Chase Strangio

Meet ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, who made history in 2024 as the first openly trans person to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. Ilana and Chase discuss his litigation in high-profile LGBTQ+ cases, the power of public opinion to preempt changes to human rights policy, and why queer people are the most free and the most fun!

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Host: Ilana Glazer
Producers: David Rooklin, Annika Carlson, Madeline Kim, Kelsie Kiley, Glennis Meagher
Video Producers: Lexa Krebs, Louise Nessralla
Audio Producers: Nicole Maupin, Rachel Suffian
Lighting Director: Kevin Deming
Editor: Tovah Leibowitz
Graphics: Raymo Ventura
Outro Music: Don Hur

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to It's Open with Ilana Glazer. I'm your host, Ilana Glazer. And I just came off of this interview that just was so exciting and interesting, and even though things are so terrifying right now, it reminded me that the fight we are in right now is the process, is the reward. It's incredible. And as a millennial, I'm like, no, I'm young. No, you're not. I'm living history. I've seen so much. It hurts. And my guest today is not only living history, but he's writing it and he's writing it all the way to human rights for all Americans through protecting trans people. He's fucking incredible. His name is Chase Strangio, and he's one of the United States' leading lawyers. He's argued before the Supreme Court several times. He started on the Chelsea Manning case before WikiLeaks was WikiLeaks Lakes. He was in the case for marriage equality, saw that passed from DC outside the courts. And he's now fighting at the Supreme Court level for trans kids to have access to healthcare, the lifesaving healthcare they need, and the wild manufactured fear around trans kids in sports. And he's just so brilliant and he's somebody that I've worked with in my human rights and organizing efforts and someone that I turned to for leadership. And I'm so excited for you to hear this conversation today. Just two neurotic Jews trying to find their way out of this mess. Give it up for Chase Strangio. Chase Strangio, I'm really amazed by the work that you do and the strength that you have to do it. Well, thank you. Similarly, when I decided to go to law school, did not imagine my life in New York, being in dialogue with so many people and thinking about the work in such a broader way that wasn't about just going into court or advocating in these very micros, but thinking about how are we building with each other both in cultural discourse, but then also in sort of power material change. And so it's very exciting to be here. With you. Yeah. So you were one of the nation's leading attorneys defenders of human rights for American citizens. You started in this role in the Chelsea Manning case. Can you review what the Chelsea Manning case was? So Chelsea Manning was someone who was enlisted in the United States Army and during her deployment, during the endless wars that we had at the time, and continued to have came across information that she found just absolutely troubling about the US involvement in military action and foreign policy around the world and became a whistleblower and shared information with WikiLeaks, which I think is important to note, was very different at that time in the 2010 to 2012 period than how we think of it now. Can you say how we think of it now? I mean, how I think of it now I guess is I sort of equate it with Julian Assange. And while I still believe in the whistle blowing and the importance of creating space for people to share information publicly, I think Assange himself is someone who rightly has been criticized for his interpersonal and structural actions. And so I don't think of WikiLeaks in the same way that I did in the Chelsea Manning disclosure era. Got it. It became about him, almost a show about him. Now we're so used to seeing nothing but narcissist in. The. World, and maybe that's always been true, but I think Assange would be very much in my view and in that space. So Chelsea has this information about gross human rights violations perpetrated by the United States government around the world discloses this information is ultimately arrested and is charged under the Espionage Act and. Got it. The ACLU gets involved in her case before I start working at the ACLU addressing first amendment issues with her prosecution and court justice system, as well as the conditions of her confinement. So that's all ongoing. My first year at the ACLU is in 2013, I'm hired on as a lawyer in the LGBT project. And I am aware of Chelsea because I'm aware of the stories. This is a big news story at the time. President Obama has come out sort of very aggressively opposed to her pronouncing her guilt even before she's had a chance to stand trial. And also undercurrent in Chelsea's case is her transness. It is not the centerpiece, it is not something that's widely being talked about in the media, but it is present in the background. Of course, Chelsea knew herself to be trans, but did not