On Wednesday, ACLU Attorney Chase Strangio will become the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court as he tries to convince the court to strike down a Tennessee law protecting minors from being subjected to harmful, life-altering, and potentially irreversible transgender medical treatments.
Strangio, a biological female who began identifying as a male while in law school, will join Biden Administration lawyers in making oral arguments in a case (United States v. Skrmetti) transgender activists fear may ultimately end up affecting Affordable Care Act provisions supporting adults wanting to deny their biological genders. While Strangio has previously worked as part of a legal team participating in a Supreme Court case, he did not present oral arguments.
Strangio is also the father of a 12-year-old son, Fox Chattanooga reports:
“Now 42, he’s an American Civil Liberties Union attorney whose legal career has included representing former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, challenging a ban on transgender people serving in the military and helping win an LGBTQ+ worker-discrimination case at the Supreme Court. He’s also the father of a 12-year-old, the son of a father who supports Trump, and has a close relationship with his Army-veteran brother.”
On March 31, 2022, Assistant Attorney General Clarke issued a letter to all state attorneys general reminding them of federal constitutional and statutory provisions that protect transgender youth against discrimination.
On April 26, 2023 the Biden Administration’s Justice Department filed a complaint challenging Tennessee Senate Bill 1 (SB 1), claiming that the law, set to take effect July 1, 2023, denies “medically necessary care to transgender minors [and] violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.”
The Tennessee law prohibits minors from obtaining, and doctors from providing, medical gender transition treatments (puberty blockers, hormone therapy, surgery, etc.), even if the minor has parental consent. However, it does allow minors to receive some of the same treatments for purposes other than gender transitions, in certain cases where they are medically-necessary.
According to SB 1, the ban is needed to protect minors from both the known and unknown harmful effects of transgender treatments:
“The legislature determines that medical procedures that alter a minor's hormonal balance, remove a minor's sex organs, or otherwise change a minor's physical appearance are harmful to a minor when these medical procedures are performed for the purpose of 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.
“These procedures can lead to the minor becoming irreversibly sterile, having increased risk of disease and illness, or suffering from adverse and sometimes fatal psychological consequences.
“Moreover, the legislature finds it likely that not all harmful effects associated with these types of medical procedures when performed on a minor are yet fully known, as many of these procedures, when performed on a minor for such purposes, are experimental in nature and not supported by high-quality, long-term medical studies.”
“The people of Tennessee, through their elected representatives, took measured action with Senate Bill 1 to protect kids from irreversible, unproven medical procedures,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in a statement responding to the Justice Department’s complaint. “Lawmakers recognized that there is little to no credible evidence to justify the serious risks these procedures present to youth and joined a growing number of European countries in restricting their use on minors with gender-identity issues.”
“Since America’s founding, States have governed the practice of medicine within their borders,” Skrmetti noted, adding that the Justice Department is relying on a “manufactured consensus” about the safety of, and need for, transgender medical treatments:
“The federal government, in its arguments to the Supreme Court, puts its faith in a false and manufactured consensus that ignores the many doctors, States, and countries who have looked at the evidence and determined these treatments are too risky for kids.”
While Strangio and the Justice Department contend that SB 1 discriminates on the basis of sex and transgender status, Skrmetti’s statement explains that the law merely “draws a line between minors seeking drugs for gender transition and minors seeking drugs for other medical purposes” and that “boys and girls fall on both sides of that line.”