https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/08/22/18879174.php
The strong man promises order and toughness: under Donald Trump, the disenfranchisement of LGBT people follows an authoritarian calculus. New York lawyer and LGBT activist Chase Strangio on the spaces that remain for resistance – and telltale reflexes in liberal America.
[This interview posted on 7/17/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.woz.ch/2529/chase-strangio/nichts-davon-ist-wirklich-neu/!41MR97X18PCM.]“People believe that twenty percent of the US population is trans. That’s playing on people’s fears,” says Chase Strangio.
WOZ: Chase Strangio, you once said that as a lawyer you engage in a kind of “damage control” because you believe that true justice cannot be achieved through legal means. What do you mean by that?
Chase Strangio: I didn’t become a lawyer because I believe in the existing law, but because I see myself as part of movements for social change. Let’s look at the US legal system: a system that was designed at its core to maintain the slave economy and secure wealth for white landowners. I don’t believe that real freedom is possible within this system. I see my role primarily as creating as much distance as possible between state power and communities so that people have space to organize resistance and create a world they want to live in.
WOZ: I interpret that as a call not to passively hope that the justice system will fix everything.
Chase Strangio (42) works as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where he heads the LGBT & HIV Project. He is one of the most prominent LGBT activists in the US. During his legal career, Strangio has represented whistleblower Chelsea Manning, among others. In December 2024, he became the first transgender person in the country’s history to argue a case before the Supreme Court. He lives with his child in New York City.
WOZ: Let’s look at the current situation. Would you say that the US is still a constitutional state under Donald Trump?
Chase Strangio: On the one hand, this administration is clearly not interested in following rules. It flouts a wide range of norms with the ideological goal of consolidating the power of billionaires. At the same time, Trump follows many existing rules. For example, we have laws that grant enormous powers to officials at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. So when we advocate for the rule of law, we should be aware of what that means. The rule of law has many violent and discriminatory elements.
WOZ: Trump breaks the law and exploits it at the same time. What is his overarching goal?
Chase Strangio: I don’t see him as some kind of king who wants to abolish the other branches of government. It’s almost more insidious: a kind of theater of democracy. We are seeing our institutions being hollowed out. Trump can wield a lot of power simply by making threats. He threatens the media with prosecution – and they capitulate. He withdraws funding from universities – and they follow his political agenda. We are moving in the direction of Orbán and Putin, where the systems of checks and balances have not been abolished, but increasingly serve the interests of the heads of state.
WOZ: Since taking office, Trump has issued a large number of executive orders. Organizations such as yours, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), are trying to counter this with injunctions in district courts. How successful have you been?
Chase Strangio: It works to a certain extent. If you just look at the ACLU’s cases against the Trump administration, we have obtained preliminary injunctions from district courts in 75 percent of them. However, these are not always implemented immediately, especially when you are dealing with a recalcitrant government. Overall, though, the preliminary injunctions have a positive effect, if only as motivation for the opposition.
WOZ: At the end of June, the Supreme Court ruled in the Trump v. CASA case, which concerned the abolition of automatic citizenship by birth, that district courts cannot stop such presidential decrees by means of a nationwide injunction. What does this ruling mean for the resistance?
Chase Strangio: The right to citizenship by birth is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In this respect, Trump’s order is completely unconstitutional. The government knows this, of course, and is trying every trick in the book. It claims that the decisions of district courts should only apply to the people who filed the lawsuits, and not to everyone nationwide. The fact that the Supreme Court has now ruled in favor of the government is an attack on all lower courts and their ability to check the power of the president.
WOZ: So we are caught in a system where district courts have very limited power to intervene and the Supreme Court usually sides with Trump?
Chase Strangio: Yes, in a way that’s true. In my role as a political commentator, I emphasize how cynical, grim, and wrong it all is. When I speak as a lawyer, however, I point out that we still have options. For example, even if the Supreme Court rules that nationwide injunctions by district courts are not permissible, we as the ACLU can still file lawsuits on behalf of a member association. That means hundreds of thousands of people will get help. We can also file class action lawsuits on behalf of various individuals or groups. We try to get everything we can out of the limited circumstances.
WOZ: Not all of the Supreme Court is right-wing. Three of the nine judges were appointed under Democratic presidents. How important is it that they publish dissenting opinions in many rulings?
Chase Strangio: It’s important for the historical record. When we think about the former rulings upholding “racial segregation,” for example, we know which judges were on the right side back then. Among today’s judges, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in particular are giving voice to the pain of the situation and speaking from their experience as women of color. I think it’s immensely important that we hear their dissent.
