people who have historically been excluded from the legal profession, I would say continue to trust yourself. Continue to build those skills. That’s what ultimately felt the most important to me.

Alex Lovit: Well, let’s talk about the case itself. So Skrmetti is about a Tennessee law which bans gender-affirming care for trans youth. Can you just talk briefly about what that law does and why you believe it’s unconstitutional?

Chase Strangio: Yeah. So I think it’s important to provide a little context here, which is that there were no states in 2020 that banned gender-affirming medical care for trans minors. The first state to pass such a ban was Arkansas in 2021, and it was a bill that categorically banned gender-affirming medical care only when it was provided to treat gender dysphoria.

At the time, Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who had signed many bills excluding the trans community from myriad legal rights and protections, vetoed that bill and said this is just a—absolutely a bridge too far. It’s government overreach into families. It’s government overreach into medical decisionmaking. It’s going to cause significant harm to transgender young people in the state of Arkansas.

That was the first bill that passed. The governor vetoed it. We ended up suing in Arkansas and had a series of wins in Arkansas and then in Alabama in which judges—the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the laws that ban gender-affirming medical care only for transgender minors violated the “equal protection” clause, and in the case of some of the cases, violated the substantive due process rights of parents to direct the medical care of their minor children.

And in 2023, Tennessee and nearly half the states in the country then introduced comparable bills to the ones that had passed in Alabama and Arkansas, similarly banning gender-affirming medical care only when it was provided to individuals who were seeking that care to live in a way that was inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth.

Tennessee’s ban on medical care explicitly hinges its prohibition on whether or not the care is inconsistent with the person’s sex. So for example, in Tennessee if you’re a cisgender boy assigned “male” at birth, you can get testosterone to undergo a typical male puberty; you just can’t if you had a sex assigned at birth of “female.”

Our argument is that that’s just a straightforward sex classification. You’re treating people differently based on their sex assigned at birth, and under longstanding constitutional protections, when the government does that, they have to justify the distinction under a heightened standard of review.

And so we argue that it violates the equal protection rights of transgender individuals. We brought the case in Tennessee on behalf of three adolescents and their parents and a doctor who treats transgender patients, and we, before the district court, got an opinion blocking Tennessee’s law on the ground that it violated equal protection.

The district court made extensive factual findings, in essence saying, “I’ve looked at all the evidence that the plaintiffs and the State of Tennessee have presented, and it just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. I don’t think that Tennessee has met its burden of showing why they’ve singled out this medical care, and this medical care alone, for a categorical prohibition.”

And so that was the history of the Tennessee case, what the law does, and why we think it violates the equal protection rights of transgender adolescents.

Alex Lovit: So there’s a lot of laws that regulate medical practice. Can you explain how we can tell that this law is based in prejudice and isn’t just a genuine attempt to protect people from harm?

Chase Strangio: So the argument actually is not that this is grounded in prejudice. So we’re not saying necessarily that this is driven by animus, though I think there is an argument that it is.

The argument is that it differentiates based on sex and that under Supreme Court precedent, whether or not it’s animus-driven or not, if you’re making distinctions based on sex, you have to meet this heightened standard of review.

And so any medical regulation that would treat people differently based on the fact that they’re male or female would have to be tested under this heightened standard of review under longstanding—50 years of equal protection doctrine by the Supreme Court. So that’s the first point.

The second point is this is not just a straightforward medical regulation. So we did not have, for example, the various executive agencies that regulate medicine step in to study this treatment and impose some sort of restrictions on the provision of care. The Legislature categorically banned the care without any sort of concern for the individual needs of patients.

And then if I could just draw a comparison? There are many other examples of medical care where, whether it’s lawmakers or regulators, have identified concerns with, let’s say, overprescription or potential informed consent problems.

One example would be opioids. There are massive regulatory schemes in place in order to regulate the prescription of opioids, but they didn’t outright ban opioids, recognizing that there were benefits to some people. Pediatric gastric-bypass surgery. Lots of concerns about whether or not individuals were getting improper informed consent. States didn’t ban the procedures; they just imposed requirements on doctors in order to ensure that parents and patients were given information.

None of that happened here. What we had is a categorical ban, in some contexts with criminal penalties attached, of care that had been provided for decades. So not only was the care all of a sudden prospectively cut off; individuals who had been relying on the care, in some contexts and cases for years, all of a sudden had no access to that treatment. So this was not a regulation; this was a blunt categorical ban on the medicine.

