ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, a trans man, will become the first trans attorney to argue a case before the Supreme Court this week as he takes the legal stage for oral arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti.
The case was filed by the ACLU on behalf of three trans youths in Tennessee, challenging a state law that bans all gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19. The suit argues that the Tennessee law discriminates on the basis of sex because it bans the use of puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and gender-affirming surgery only in cases of gender dysphoria. The state continues to allow surgeries for infants born with genetalia that falls outside the male-female binary, and it allows the use of puberty blockers for children experiencing precocious or early puberty.
"The future of countless transgender youth in this and future generations rests on this Court adhering to the facts, the Constitution and its own modern precedent," said Strangio earlier this year, when the Supreme Court announced its decision to take the case.
Oral arguments will happen Wednesday, December 4. As Strangio tells the Associated Press, "“I am able to do my job because I have had this health care that transformed and, frankly, saved my life. I am a testament to the fact that we live among everyone."
Strangio previously served on the legal team that successfully argued a case about LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace before the court in 2019, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That case ended in a 6-3 ruling in June 2020, with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing for the majority that "An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex," arguing that "Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids."
Title VII will again be at the center of the Skrmetti case, and it's call but guaranteed that the three dissenters in the previous case, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh, will again take issue with extending Title VII to include gender identity and sexual orientation.
The Skrmetti in the case name is Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, however arguing before the court on behalf of the state will be Tennessee Solicitor General Matt Rice. As the AP notes, Rice, a graduate of UC Berkeley, was a clerk for Justice Thomas in 2019 when the Harris Funeral Homes case was before the court.
While the Biden administration has expressed their support for the plaintiffs in the case, and oral arguments will be over and done before Donald Trump retakes the presidency, the Trump administration is expected to do everything in its power to roll back trans rights and gender-affirming care for trans youth, where they can.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar was among those who filed briefs urging the court to take up the case, writing that Tennessee's law "is part of a wave of similar bans preventing transgender adolescents from obtaining medical care that they, their parents, and their doctors have all concluded is necessary."
The high court has in recent years passed on weighing in about various states' so-called "bathroom bans" focused on trans people.
And while the Supreme Court won't decide the question of whether surgeries can be included in the law, the case may serve to settle, for any number of years, the issue of whether gender identity and discriminatory laws around it should be covered under the Constitution's equal-protection clause.
A plaintiff in the case, a 15-year-old trans girl referred to in the suit only as LW, tells NBC News, "It scares me to think about losing the medication that I need, and if this law continues, my family may have to leave Tennessee — the place I have lived and loved my entire life."
One teenager whose life could be impacted the case because her state has a similar law, 17-year-old Harleigh Walker, told NBC News that she currently has to drive out of her home state of Alabama, 200 miles at a time, in order to legally have telehealth appointments with a doctor in another state to receive gender-affirming care.
"It’s horrifying that there’s a possibility that this could affect health care access for transgender adults,” Walker said, speaking to NBC. “It’s scary to think that I won’t be safe for the rest of my life in this country, and I hope that that’s not the case.”
Top image: Chase Strangio speaks onstage at the TIME100 Summit 2022 at Jazz at Lincoln Center on June 7, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME)
