The Lawyer Behind the Biggest LGBTQ+ Legal Victory in History

Last week marked one of the most important legal moments in LGBTQ+ history, surpassing even that of marriage equality: A conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled that LGBTQ+ people are protected in the workplace and public spaces by federal anti-discrimination laws. The court’s ruling was on two separate cases—one concerning sexual orientation brought by two gay men, and one brought by a transgender woman named Aimee Stephens. Stephens passed away in May, but became a hero for bringing a case to the Supreme Court that would eventually enshrine civil rights protections for transgender people throughout all 50 states.

One of her lawyers was the ACLU’s deputy director for trans justice, Chase Strangio, a trans man who called this case his “baby.” Strangio has long been at the forefront of fighting for legal justice for trans people, and now he has one of the most significant moments in the LGBTQ+ movement under his belt. GQ caught up with Strangio just days after the decision was handed down to talk about the victory, what’s coming next, and why Pride forever needs to change.

GQ: I want to formally say congratulations on winning this case. I'm wondering if you can take me back, because you were live-tweeting the SCOTUS decision and you appeared to be confused as the ruling came down. What was going through your mind?

CS: The fact that all of that is immortalized is perfect because it's also just my completely frenetic, chaotic personality. As some context, this case was argued in October. We knew it was a big case, and often the Supreme Court holds big cases until June. At the same time, it was a packed term and it was, from my perspective, a straightforward case, so we started checking on the Supreme Court on opinion days back in January [when rulings on a term’s hearings begin to be handed down]. That means we've been going through the process of being anxious and sitting there, refreshing, to see if any opinions came down for the last six months. This case was my baby—something I have been working on and devoting every ounce of my being to.

Unlike in typical years, the justices aren't at the court [due to COVID-19], so we have this new process where they are uploading opinions at 10:00 AM in 10 minute intervals. So we're sitting there, getting anxious, and all of a sudden someone yells, "It's Bostock!” My heart is racing because all we know is that it's our decision. We don't know who's written the opinion because it hasn't shown up. And then, the first thing we know is that Gorsuch writes it, which, that's hopeful for us because we wanted Gorsuch. But the opinion won't load. Nobody can load it.

Finally, I'm the first one to actually start to download the opinion itself, but it will only download one page at a time. And right on the first page, you can see that we've won, and that we've won 6 to 3. The best possible outcome we thought is that we would win 5 to 4, with Gorsuch siding with the liberals. To win 6 to 3 with the Chief already felt epic.

So finally, we're all trying to save the document and the website is crashing. There's all this speculation that the reason is because Justice Alito has this 100-page raging dissent with pictures of dictionary definitions over the last 60 years. Everyone was like, "It's a win, it's a win, but what does it say?"

Finally, we see that it's just the most beautiful win we could possibly get out of this court. It's everything that we wanted. It's a per se rule, it protects everyone, it has really good language that we can use in other contexts, and it's just completely unequivocal in ways that will help across federal law.

So even though there were those five minutes of sort of uncertainty, all of this fear and uncertainty that we were going to lose had now changed into this unbelievable sense of joy that we had won in the best possible way, that the arguments that we made completely resonated with Gorsuch, which is who we were targeting. And he basically adopted our briefs in full to create this opinion that I think will serve not just the LGBTQ community, but serve the expansion of justice in civil rights litigation generally in really incredible ways. And so that's sort of how many emotions progressed in the span of 15 minutes or 20 minutes.

GQ: I have to say I was so shocked mostly because I was out there in October at the Supreme Court for the demonstrations. I remember you saying, "We're very nervous." So this win felt monumental in a way that was surprising.

CS: The reality is that the Supreme Court has, for the past several decades, shifted to the right. Overall, this is an incredibly conservative court. It has been for a very long time. They’ve done so many horrible things in the last decade, from gutting the Voting Rights Act, to upholding Trump's Muslim ban, to continuing to drag out questions about affirmative action, to allowing certain types of police brutality to go completely unchecked within the legal system. And yes, there have been positive LGBTQ decisions over the years, but those are the decisions that made, in some ways, relatively conservative demands, with marriage equality being the most recent one. And that was a different court.

This decision was post-Gorsuch, post-Kavanaugh, and it truly felt terrifying. There was so much at stake because the threshold question that was being presented was: do federal prohibitions on sex discrimination include LGBTQ people? This was going to have a ripple effect on every aspect of federal law and the ways in which the Trump administration has been utilizing the power of the executive to attack LGBTQ people. The outcome here was going to determine the validity of their attacks on healthcare, on their attacks on education, on their attacks in employment, of their attacks in shelter. So much was at stake. It just felt so hard to imagine that we could pull out a win knowing how much anti-trans rhetoric was out there and how much fear-mongering the other side was doing. I certainly didn't think we would win.

And then I have to say, I couldn't really feel joy because the DACA case was outstanding and I thought, well certainly we can't win both of them. So to have DACA come out the right way three days later felt also like this incredible validation of the power of movement work, of organizing work as the engine behind legal work. This particular decision came the day after 15,000 plus people in Brooklyn rallied for Black trans lives. It all feels so connected.