Alex Lovit: Well, let’s talk a little bit about the legal aspects of this case [and] a couple of things you’ve already brought up. So one is, I believe you’ve already said, you’re basing this not in creation of a new protected class for transgender people but on the fact that it differentiates based on gender, which was already a protected class. Do I have that right, and can you explain how that works?

Chase Strangio: Yeah. So I would say there’s actually two arguments. One is that it is based on the differentiation based on sex, which is already a protected characteristic under the Constitution that triggers heightened scrutiny, which is a legal standard that is triggered when sex classifications are used by the government. This is the type of law that the Judiciary scrutinizes with more rigor than a standard economic regulation, like whether and where you can sell milk.

We also argue that transgender status itself should trigger that same standard of review. When you are talking about classifications that implicate groups of people that have historically experienced discrimination, courts look a little closer. And that’s what we argue is happening here, both with respect to the sex-based differentiation and with respect to the differential treatment of transgender people.

Alex Lovit: Yeah. Well, so let’s talk a little bit about the heightened scrutiny you just mentioned. In most cases, the Court doesn’t see it as its job to second-guess laws passed by the Legislature—the Court tries to stay out of the way—except in cases that involve certain groups, like people who’ve experienced discrimination, often based on race or gender. And then the Court says, “Okay, we’re going to have to look at this a little bit more closely.” A higher tier of scrutiny is required. So what does that mean? What does extra scrutiny look like in practice?

Chase Strangio: Yeah. Just to clarify, there’s different levels of this heightened scrutiny in the context of equal protection. There’s all sorts of other heightened standards in which the Judiciary looks at government action in other contexts, whether it’s the First Amendment or the Second Amendment and others.

In the “equal protection” context, where you have the Fourteenth Amendment’s instruction that the State not impose differential treatment on individuals, then the question is: Is it a classification based on race, for example, in which case it would have the highest amount of scrutiny from the Court, or is it based on sex, in which it would have what the Court has identified as this intermediate level of scrutiny?

In both contexts, what that means is rather than the individual challenging the government action, having to show that there’s no conceivable basis in which the government could have rationally acted, the burden shifts to the government to explain exactly what interests it is seeking to advance and how the use of that classification or differentiation advance those interests.

So when we’re talking about a sex-based regulation, which is what we argue is at play in Tennessee’s SB1, the burden is on Tennessee, in this case, to show that the way in which they’re using sex is substantially advancing an important governmental interest. That’s the legal standard. So Tennessee has the burden to say, “This is the interest. We needed to treat people assigned ‘male’ and people assigned ‘female’ differently because it serves this interest, and banning this medical care was substantially related to advancing that interest.”

Here Tennessee argues this law that categorically bans medical care, when it is provided in a manner Tennessee considers inconsistent with sex, that is advancing an interest in protecting children.

And we argue that Tennessee has not met its burden because this is a law that does not advance an interest in protecting children. It, in fact, undermines that interest; but also that every single argument that Tennessee raises—so for example, critiques of the medical care based on the level of evidence showing it’s effective—is true of many other forms of pediatric medicine that they have left totally unregulated.

What I think is really important for people listening, especially people who don’t know trans people, is to understand just how unusual these laws are; and that even if people have concerns about this medical care, and they have questions because they aren’t familiar with it, we should be very concerned about the idea that the government is going to pick a form of medical care that it does not like and, over the objection of the medical community in its state, the parents who love and care for their adolescent children and the adolescent children themselves, make it wholly unavailable and, in some cases, criminal. That is an alarming proposition, and it is drastically divergent from every single other context in which medical care is regulated.

Alex Lovit: Let’s talk about the implications of this case. The Court has not yet ruled and will rule shortly, this summer, and either uphold or dismantle the Tennessee law. What would the implications of that be for people in Tennessee if this law is upheld?

Chase Strangio: Well, so just to take a step back: Right now we’re living in a country where almost half the country currently bans gender-affirming medical care for trans youth. That is the reality that people are currently facing.

Young people have been stripped of medical care that they need, that their parents consented to, that their doctors recommended. And for those without means, that has been a catastrophic health crisis. Many people are moving from state to state to try to access medical care, and obviously that really depends on people’s access to resources and other means to move.