WOZ: Let’s talk about your area of expertise, the rights of trans people. How would you describe the situation, in general terms?
Chase Strangio: We are experiencing an incredible backlash against progress for LGBT people in general, and trans people are particularly affected by this. This is expressed not only in the erosion of their legal protections, but also in the scapegoating of trans people in the discourse, with a media fixation on our bodies. What we are seeing in the US is very similar to what we are seeing in Europe, particularly in the UK. Right-wing parties and governments have really latched onto this issue. It’s about forcing men and women into their “proper” roles; it’s about controlling the population. Young men in particular are being incited online. And it’s not just LGBT people who are affected by this backlash, but immigrants, people of color, and anyone who has anything to do with equality and inclusion. The prevailing attitude is that the left has gone too far.
WOZ: Author Andrew Sullivan made precisely this argument in a recent essay for the New York Times. Sullivan, who is gay himself, believes that the gay and lesbian movement was successful because it focused on civil rights such as same-sex marriage. The LGBT movement, on the other hand, is failing because of its own radicalism, according to Sullivan, by demanding gender reassignment treatments for minors, for example. What do you think of this argument?
Chase Strangio: It’s an ahistorical narrative that suggests political success can be achieved by abandoning part of a community. The idea – whether out of ignorance or malice – is that we would preserve equality for gay people if we stopped advocating for trans people. But that’s not true, of course. The driving forces are the same ones that want to overturn Obergefell [the name of a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, editor’s note]. So they also want to undermine Andrew Sullivan’s equality. The irony is that through my work, I am fighting for Sullivan’s rights just as much as I am fighting for the rights of trans kids.
WOZ: How has the movement against trans people grown historically?
Chase Strangio: It’s a global campaign that has been going on for decades and has cost billions of dollars. Much of it follows the same patterns used to fight homosexual people, such as ensuring that they cannot hold government positions, are barred from military service, cannot become teachers, and cannot participate in sports competitions because they would then have to sit in the changing rooms.
So none of this is really new. Today, as then, it’s all about the supposed protection of women and children. The Christian right plays an important role here, deliberately demonizing LGBT people. They believe that we are a threat to society.
WOZ: How do you explain this obsession?
Chase Strangio: In a way, it’s inexplicable to me too. I find this obsession truly obscene. Cover stories over and over again. Relentless headlines. Fox News, for example, aired around 400 stories about trans athletes in four months, even though there are very few of them in the US.
WOZ: Of the 500,000 athletes in the NCAA college sports association, only ten are trans.
Chase Strangio: But because of the political and media climate, people believe that 20 percent of the US population is trans. That has nothing to do with reality. It’s playing on people’s fears in a changing world so that they end up electing a “strong man,” someone who will restore the old order. Trans people are shaking up the binary gender system. When rigid systems are destabilized, it’s always a threat to those in power.
WOZ: On the day of his inauguration, Trump declared that from now on, the government would only recognize two genders. How will this be implemented?
Chase Strangio: We saw the changes very quickly on official documents, such as newly issued ID cards. This naturally causes chaos and fear. Trump’s assertion that there are only two genders is incompatible with both biological knowledge and the laws of the past decades. There have been many regressive rules in the past, but for a long time, people did not have to indicate the gender assigned to them at birth on their ID cards. Now we are in a situation where people who would never be identified as trans are forced to carry ID that is obviously incorrect, which in turn leads to them being accused of fraud. The government is acting as if its classification model is simpler than the model of self-determination, but in reality it is simply not.
WOZ: What else has changed for trans people since Trump took office?
Chase Strangio: First of all, trans people in Republican-governed states still don’t have access to the bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity, and there is no adequate health care for those under the age of 18. The government’s goal is to enshrine these measures at the national level. What has worsened in recent months is the situation at universities. More and more institutions are bowing to the government and excluding trans athletes. Just recently, the University of Pennsylvania stripped an athlete, Lia Thomas, of her titles. A children’s hospital in Los Angeles recently closed its trans health care center. The exclusion of trans people from the military also has a huge impact. There were thousands in active service until recently.
WOZ: In December, you became the first trans person in US history to argue a case before the Supreme Court. Before we talk about the case itself, what was that experience like?
