Today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case brought by transgender adolescents and their families against a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming medical care for trans youth. ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, who is also a dad, will be arguing before the court, the first out trans person to do so.
The Case
The case, United States v. Skrmetti, was brought by plaintiffs Samantha and Brian Williams of Nashville and their 15-year-old transgender daughter, two other plaintiff families filing anonymously, and Memphis-based medical doctor Susan Lacy. They argue that Tennessee’s Senate Bill 1, which prohibits health care providers from providing gender-affirming care to transgender minors, violates the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The bill bans hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries if the purpose is “Enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex; or … Treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.” Such treatments are allowed, however, “to treat a minor’s congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease, or physical injury.” In other words, the treatments are banned for treating transgender minors with gender dysphoria, but allowed for cisgender minors who need them for other reasons, and therein lies the inequity.
“It was incredibly painful watching my child struggle before we were able to get her the life-saving healthcare she needed. We have a confident, happy daughter now, who is free to be herself and she is thriving,” said plaintiff Samantha Williams in a statement. “I am so afraid of what this law will mean for her. We don’t want to leave Tennessee, but this legislation would force us to either routinely leave our state to get our daughter the medical care she desperately needs or to uproot our entire lives and leave Tennessee altogether. No family should have to make this kind of choice.”
“I don’t even want to think about having to go back to the dark place I was in before I was able to come out and access the care that my doctors have prescribed for me,” said Samantha and Brian Williams’ daughter. “I want this law to be struck down so that I can continue to receive the care I need, in conversation with my parents and my doctors, and have the freedom to live my life and do the things I enjoy.”
The Williams sued the state with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Tennessee, Lambda Legal, and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP. A federal district court granted a preliminary injunction in June 2023, preventing the ban on hormones and puberty blockers from going into effect, but allowing the ban on surgeries. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals then stayed the injunction, putting the bill into effect, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed in June 2024 to hear it.
The Lawyer
Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, “has argued the issues before the court in Skrmetti four times before federal appeals courts, more than any attorney in the country,” according to James Esseks, his co-director.
Strangio first joined the ACLU in 2013 as a staff attorney. He served as counsel in the landmark 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case that established marriage equality nationwide; in the ACLU and Lambda Legal’s challenge to North Carolina’s HB 2, an anti-trans “bathroom bill”; the ACLU’s challenge to former President Donald Trump’s ban on trans people in the military; and the landmark 2020 Supreme Court ruling protecting LGBTQ workers from discrimination in employment (Bostock v. Clayton County).
Before coming to the ACLU, Strangio was an Equal Justice Works fellow and the director of Prisoner Justice Initiatives at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. In 2012, he co-founded the Lorena Borjas Community Fund, which provides direct bail/bond assistance to LGBTQ immigrants in criminal and immigration cases. He is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law and Grinnell College.
Strangio will be bringing both his professional expertise and lived experience to today’s arguments, as he explained yesterday in a moving piece for the New York Times. “My presence at the Supreme Court as a transgender lawyer will have been possible because I have had access to the very medical treatment at the center of the case,” he wrote. “Though some doubt the lifesaving properties of this care, I know them personally. And so do my clients.”
Additionally, he’s a dad—a role that also seems to drive his work. He told the Advocate last month, “I think the thing I connect to most in this case is the idea that as a parent, you could lose the ability to protect your child.”
Later, in 2017, he wrote a piece for Medium asking, “When You’re Passing Your Anti-Trans Laws, What Will You Say to My Kid Who Loves Her Trans Dad?” and elaborated:
Do they truly believe that my child should not feel loved and protected by me because I am trans? It is unbearable to me that the world would try to hurt my child because she has a transgender parent. How cruel. And what about the parents who have held their trans kids in those similar moments? What do we say to them and their abiding love for their children? The message they are receiving in this hostile anti-trans climate is that their children do not deserve protection, safety, and care. Those same children that we welcome into the world with promise and hope somehow become rejected and disposable.
And right after the 2016 election that saw Donald Trump elected for the first time, he wrote in another Medium piece, “So while everything seems impossible, I can’t help but to walk into my sleeping four year-old’s room and look at her taking calm, unknowing breaths and realize that she is going to wake up to a world that scares her and it is my job to fight to make that world better. Not just for my kid but for the young people I work with, and fight with, and believe in.”
He’s still fighting, and for that, we should be grateful.