So we’re already living in the context in which nearly half the country bans this medical care. Let’s say the Supreme Court fully upholds the lower court decision saying that states are, in essence, constitutionally permitted to enact these bans on medical care based on at least the record that was before the Court in this case. That just keeps the status quo, in essence.

There are a few states that have an injunction in place: Arkansas and Idaho. Those injunctions may be subsequently affected by a Supreme Court decision, but right now these bans are in effect in many states. And so that would just simply greenlight the continuation of that denial of care.

Obviously, one of the major concerns is that, depending on how the Court writes its opinion, it could open the door to efforts by the Trump Administration to, in essence, ban care nationally—although I think there would be separate limitations on the federal government’s ability to do that separate and apart from whatever equal protection analysis the Court employs in Skrmetti.

So I think it’s important to recognize that the question is whether states can ban the care, not whether they have to ban the care. They don’t. The states that currently have no laws restricting access to this medical care can continue to provide medical care in those states. But obviously, we’re already facing an urgent catastrophic situation for many people because of the rapid proliferation of these laws cutting off care for the people who need it.

The other thing to keep in mind is that there’s not just a single way in which the Supreme Court might rule here. It’s not just an up/down, it’s constitutional or it’s unconstitutional. There’s lots of different analytical questions at play. And so I think the consequences of that happens next will depend on precisely how the Supreme Court writes its opinion.

So there’s a lot of different variables at play. I think the important thing to remember is no matter what happens here, there will be tools available to continue to fight the Trump Administration’s efforts to coerce states to cut off medical care for trans minors; and that there will be nothing in this decision that will require a state, like Massachusetts or New York or California, to restrict the care that it is currently providing in accordance with the medical standards.

Alex Lovit: So this Tennessee law, and a lot of the laws we’re talking about around the country, are about minors specifically. What are the implications for gender-affirming care for adults?

Chase Strangio: Yeah. I think this is one of the things that came up a lot in argument and is really important to flag, is that Tennessee’s arguments as a legal matter are not different based on whether or not the ban is limited to minors or not. So the solicitor general of Tennessee was asked in oral argument, “Would your arguments be the same if this law targeted people of all ages?” And in essence, he admitted that the arguments would be the same.

I think one concern that people should have is: Does this open the door to the Tennessee Legislature next year saying, “You know what? We’re going to ban this care for everyone”? Because if the Court says sex-based distinction is not a transgender status-based distinction—we just defer to the Legislature in the same way we do when they’re regulating where milk vendors can sell milk—then that opens the door to the states that are eager to ban this care for adults to do so.

I think that’s one of the main implications here and something we’re monitoring, which is the reason why people’s ears should perk up when we’re hearing all of these critiques of the medical care about the provision of the care to minors: because the legal arguments themselves are not limited to the prohibition of care to minors.

They are based on an argument that this is not a law that treats people differently at all. And that should be concerning to everyone because we’re about to be in a situation potentially where states are going to come in an erode the ability of consenting adults to access medical treatment, even though those same consenting adults could, say, access cosmetic surgery and any number of other forms of medical intervention but singularly be prohibited from accessing anything that is deemed inconsistent with sex.

Alex Lovit: We’ve talked about the implications for this case for trans people in Tennessee and other states for trans adults. Could the Skrmetti decision have implications for other protected groups beyond trans people?

Chase Strangio: Of course Skrmetti can have implications for everyone, and I think people should understand that it already does. The state of Tennessee’s prohibition is on individuals receiving medical care that is inconsistent with their sex. Because of the government’s asserted interest in people appreciating their sex, they are articulating an interest—a government interest, in essence—in gender conformity, in people living and acting in accordance with the government’s preference for how men and women, boys and girls, live their lives.

So that is a framework that is going to affect all of us, and we’re seeing, in state legislative sessions in 2025, efforts to regulate just gendered behavior more broadly: Arkansas has a bill about gender nonconforming haircuts; Texas has a bill that is attempting to limit the ways in which individuals can express their gender completely independently of medical care.

And so this is a larger conversation about whether or not the government is going to control the contours of our gendered expression. And so the outcome of Skrmetti, both in terms of the legal outcome but also in terms of the cultural consequences, will affect all of us.

At the end of the day, when we think about what’s happening in this moment, transgendered people represent less than 1 percent of the population; and we are facing outsized scrutiny, outsized criticism, and the outsized suggestion that we somehow wield significant political power.