come out as trans. She's in the military at a time when you're not allowed to be trans in the military. Holy shit. So I think when we think about trans military bans, we often think about the Trump military ban. It was also the policy of the United States armed forces to exclude open trans service for the majority of the Obama administration as well. Well. It's funny, almost the ban actually acknowledges trans people. Yes. Yeah. Do you know when that came up? To be honest, I don't remember. But. It was folded into the system. Certainly. It was. And I did know at a time because we were working on challenging it during the first Obama administration and I was sort of in it. And then also just as someone who feels very ambivalent about the military as an institution, and my brother was deployed in Cobble during this period of time as well. And so I was just thinking I had so many fraught personal and political associations with the military, but I was working on the efforts to get rid of the ban on open trans service and then also Chelsea serving at this time, and she's a flashpoint both in the public discourse as well as for people who are in military service. And Chase, can I for a second, the distinction between Julianna, he's the hero of his own story versus Chelsea's whistle blowing. The sense I'm getting from you is like this was a really brave anti-war act that she did as someone who wasn't trying to be some visible figure in a news story. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really important way to sort of frame this. I mean, Chelsea's this young closeted openly queer person. It's not that long after just the don't ask, don't tell is the policy in the military. And that was just about being gay. Yeah. So again. I think we have these, not just, but it's also ranked and then purposely confused for each other. So I don't mean to be like that was. Only that, but I don't know having a 13-year-old now who's like, wait, gay people couldn't get married. All of these things are very recent. Gay people also couldn't serve openly in the military when we were in high school. I think it was very common to sort of for even in women's sports where lots of people were gay, there was this, no, no, no, there's no gay people here, not in my locker room. And so all of these sort of norms about how we think about inclusion of LGBT people are new. We were living in the outsides as gay people, as queer people and as trans people for a very long time and very recently. And so that's reality in the military. She's someone who enlists to try to have access to resources to change the conditions of her life and then ends up as many people are sort of confronted with hypocrisy of the promise of the United States as well as what's going on in our military, deeply troubled by it, wants to do something about it and pays a very, very significant price. She ends up arrested in brutal conditions, first in Kuwait and then in Quantico in Virginia, and then is sentenced ultimately to 35 years in military prison, which is a very high sentence in terms of years. And this was for exposing civilian killings. It was for a lot of, I mean the disclosures reached but many of the sort of most publicly known aspects of it were these videos that just showed the extent to which there were killings that were happening, that were deliberately targeting civilians, targeting journalists. And so that she ends up being arrested, then tried in a court-martial system in the military, so-called justice system, and then sentenced to 35 years the day after her sentencing. She announces through her lawyer at the time that she's trans. The response at that time from the United States government, the Obama administration, is we will not be providing you with any medical treatment related to your trans identity while you're in prison. And so we at the A CLU work with her lawyer at the time and partner and ultimately end up suing the Department of Defense arguing that it's unconstitutional to deny prisoners access to medically necessary treatment. And so that was my sort of big first case at the A CLU after I started in 2013, representing Chelsea in that challenge to the Department of Defense's conditions that they were holding her in. Did you step up into the role? Did they ask you to be a part of it? How did you become so called upon in this case? This is a good question. I mean, it's a combination of factors. One is I'd come from an organization where I was doing prisoner rights work. The law that I knew best was the law related to the conditions of trans people in custodial settings, so in prisons and jails and other sites of immigration detention and other sites of confinement. And then I was the only openly trans lawyer on staff at the time. At the ACL U. At the A CLU in 2013. How many people were there? Hundreds. Wow. And can we paint a picture for what it looked like, sounded like and felt like to be an openly trans person in 2013, it feels like? Oh, 2013. Yeah, it feels, actually, it's so long ago. Yeah, no, it is so long ago in the context of being a public openly trans person or just