Chase Strangio: In my work, I often move between spaces of community and spaces of justice, and that’s challenging. It’s similar to working parents who feel like they’re failing both at home and at work. And of course, you always have to switch codes and language. But no matter where I am, I always follow a guiding star, an overarching goal, and that is fighting for my community. That also helped me in front of the Supreme Court. I didn’t go in there hoping that the presiding judge would respect me as a trans person; I was just focused on my job. And I now know how important my presence was for many people. Representation alone is not the be-all and end-all, but it does mean something when a trans person is in the room when such decisions are being made.
WOZ: The case in question concerned a ban on gender-affirming treatment for minors in the state of Tennessee. You argued that this was unconstitutional for two reasons: firstly, because it violated gender equality, and secondly, because it deprived parents of the right to make medical decisions for their children. The Supreme Court disagreed.
Chase Strangio: The court didn’t even address our argument about parental rights. So it was solely about the principle of equal treatment. If you are a trans man, you don’t have access to hormones. If you are a cis man, you do have access to these hormones. The court had to ignore a great deal in order not to recognize a violation of equal rights here.
WOZ: What does the ruling mean for the legal battle for trans rights?
Chase Strangio: It limits our ability to sue when it comes to healthcare for young people. In other contexts, we can continue to assert constitutional claims, including for healthcare for trans adults.
WOZ: Some have argued that it was risky to bring this case before the Supreme Court.
Chase Strangio: The only way to ensure that a case never comes before the Supreme Court is to never file a lawsuit. That would mean giving up. And that is not an option. We cannot simply accept laws like the one in Tennessee without challenging them.
WOZ: The ACLU is currently fighting on several fronts to prevent government repression of trans people. What is the status of the other cases?
Chase Strangio: We are suing in three cases that specifically concern trans rights. One is against the government’s decision that trans people must have an ID card with their birth gender. The district court ruled in our favor, which means that, at least in theory, all trans people should still be able to obtain an ID card with their correct gender designation for the time being. Another lawsuit concerns access to healthcare for trans people in prisons. Here, too, we won a class action lawsuit in a district court. In another case, we have achieved that the government cannot force hospitals to deny trans people under the age of nineteen access to appropriate medication. However, this is a nationwide ruling, so we will have to wait and see what happens after the Supreme Court’s landmark CASA ruling.
WOZ: What is the Democratic Party’s position on these issues?
Chase Strangio: The priorities of this party were once again made clear when the Republican budget bill was being debated in Congress – and some Democratic lawmakers had nothing better to do than attack Zohran Mamdani, New York’s new left-wing mayoral candidate. The party always ends up betraying certain groups of people. After the 2024 election, it didn’t take long for the narrative to spread that the fight for trans rights was one of the reasons the election was lost. That is completely false, empirically speaking. The bottom line is that I view this as a nonpartisan issue; we need a mass movement, a mobilization against the politics of the establishment.
WOZ: Because you appeal to the masses: where does the US population stand on the issue of trans rights?
Chase Strangio: If you drum into people’s heads that one group of people has much more power than the rest, it will eventually become apparent. I am Jewish and learned a lot about the history of the oppression of the Jewish people as a teenager. From a left-wing perspective. And yet even I believed the exaggerated image that Jewish influence in the US was very strong. Conspiracy narratives about minorities always lead us to dark places. So we should be careful when people say, for example, that the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest US association of pediatricians, is controlled by trans activists.
WOZ: You once said in an interview that your gender reassignment treatment helped you find peace with yourself and the world. Do you think too many people simply don’t understand the significance of these treatments? Or do too many people just not care?
Chase Strangio: I think most people don’t know anything about this topic to begin with. If you asked opponents what gender-affirming treatments are and why exactly they should be banned, very few would be able to say three coherent sentences. This isn’t just true of this topic. People often only read headlines. We all do that sometimes. On top of that, they are bombarded with misinformation, increasingly produced by AI. So we face enormous challenges in countering this climate and telling other, true stories.
WOZ: And what about resistance to trans rights among the general population?
Chase Strangio: I think there needs to be more solidarity between movements. We need more robust movements. But at the same time, I’m hopeful. Every day, I see people doing extraordinary things under disastrous conditions. When the forests were burning in Los Angeles in January, neighbors came together. The same thing happened in my neighborhood in Queens when the pandemic broke out in 2020. If there’s one thing I believe in, it’s the power of people to care for one another. And the history of queer people is exactly that. I was recently in Provincetown, a town in Massachusetts known for its LGBT community. People there told me that when Covid first hit, everyone knew what to do because Provincetown still had so much experience from the time when people were dying of AIDS. As a result, the Covid vaccination rate in Provincetown was virtually 100 percent. What I’m trying to say is that we can draw on our history of survival and caring.