I think anyone should be concerned when you have government actors arguing that a community of people who are under perpetual discrimination and assault both by nongovernmental actors and governmental actors are somehow running some broad conspiracy about either our medical institutions or other institutions.

And so at the end of the day, if we give in to this argument that trans people are uniquely powerful while every single protection that we might enjoy alongside others is systematically eroded, I think we have a serious problem on our hands.

Alex Lovit: Earlier you said that Tennessee was asserting the government’s interest in having people “appreciate their sex.” You’re actually quoting the law there. That’s directly in the law. What’s your understanding of what Tennessee means when they say that, and why are they saying it?

Chase Strangio: I think it’s really clear what they mean based on the legislative debate around this law. I was in Tennessee—I was in Nashville at the end of January, 2023, during the legislative hearings, and it was very clear that the goal here was to say that your sex is assigned at birth. You should appreciate that and not, in any way, depart from what we believe is acceptable for that.

And so I think what it means is: If you’re assigned “female” at birth, you should be and appreciate womanhood in the way that we tell you. If you’re assigned “male” at birth, you should be a man and appreciate manhood in the way we tell you.

When the government starts coming in and telling people how to be and feel about manhood and womanhood, I think we should be very concerned about that. That is in the plain language of this law. And then the law’s prohibition itself says you can get this care for any reason—unless that reason is inconsistent with your sex. And then Tennessee has argued, before the Supreme Court and the lower courts, that this law has nothing to do with sex.

It’s a hard argument to swallow, and if the Court accepts it, I think we have to really ask ourselves: Are they following the doctrine, or are they following an ideology?

Alex Lovit: So this isn’t the first time that trans rights have come before the Supreme Court. There’s a previous case in Bostock, when the Court maybe surprised us by finding some protections for trans rights. Can you talk briefly about what Bostock said?

Chase Strangio: Yeah. So Bostock was a case—it was actually three cases—in which two individual gay men were fired because they were gay, and one trans woman was fired because she was trans. And the question in those cases was whether or not Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination in employment included a prohibition on discrimination based on the fact that someone was gay or transgender.

The argument that we advanced up to the Supreme Court was that it is necessarily sex discrimination to fire someone for being gay or being trans. The argument went that Aimee Stephens, who’s the woman who was fired for being a transgender woman, she could identify as a woman and come to work as a woman if she was assigned “female” at birth, but she could not because she was assigned “male” at birth. That is simple sex discrimination.

And as to the gay men, who were the other individual litigants in the case: Both of those gay men could not form romantic partnerships with men, but had they been assigned “female” at birth, they could. So in essence, all three of those plaintiffs were treated differently because of their sex, and so it was a form of sex discrimination protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

And the Court, in a 6-3 decision, held that yes, it is a form of sex discrimination to fire someone because they are gay or transgender, just looking at the plain language of the statute. Justice Gorsuch wrote the opinion, a known textualist, that this is a law that broadly prohibits discrimination because of sex.

Firing Aimee Stephens because she came to work and identifies as a woman, that is because of her sex assigned at birth of “male.” You fired Don Zarda because he formed an emotional—an intimate connection with a man, but you wouldn’t have fired him if he had been assigned “female” at birth. That’s sex discrimination. It’s a very straightforward, mechanical argument that the Court was unambiguous about in a 6-3 decision in June of 2020.

Alex Lovit: We’ve been talking about your work as a lawyer. I’m going to quote an editorial that you wrote for the New York Times last year. You said, “In some sense, I’m speaking not only to the nine Justices who will decide this case but also to a country confused, skeptical, and unnecessarily fearful of trans healthcare.” So you’re saying there you’re not just a lawyer speaking to the courts; you’re also an advocate speaking to the broader public. Can you talk about that part of your work?

Chase Strangio: Yeah. At the end of the day, [I think] as a trans person and as an advocate for trans healthcare and trans people, I think so much of this is about the conversations that we have with each other. And when it comes to the way in which the country has engaged in the conversations about healthcare for trans people over the last five years, I think there is so much confusion and misinformation.

The work ahead is helping people understand what this healthcare is, helping people ground themselves in what it means for the young person in Arkansas who has struggled for years of their life only to find an unbelievable amount of relief and hope from this medical care, only to have it taken away.