an openly trans person being in public mean. So it was a time when for the most part, there were not media stories about trans people. I think the most common way that trans adults at the time learned about transness was from growing up, watching Jerry Springer and other talk shows in which we were sort of ridiculed and the sort of exposure slash disclosure of it's really a man, it's really a woman. And that's how we all came to understand ourselves. That is so painful. But you have two things. You have that. And then for me, the next thing is boys don't cry. So you have your disgusting worthy of mockery or you're murdered. This is pre orange is the new black. So there's no Laverne on television, at least not in that way. There's no for better or for it's pre Caitlyn Jenner coming out, pre Janet Mock being in the public discourse very much pre post. So there's not. Really. Positive, even human, even human, there's human representation. There's no human representation. If you're a legal advocate trying to make change on behalf of a community who hasn't reached the point of being depicted as human, this stuff really matters. You can't have a legal strategy that is not working in concert with a strategy to shift the way in which there's an empathy sort pathway. And that happens through art and culture. There's no other way. I mean, empathy is not built through a legal argument, not at all. And so we have to be in that space. And that became very clear to me very quickly when I started working at the A CLU when I started representing Chelsea. And one thing about Chelsea is she understood that she the conditions of her life as someone who was arrested and facing decades of incarceration were going to be impacted by what she could say publicly. But she was limited in what she could do. And she had to do that in part through her lawyers that Chelsea pushed me to sort of be a voice for her. And then I started to see how essential it was through that process that there'd be more voices for trans people in the public. Were you scared? Were you excited? Were you all of it? Were you exhausted? What did it feel like to step into that role that you were representing someone, but it was also representing your reality? I had a six month old child at the time, so I wasn't my God sleeping. So I actually think in that way I was just on an autopilot that might have served me of just sort of like, I'm not going to be able to process what's coming in. I'm just going to try to manage what's in front of me, which included very steep learning curve with respect to parenting, a very steep learning curve with respect to my job and just a very steep learning curve with respect to interfacing with the world. So all those things are happening simultaneously, and I'm 30 years old and also a steep learning curve of who I am. Because. Part of the challenge of not having tons of representation is what is being reflected to you. You don't know how to inhabit your body. Because we take these stories in art as a first draft, and then we edit based off of them. So then to have no first draft or a subhuman first draft with fucking Jesus, Jerry Springer, and then boys don't cry. It's like, where do you even begin? Right? And also I'm totally, I'm neurotic. I'm Jewish. My family is just neurotic Jewish people, so I'm already predisposed. And. The thing about having a six month old, I mean, you're turned inside out, you're exposed. What an interesting and also valiant intersection you survived of the deep automatic sensitivity that you have when you have a little baby, and then the sort of organization you had to have to get through this case. And I mean, it wasn't my only case. That's the thing too. The world was also what we were also had building out between 2013 and 2015 is when we built the scaffolding and the foundation to strike down beyonds on marriage equality. And so I was working on that. I was sort of challenging or preparing to challenge the first efforts that were really targeting trans people under state law that didn't ultimately come to sort of fruition until after 2015. But so all of these things are happening all at once and. Moving forward to marriage equality, your role in this fight, let's talk about it. I mean, so the A CLU has been doing LGBT cases for a very, very long time. I mean, going back to the 1930s. And that's amazing thing about being at a hundred year organization is that you can sort of trace the lineage of the work going back in time, challenging cross-dressing restrictions and other things. But what happens in the two thousands is there starts to be this big effort to strike down bans on marriage equality. Starting at the state level. There's a huge backlash. The George W. Bush years are characterized by backlash. You have most of the, well, I would say half the country starts passing bans on marriage in their constitutions. That did not happen before. That was a new backlash. And so we're building out of that time in the sort of second half of the Obama administration, let's say it. And this goes back to the thing about bans in the military, that marriage