GQ: So in other words, you're saying that movement work inspires the legal work that enacts legislative change?

CS: The movement work is the thing that enables any of the legal and policy change to be successful. At the end of the day, context changes the ways in which justices read the law. The fact that people were galvanizing in the streets, that people were demanding to be seen in these big public ways—not just on television but in these mass mobilizations—that influences what courts do. They start to see the fact that LGBTQ people are already here, that trans people already exist. You can't write us out of existence by gerrymandering some sort of convoluted interpretation of the law.

At the argument, Justice Gorsuch asked something along the lines of, "If we protect trans people, won't that cause massive social upheaval?" He had this concern that the country did not understand trans-ness and that it would be so extreme to include us in public life. And yet, eight months later, he writes an opinion that has such a facility with the idea that trans people exist and there is no question that we are covered under this law. On some level, I have to believe that in eight months, he learned something from watching what was going on in the world, and that is a testament not to our briefs and not to the legal movement, but to the organizing movement.

GQ: I feel like now is an appropriate time to honor your plaintiff, Aimee Stephens, and the immense sacrifices that she had to make in order for this decision to be reached, which essentially endorses equality for trans people. This was a decision unfortunately made after she passed away. What do you want people to know about Aimee Stephens?

CS: It breaks my heart that she didn't live to see this. Aimee was such a kind, tender soul. She was a funeral director. Her calling was to comfort people in times of immense grief, and to do so in a way that didn't center herself. I think she had this ability to, through her understated compassion, help people on a journey through something difficult. After she was fired and decided to fight this case for herself, it truly became a fight for the whole community. I think she started to see her mission to bring that compassion and that understated energetic commitment to justice to other people's fights.

On the day of the argument when we came out of the court, Aimee had to listen to horrible things said about her from the United States government, from Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers who were talking about her with such disrespect. And yet she came out of the courtroom that day to the chants of hundreds of people chanting, "We love you, Aimee." She never lost hope that we could win this case. Even if I did, she didn't.

This is the ultimate recognition of the optimism she brought to this fight. She was told there was no way she could win, but she spent the last seven years of her life fighting this case. She had this sense of enduring compassion for others, and perhaps even an enduring compassion for the justices. She felt that they were going to see her humanity in ways that I didn't predict. The outcome is probably one of the most transformative moments in LGBTQ legal history. I'm sad she didn't live to see it, although I have to trust that she's looking down on us and smiling and knowing that the next generations of LGBTQ people are going to have different opportunities for both legal protections and material survival.

GQ: Obviously this decision is a victory for LGBTQ people, but there's been some talk about whether or not the religious right will up its game. What do you feel is coming next that we should be paying attention to in this moment?

CS: Our opponents are not giving up. There are two essential things that we're going to see both from the Trump administration and from organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom and Heritage Foundation.

The first bucket of things are the attempts to chip away at nondiscrimination protections through religious exemptions. We know this has been their strategy for an incredibly long time. There's already a case at the Supreme Court that is going to be heard next term called Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. This is a case about a Catholic foster agency that was contracting with the city of Philadelphia. The city of Philadelphia has a nondiscrimination policy, and pursuant to that nondiscrimination policy, agencies cannot discriminate against LGBTQ individuals or people of different faiths. The question now before the court is: Does a law of general applicability infringe upon the constitutional religious protections for certain entities? What we're going to see are efforts to argue that nondiscrimination protections can't be enforced against certain religious institutions, or against individuals with certain religious beliefs. This is a court with a majority of justices that are very concerned with expansive religious exemptions, so that's one area where I think we have to stay incredibly vigilant.

The other is the attempt to further attack trans people particularly within the context of single-sex spaces and activities. There are definitely going to be arguments that this ruling does not extend to restrooms or locker rooms or athletics, and those questions are going to be tested in the lower courts very quickly. We already have cases pending about whether or not it violates the Constitution and Title IX to exclude trans students from restrooms. Gavin Grimm's case is still pending in a federal appellate court, and there's another similar case that Lambda Legal has pending in a federal appellate court.

As we saw in the 2020 legislative session, the right is really fixating on the context of athletics as a place to attack trans bodies. And it's not really about sports. ADF does not care about women's sports, they do not care about women, but they are using the context of sports to try to play into people's fears about trans bodies to undermine expansive protections for the trans community. Not only are state governments arguing that trans people should be fully barred from athletics consistent with their gender identity, but the United States government has weighed in to say the same. They're arguing that this Supreme Court decision does not apply, and that states should be free to bar trans people from sports using an incredibly retrograde definition of sex that's based on chromosomes and reproductive anatomy. In the 2020 legislative session alone, states introduced 20 bills attempting to restrict athletics for trans people, and then another 15 bills attempting to criminalize healthcare for trans youth. Those are both really geared at trying to stop people from being trans. And that, I think, is where we're going to start to see this next set of contentious issues over trans existence play out both in legislatures and in courts.