I think we really need to sit with the people who are most affected by these laws, most harmed by the conversations that we’re having, and ask ourselves, “Why? Why are we not trusting these parents? Why are we not trusting these doctors? Why are we not trusting these young people?”

I think it has more to do with our own fears as a country, as a culture with gender nonconformity, with things we don’t understand, than it does with any sort of certainty we have about this medical care because these are very thoughtful, deliberative decisions made by parents, doctors, and adolescents. The government is coming in and imposing a categorical one-size-fits-all rule that is causing absolutely catastrophic harms.

Alex Lovit: Do you ever feel any tension between these parts of your work—you know, the argument that’s most likely to succeed in the legal context might not be the most compelling argument, or vice versa, to convince the public?

Chase Strangio: In the context of healthcare, I don’t feel a tension. I think, at the end of the day, what’s clear here is that the government has acted in a way that is so drastically different from the ways in which medical care is usually handled; and that helping people understand that this is real medical care that has substantial benefits for people is hugely important; and then explaining that all of the arguments raised in criticism of this care are true of all of medicine. And I think that’s also really important.

We have arguments by Tennessee that people come to regret the care. Well, that’s true of all of medicine. I talk about this all the time. I had a pediatric orthopedic knee surgery. I’ve regretted it for 35 years. And you know what? I don’t believe that we should stop providing orthopedic surgery to minors.

I just think that sometimes you regret things. You think you’re making the best decision, and maybe you’re not. My parents consented to it. We thought we were making the best decision. That’s part of life, and that’s part of medicine. And in fact, if you look at the data [here], the regret rates are extraordinarily low—much lower than things like pediatric orthopedic surgeries, for example.

So that’s one piece of it. The other is people say, “Well, there’s not a lot of long-term studies showing the efficacy of this care.” As a factual matter, that’s not true. It’s also true in pediatrics we don’t have the same type of robust data that we have for adult medical interventions.

If you think of something like the provision of Ozempic to minors right now, we don’t know a lot about it, but it is being provided rampantly across the country. Maybe that’s a great thing, and maybe we’ll later learn that it’s not, but there’s not a series of laws trying to ban that care. The same states that ban this care were the states that passed laws to ensure that people could have access to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid when we knew that they were not effective treatments, but they wanted people to have the right to try.

So those same states that say you should get to try experimental ineffective treatments but you cannot have access to this medical care that has proven to be safe and effective just shows we’re being subjected to a different standard, and I think we have to engage with it with the critical lens that it deserves.

Alex Lovit: And that’s both a legal argument and a public argument?

Chase Strangio: It’s a legal argument, and it’s a public argument. Completely. It’s the same thing. It’s sort of like let’s ask ourselves these questions as the public. And also, when it comes to the legal standard, the State just hasn’t met its burden to explain not necessarily why they have concerns about regret because, sure, you can have concerns about regret and ban any treatment that has a regret rate over a certain percent, but that’s not what the law does. The law isn’t concerned about regret because there’s unlimited examples of treatment that have much higher rates of regret that are unregulated by Tennessee and other states.

Alex Lovit: So thinking about how legal movements coincide with public movements to change public opinion, I can think of some examples of cases where the Court ruled in ways that seemed to be based on changes in public opinion.

So for example, black people in Montgomery, Alabama boycotted the buses for more than a year before the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to segregate public transportation. More recently, the Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide was on the backs of a large movement by the LGBTQ+ community and a really significant shift in public opinion. How do you understand how these things work together, how legal action and public activism can reinforce each other?

Chase Strangio: Yeah. I think, at the end of the day, it’s critically important to have a movement alongside any legal work for two reasons. One is that even if you get a great decision, if there’s resistance to implementing the decision at the public or at the political level, then it’s much less limited in what it can accomplish. So that’s one reason.

And then the other is that judges, justices are people, too. They’re living in the world, and their sense of whether or not something is legally permissible or impermissible, or even whether or not something is a good idea or a bad idea, is going to be informed by the cultural context in which the case is being litigated.

And so I think it’s absolutely critical for individuals and movements to use multiple strategies at once. I think that is the only way to have an effective movement for change. I think what’s really important to keep in mind, though, is that trans people have been a part of a lot of these movements for shifting people’s understanding about norms around gender, and also a robust public education movement about trans people ourselves.