equality bans weirdly, ironically, acknowledges the existence of same-sex, love and partnership. And so they emerged when the public demand for recognition emerges. And so before it was like we were sort of outside the public discourse to such a degree. It was sort of self-evident that we would be banned from intimate partnerships recognized by the state. Then there starts to be more public demands for it, especially as we're moving into the 1990s. And. It's literally like Will and Grace. Yeah, literally. I mean, it's not just Will and Grace, but you can't move through this moment without these sort of pop cultural references that are changing, people understanding crazy. And it's happening in concert. So you can think of Orange is the New Black is very similar to Will and Grace in terms of what it is doing publicly. It's not the only thing, of course, but it is part of the story. So what happens then between, so 2013, there's a big Supreme Court case that strikes down the federal law called the Defense of Marriage Act. So the law Bill Clinton signed 1996. Hold on. This is a lot. Bill. Clinton side, the defense of marriage has to be opposite sex. Yes. LOL. Yeah. I mean, it's just that they're debating this horrors of gay people being together, having children, the destruction of society. I mean, just really some of the most grotesque homophobia you've seen just on the floor of Congress, these committee hearing reports. So they complied all this record in 1996 that then we're challenging at the Supreme Court in 2013. That's the year I started the A CLU or at the Supreme Court. Were representing Ededie Windsor, who was married in New York to her longtime partner, Thea Aspire. Thea dies. And because of the Defense of Marriage Act, even though they're recognized as married, married spouses in New York, although I actually think they got married in Canada at the time, but it doesn't matter, they were married under because it was legal in New York. It became legal in New York in 2012, I believe, or 11 20 11 or 2012 at this point. I actually think Theia and Edie got married in Canada. It still wasn't legal in New York. They lived in New York, but they were legally married. New York was recognizing out of jurisdiction marriages, but the federal government, the US government, so for tax purposes, they're strangers. They can't pass property, and so they are taxed like legal strangers. So we sue, we challenge, we win. And at that point, it really does open the door to a massive shift in sort of how the courts are receiving these challenges. And in two years, we go from just striking down doma, the so-called Defensive Marriage Act, and then all these state bans. So 2015 Obergefell has decided that is the law that strikes down the bans on marriage for same-sex couples nationwide. And hold on a second, chase, can we just stop a second and talk about where you were personally, Chelsea Manning's cases behind you, you're in New York and going again to the Supreme Court? Yeah, so this is my first time at the Supreme, well, so I guess the A CLU was going, again, I was sort of very much on the periphery of that Windsor case. It was brand new. I was sort of like the. Equivalent of Windsor being the New York State Ed and. Yes, exactly challenging the defense, the federal law. And so now we're challenging Ohio's law and Kentucky's law now Alabama's law. And so trying to say you can't ban people from getting married anymore. Okay, you already said that federal government can't ban their marriages from being recognized, and now we're fighting for the right itself. And you're so incredible at speaking, and you have all this, I mean, you're an incredible lawyer, have all this stuff at the ready. I'm slowing it down for a second purposely for my own brain for another thing. We're going to touch on this when we talk about the recent cases of healthcare and trans sports, but could we just talk about the machinery of campaigning in the way that you do state by state, by state? It's time to take it to the top. Can you just speak to that for a second? We were talking about this, about healthcare building empathy with the general public before doing the sports thing. Can we talk about this in the case of gay marriage? Yeah, I, and this is the model that's often brought out where it's like the reality is that the public is so against same and sex marriage. And this is something that right in this moment, people just do not remember. And it's not that long ago. It pulls. Horribly, what the fuck? 20 People are going out. It pulls horribly at the time. It pulls horribly in the 22,000 to 2011. We're still building out of this ditch voters. It drives voters out to vote against marriage equality. Hold. Up in California, remember Prop eight is in California. We are talking about 2008. There is still such a deep discomfort. I mean, remember Obama, right? And also deep canvassing against. Prop. Eight, right? Yes. Hollywood, the gayest place in America, Broadway probably was, and Prop eight was anti-gay marriage. And the deep canvassing that people did probably from LA and Hollywood and