The Tennessee Law Tells Us: They Want to Stop People From Being Trans
Chase Strangio talks with Zach Stafford about the Supreme Court case ‘U.S. v. Skrmetti’
Zach Stafford talks to ACLU attorney Chase Strangio about U.S. v. Skrmetti in this Vibe Check podcast episode released Dec 2, 2024.
If you’d like to read up before you go into the 35-minute episode, here’s my unpaywalled 3-minute summary of it.
Strangio recounts how attacks on trans people escalated in 2020 when people began to legislatively attack healthcare for trans adolescents. Strangio and his colleagues believed that this line of attack was too extreme and would never succeed.
Yet in 2021, Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming care for minors, despite Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s attempted veto. Hutchinson, a Republican, had considered banning gender-affirming care too extreme and anti-family despite taking a number of other anti-trans actions.
In 2023, there was a “floodgate…It was very clear that these [state laws] were going to be unstoppable. It was the Number One priority of these Republican-led legislatures across the country.” By the end of 2023, 23 states had banned healthcare for trans youth. (9:50–11:20)
Strangio says:
“Of course, it’s the same officials who in every other circumstance are espousing rhetoric about “parental rights,” saying, you know, a parent has the ability to decide what their kids learn in school, whether their kids wear a mask, whether their kids get vaccinated. But all of a sudden when it’s a parent supporting their trans kid, the Tennessee government thinks that it can displace that decision-making, and that is plainly what’s happening here.” (16:00–16:30)
The anti-trans movement is driven by a heteronormative, “regressive understanding of gender” and gender roles. Republicans feel a “desire to control” trans people, who “represent a form of transgression from that.” (17:00–17:30)
Strangio says:
The [Tennessee] legislature told us what they were trying to do, because in the findings of the bill [SB1], they say that Tennessee has a compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex and banning any medical care that could cause them to be disdainful of their sex. That is what Tennessee’s announced interest is. And they’re not saying, really, that “we’re doing this to protect children.” Of course that’s how they’re defending it in court, but…what they’re telling us is that their interest is in stopping gender transition, in stopping people from being trans. It is all over the text of the law itself. And when we think about how the rhetoric has escalated — you know, if you think about something that we heard a lot in 2018, 2019, and the early part of 2020, it was: “Oh, we’re just concerned about women in sports”…That was an entry point to delegitimize the trans body, full stop. (19:00–20:00)
(We knew it was never about sports!)
Strangio says: “This is a cultural and public discourse fight as much as it is anything else. And so I do think, especially now, people need to intervene in the false narratives around transness that we’re hearing all over the place.” (29:35–29:45)
Right now, that’s relevant to
the postmortems around the election.The idea that trans people could have cost anyone this election— It is literally absurd.
Especially because it wasn’t like the Democrats were running campaigns that focused [on] or defended trans people at all. It was just that the Republicans placed a significant emphasis on demonizing trans people. (29:45–30:05)
(Nope, I’m not in the mood to read that kind of election postmortem either, as I wrote on November 19.)
Strangio says we can’t “morally or politically turn our backs on a community just because they are demonized by others. And I think we all have a role to play in counteracting that.” (30:15–30:25)