Alex Lovit: So what’s your hope for what the trans rights movement looks like over the next few years and decades?

Chase Strangio: I think my hope is a hope that’s for the trans movement, but it’s for all of us: that we continue to move forward robust ideas about what it means to have access to equal protection, that we move forward robust ideas of how we care for each other, and that we are not distracted by efforts to divide us.

I think one of the most disappointing and chilling aspects of this moment is that, when so many communities are under attack, there is a willingness to give in to the impulse to turn on each other, to be divided by a strategic force to divide us.

And so my hope for the future is that the trans rights movement continues to build with the women’s rights movement, continues to build with the reproductive rights movement and the immigrants’ rights movement[s], because these are interconnected.

And in a time when we have a federal government that is targeting some of the most vulnerable communities in this country in the service of expanding their own power, the answer is to say, “Absolutely not. We are going to unite together to defend the principles that we believe in and to defend the wellbeing of our friends and neighbors.”

Alex Lovit: So you and I and the whole country are waiting to find out what the decision is going to be in the Skrmetti case, and that’s a decision that’s ultimately going to be made by nine people. And it’s hard to see: “Okay, what influence do I have on that? How could I possibly have an impact on that?” So for people who are listening to this, what can they do to help America be a nation that protects basic rights for all people, including trans people?

Chase Strangio: Yeah. So I think everyone has a role to play, in part because of what we were talking about: the shifting in public opinion and public understanding. We all have the ability to be compassionate and learn about our co-workers, our colleagues, our kids’ school classmates, and that changes the world that we live in.

As just an example of how that interacts with Supreme Court litigation, which can feel very far away from the micro experiences we have in the day-to-day of our lives: During the Supreme Court argument in Bostock, Justice Gorsuch asked David Cole, who was representing Aimee Stephens from the ACLU, “Well, if we rule for you, won’t that create chaos in the country and in the workplace?” The idea being if we, all of a sudden, included LGBT people—and trans people in particular—wouldn’t that be a chaotic experience?

And David’s response was, “Well, no. Trans people are already everywhere. They’re here in the courtroom. They’re in your workplaces. They’re in your schools.” And so it actually would just be an affirmation of what’s already true.

But in order for Justice Gorsuch to feel that, in order for nine Justices to feel that, they have to see a country in which people are expressing that that’s already true, people are standing in solidarity with their trans friends, their trans family members, their trans co-workers. And that’s equally true of immigrants. That’s equally true of disabled people. That’s equally true of women, people of color.

We have to show that we live in a country in which the norm is inclusion, acceptance, and willingness to fight for each other. And that then has an impact on how the law is interpreted and applied.

And so that’s what I would say to the everyday person listening, is make those changes in your life because they have institutional and systemic effects that then, in turn, change what the law is and how we are experiencing it.

Alex Lovit: Well, Chase Strangio, thank you for fighting for inclusive constitutional democracy at the Supreme Court and in the public, and thank you for joining me on The Context.

Chase Strangio: Thanks so much for having me.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake, Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of Communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Darla Minnich. We’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy.

In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org, to learn more about the Foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at #TheContext at kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts, or just tell a friend about us. I’m Alex Lovit. I’m a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.

Alex Lovit: The views expressed during this program are critical to us having a productive dialogue, but they do not reflect the views or opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The Foundation’s broadcasts and related promotional activities should not be construed as an endorsement of its content. The Foundation hereby disclaims liability to any party for direct, indirect, implied, punitive, special, incidental, or other consequential damages that may arise in connection with this broadcast, which is provided as is and without warranties.

Male Voice: This podcast is part of The Democracy Group.

Jenna Spinelle: Hey, everyone. My name is Jenna Spinelle, and I host and produce a podcast called Democracy Works. It’s a collaboration between the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and WPSU, Central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. If you enjoy this podcast, I think you’ll like our show, too.

Every episode examines a different aspect of what it means to live in a democracy. Sometimes it’s “big picture” issues, like neoliberalism or demagoguery, and other times it’s more on-the-ground topics, like ranked-choice voting and how local news deserts are democracy deserts, too. Some of our previous guests include Jonathan Haidt, Andrew Sullivan, and even Wynton Marsalis. So I hope you’ll check out Democracy Works. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a Kettering Foundation contractor and may contain small errors. The authoritative record is the audio recording.