Hollywood throughout the state was what really turned that there. So you are working to overturn this in New York and now, okay, my heart has caught up. And if we take a step back, what is the. Point? The point is a things that felt impossible changed very quickly. So much so that people don't even remember the recent past when they themselves were against this. And let's pause there. They changed. Very quickly because of human powered magic. Good love. Yes. They changed because of literally organized love. Right? I mean, that's what it was. And it was not. And this is what I remind people all the time. The legal arguments stayed exactly the same. And we lost those arguments in the most progressive courts in the state high court of New York, we lost, and 2006 we lose in the New York state high court for gay marriage, for gay marriage. One of the gayest places in the country. New York, New York, that had. Been four decades at this time, obviously. And then nine years later, we win at the US Supreme Court with the very same arguments. Obviously we didn't have a new constitution. What fundamentally changed with people's understanding of connection to the demands, the humanity, the realness, the tangible experience of gay people, of same-sex parent families, and it was a massive shift and it had taken decades. I think it's really important that we don't suggest, oh, it was nine years and that was it. It was all those other years building and learning and struggling and failing. That's part of winning. That is part of changing. You have to have the backlash, the failure. And that's part of understanding how are we going to connect with people who are resistant to connecting with us, and. How are we going to move forward? I mean, we are in this just painful, terrifying, not scary, terrifying, because it's terrorizing this moment. And we have the playbook over and over again starting with abolition in this country from seemingly impossible circumstances. It's about connecting and organizing love. And together, I mean, I think that going to sort of bad Bunny's message, we can be hardened and turn to our own sort of anger, hate driven response, or we can be driven by our love for our own people. And so I think that when we move away from abstraction, we move away from vengeful rage towards this sort of expansive sense that, and not in a Pollyanna way, in a real deep love transformational way. That's how we build, because we're energized by it. We're not exhausted by it. I'm not exhausted by mobilizing out of the absolute obsessive love I feel for queer and trans people at all. Oh my God. So talk to me about going to the Supreme Court. You're still in your early thirties. You've got a fucking toddler and you had this big case behind you. You overturned it in New York. What did it look like? LOL, you're in dc right? What did it look like and feel like to be there that day that it was overturned? I mean, so I think the thing about Supreme Court cases is it's the building up, the writing, the preparing the arguments is so relentless. It's so exhausting. I'm exhausted. It's exhausting hearing about it. And it's like one case and you're spending every waking second and you're in the middle of the night and you're working. God, sometimes you're like, oh, we have to rewrite this sentence like 400 times. It's not getting the point across. So it's so much work and so many people are working so hard to come up with new arguments because the Supreme Court, it's different than when you're arguing at lower courts because in the lower courts, in the appeals courts, you're just convincing those courts to apply Supreme Court precedent to some outcome. When you're at the Supreme Court, you're sort of weaving a whole new story to convince them on first principles. Got it. And so you're just like, what is the best way to do. This? Can I stop and ask? You're saying at the lower courts, it's about getting up at the Supreme Court. It's literally about the decision. Yeah, it's about the decision also. It's. The story and the strategy changes, changes. Dramatically because it's about, and it's, it's about what the decision is and how you get there. Because remember, during Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings an ugly, okay, so nobody wants to relive this moment, but one. Of the things that was, so shout out to Dr. Christine Blaze Ford. My God was that brave? What a just gunky, ugly, thankless, horrible nightmare. Like speaking elegantly through a whiny crying baby crying about beer, if I remember correctly. Yeah, there was a lot of whining. And I think for me, the other thing is that there was just sort of the disingenuousness. And so he's asked over and over about Roe v. Wade in that confirmation hearing, and he's like, I'll follow precedent. But here's the thing, the Supreme Court makes the precedent. Yes, the lower courts have to follow the decision in Roe v. Wade. But it was such a ridiculous answer because the Supreme Court changes the precedent. When you're there, you're starting from the sense that you can just, anything is possible. And so that is, I think what