Helping people feel safe and find joy are Chase Strangio's primary goals
Chase Strangio recently became the first known transgender attorney to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. (Photo by Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press)
Chase Strangio, co-director of the LGBT & HIV Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, stresses the importance of remaining hopeful, even if the legal landscape for transgender rights seems bleaker right now than it has in recent times.
“I’m very committed to moving us out of a space of chaos, catastrophe and fear, and moving us to a place of possibility and grounded connection,” says Strangio, who in December became the first known transgender lawyer to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Along with co-counsel, he represents three transgender teens, their parents and a Tennessee doctor challenging the state’s law banning transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming medical care.
The high court has yet to rule in U.S. v. Skrmetti. Legal scholars and advocates say the ruling, depending on how broad it is, could potentially affect other laws relating to transgender rights in the United States. There are currently court challenges to other state laws regarding transgender access to bathrooms, sports participation and health care for adults. In addition, President Donald Trump has signed executive orders prohibiting recognition of transgender individuals, restricting gender-affirming medical care for minors, ending funding for transition surgeries for federal prisoners and reinstating a ban on openly transgender individuals serving in the military.
Strangio, 42, doesn’t want to “feed into chaos.”
“We are putting up a fight,” he says. “We are becoming proficient in organizing. We are reorienting what litigation means and what it can do. We are building community and trying to help people feel safe and find joy.”
Just before oral arguments at the Supreme Court, he wrote a guest essay for the New York Times, in which he described the importance of the case and of providing medical care to transgender patients.
“My presence at the Supreme Court as a transgender lawyer will have been made possible because I had access to the very medical treatment at the center of the case,” Strangio wrote. “Though some doubt the lifesaving properties of this care, I know them personally. And so do my clients.”
Strangio grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, a tony suburb of Boston. While he was in high school, his parents divorced, which he describes as “destabilizing.”
Meanwhile, Strangio was focused on excelling at school.
“My parents were a lot less academically driven than I was,” he says. “I had my own sense of motivation throughout my life, in part because I was struggling with my identity as a queer person and as trans person, and I didn’t know it at the time. I was using academics as my path out, thinking, ‘If I can thrive academically at school, then I will be OK no matter what.’”
Following his high school graduation, Strangio attended Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, but dropped out within a few weeks.
“I was lost, and I made a good decision to spend time figuring out who I was,” he says. “There was never any question that I would go back to college.”
After spending a year working at two different ice cream shops, Strangio enrolled at Grinnell College in Iowa. The school, he says, had a reputation for a welcoming environment for LGBTQ+ students. He graduated in 2004 with a degree in history.
Strangio worked as a paralegal at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders before attending Northeastern University School of Law, graduating in 2010. During law school, he came out as transgender.
After graduating from law school, he was an Equal Justice Works fellow and the director of Prisoner Justice Initiatives at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, where he represented transgender and gender nonconforming prisoners. In 2012, Strangio co-founded the Lorena Borjas Community Fund, which provides direct bail and bond assistance to LGBTQ immigrants in criminal and immigration cases.
Since joining the ACLU in 2013, Strangio has worked on high-profile litigation involving LGBTQ+ rights. He was part of the legal team working on Obergefell v. Hodges, which resulted in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2015 that state bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional under the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. He also fought North Carolina’s anti-transgender bathroom law, resulting in a 2019 court-approved settlement that transgender individuals in North Carolina could use any public restroom in state-run buildings that conformed with their gender identity. But laws restricting bathroom access for transgender individuals have popped up in other states since then.
Strangio represented transgender student Gavin Grimm, who battled a Virginia school board for the right to use the bathroom corresponding with his gender identity. Grimm sued the school board for discriminating against him in violation of the equal protection clause and Title IX of the U.S. Education Amendments of 1972, and ultimately won his case after years of litigation.
Strangio also represented Chelsea Manning, a transgender former U.S. soldier who was imprisoned for leaking classified documents. In addition, he was one of the lawyers representing Aimee Stephens, who was fired in 2013 from her job at a funeral home after coming out as transgender. That case, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, landed at the Supreme Court, In June 2020, the court ruled 6-3 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts barring discrimination based on sex protects gay, lesbian and transgender workers.
Stephens passed away in May 2020 due to complications from kidney failure. “That was an incredible experience, winning that case,” Strangio says. “It was a shock and, unfortunately, our client died a month before this moment of joy and celebration.”
In 2020, Strangio was honored by the American Bar Association Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity with its eighth annual Stonewall Award for championing LGBTQ+ causes.
He recognizes that his recent Supreme Court argument was not only on a crucial topic for the LGBTQ+ and particularly the transgender community, but it also was historic in terms of representation.
“It is in the service of excellence that we expand the Supreme Court bar, and the people who are in court as litigators,” Strangio says. “For younger trans lawyers, I know how important it is to see versions of yourself reflected in different spaces.”
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