GQ: There's also another thing that you've spoken a lot about, which is just the importance of who our executive branch is in terms of protecting or preserving the court's integrity for the years to come. Trump has had a very aggressive judicial strategy of really stacking the benches with hyper conservative justices and judges. So let’s talk about November!

CS: Let's say this: If Trump wins in November, I am terrified about whether we will have any meaningful path in the courts to protect trans people. This decision was incredible and it will stand. However, the strategy that is emerging and frankly escalating within the Trump administration, is to start to articulate and advocate for a constitutional right that cis people have not to be in space with trans people. And so what that means is that the future that Trump and the leaders of his executive agencies want is a future where trans people don't exist at all. And I know that that sounds incredibly extreme to people, but that is actually what they're arguing in court.

For example, take ADF's argument in Idaho, where we are challenging Idaho's restriction on excluding trans girls from girl's sports. Their argument is that our clients—the women and girls who are trans—aren't harmed by this restriction because being trans is so dangerous that they benefit from having to live in their assigned sex at birth. That is just such an insidious proposition. They're not saying federal law just doesn't protect you, they're saying you cannot be protected because the only way to protect you is to make you not trans. We know that that's unethical, we know that that's counter to science, we know that that's counter to every single major medical association. However, if we have four more years of Trump, that means that we have a federal judiciary that will be almost super, super majority Trump nominated. And that means that the very people who have spent their careers attacking trans people will be in lifetime appointments on the federal judiciary.

So what we need to do in this moment, from my perspective, is probably twenty-fold. But the main thing is to leverage the momentum of the organizing, of the incredible amounts of creative and beautiful work that have galvanized people to understand the compounding violence of white supremacy, anti-Black racism, and transphobia that people are living under. The more that we galvanize in the streets in recognition of and resistance to that, the more power we will continue to build not just for nondiscrimination protections, but to decriminalize sex work, to defund the police, to ensure people have food and housing and shelter and employment. We need to do that no matter who wins in November.

GQ: There's been a more complicated element of the coverage that has followed the SCOTUS decision, and that was that very few trans folks were actually cited or quoted in the press that surrounded the immediate decision. And this comes, Chase, despite you being one of the lawyers on this case. I just want to hold space for you, if you would like to say anything about your general frustrations with what has happened in the mainstream media following this very hard-won decision.

CS: I think that the Twitter thread detailing all of the main coverage of these cases that didn't quote a single trans person is deeply disheartening for so many reasons. First of all, there's already not enough trans people in positions of leadership because of systemic discrimination. We already are struggling to be present in space to be able to have jobs that are seen as worthy of being validated as experts in different contexts. So we already have sort of these system barriers which are that much more profound for trans women and particularly Black and brown trans women.

There's also this really complicated dynamic where, particularly for people who are very publicly trans, we're seen as trans first. Often what I experience is I will be brought on to a media program or quoted in an article as a trans person who has feelings about the impact of something on the trans community, and then they'll go to a cis lawyer to talk about the law. This is deeply troubling because I do know the law incredibly well and I am a legal expert.

But there's sort of this complex tension because I also believe that I'm not just a lawyer who's trans, I'm also a trans lawyer. What makes me a great lawyer is also, in part, my trans-ness. The nature of power wants us to subordinate what makes us who we are and code switch into the role of expert. And even then we're often not seen as such.

GQ: My last question for you is, are you going to take any time to rest or take any time off?

CS: Right now I am deep in litigation in challenging Idaho's anti-trans law HB 500. We have a series of motions pending and a hearing on July 22nd, so that is a big part of the next month of work for me and my colleagues. And then we also have a case in Connecticut defending two runners who are young Black women who have been the target of attacks over the past several years. Non trans people have brought a lawsuit there to try to strike down Connecticut's inclusive policy, and we have ongoing litigation to intervene on behalf of the two trans runners who have been the subject of so much attack. Then, there's also a lot of work to do in the coming weeks to ensure that in the immediate aftermath of the Bostock decision, that we hold the Trump administration accountable and hopefully block any attempt to try to enforce the anti-trans healthcare regulations. We just have to stay vigilant to make sure that they comply with the law, which is not, as we know, their specialty.

GQ: What a way to honor Pride Month.

CS: To me, the most beautiful Pride month event of my life was the gathering for Black trans lives in Brooklyn that Raquel Willis, Fran Tirado, Eliel Cruz, and others were involved in organizing. If I never see a corporate Pride parade ever again, that will be absolutely fine by me. This is our moment to go back to Sylvia [Rivera] being booed off the stage in the 1970s and to think about Marsha [P. Johnson] dying and being killed and then found in the river. To look deep within ourselves and say, as queer people, what role did we play in facilitating those horrors then, even if we weren't alive and how are we carrying those horrors forward? How can we build a legacy that centers a notion of Pride that is about collective survival and resistance to state and interpersonal violence? To me, that's celebrating each other, creating art with each other. That's also about showing up for each other, about giving each other money, giving each other love. We are going to hold grief and rage with hope and joy. That is how we honor Pride—by never reducing anything to a simplistic, binary narrative.

Originally Appeared on GQ