happens when you get to the Supreme Court is they're not bound really by much as we're seeing even more now. And so much of the work is building up to that moment. And I did have a very, I had a two, 3-year-old child. I'm trying to, the sort of quintessential working parent reality where you're like, oh my God, I'm failing at parenting and I'm failing at working, and you're never doing the right thing at the right time. Oh my God. So yeah, so it was my life and I was working with Chelsea at the same time. So it was a lot of things happening at once. And I'm young, and so I'm trying to just learn too. So I'm also very invested in learning how to be a very effective litigator, a supreme court litigator, so that I can also do trans cases knowing my community is sort of really struggling. So ultimately, we have arguments and the decision comes down June 26th, 2015, and I'm in DC that day outside the court, I was someone who, I was a very public critic of the LGBT movement's focus on marriage. It was not where I would've put our resources. I was concerned about what it would mean. And at the same time, talk about the beauty and power of just celebrating people's love. I mean, there are people outside the Supreme Court that day that had been together for 50 years, and it was out of the realm of possibility in their minds that they would ever be able to be publicly recognized like that. And there's people singing and choruses performing, and it's just one of those moments where you can't feel anything but just absolute celebratory love for what this moment means for the people who risked so much just to be themselves for so long, oh my God. 11 Years ago. So this is just 11 years ago, we had what felt impossible become possible standing on the shoulders of decades, hundreds of years, hundreds of years of existing being joyful in who you truly are. Organizing around that speaking up backlash, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. All building up to 11 years ago, gay marriage was made legal federally must have felt, did you think it was going to happen? Were you really like this could go 50 50? Did you think, no way is this going to happen? What did you think? Well, by then, I think there was a strong sense that it would, just knowing you have a five four court, this is still the Justice Kennedy era, so we have that sense of momentum. They take it, the polling is changing, the country is changing. This. Is also, remember most of Obama's presidency, first time he doesn't support marriage. Yeah. Wasn't like Biden. Somewhat accredited. Here. Well, Biden just in an interview came out and changed his position publicly long before I think he was supposed to. And then that sort of pushed the administration. And But again, this is not that long ago. This is 10 years ago. Biden's like, I love him. I love the gays. Let don't get married. It's like what? That was the vibe. It was a little bit, I love the gays and we always felt like they all love the gays, but they're doing this thing where they're like, well, marriage is very this and civil unions, but they're hemming and hawing and much we see the Democrats doing now on a position where they should just take a principled stance and the. Democrats should just be the Republicans. The Republicans should be the fringe and progressive fighters should be the Democrats should the opposition. Yeah, whatever it is. I know, it's so crazy. And honestly, I think every time we hang out or do something, it's like I almost need to lay the whole landscape out so that I can see what's possible. Because just to say that out loud, I'm like, we are in the motion toward that. And obviously the Republicans are not fringe. They're embedded with the techno fascists and trying to take over as quickly as possible. But public opinion still really matters, still shapes things, pushes things, swings things. And even if they're not changing how the current policy is affecting their bank account, they do care about being shamed by our opinion, the people in power. They. Do. And even the justices, I mean this term, there was a moment where Justice Kavanaugh wrote this concurrence about this idea that it's not such a big deal to be stopped by ice and be inconvenienced for a few minutes if you're a US citizen. And when they were sort of greenlining the racial profiling of ice officers and CBP officers, then we have this big public outcry calling. Everything Kavanaugh stops and everything becomes a Kavanaugh stop and it's infused in the cultural discourse. And a few weeks later, he walks it back in another opinion. And so people are like, if I'm not arguing at the Supreme Court, what role do I have? What role. Do I have in? But speaking up makes the fucking difference. So they Kavanaugh stops because he writes a sweet letter about how it's pretty cool to be stopped by ice. And everybody's like, shut the fuck up. You're fucking kidding me. This is literally deadly, literally murdering you as citizens no matter what their skin color. And in Alex Prey's case, legally gun carrying citizens, which you all said you stood for. So the public opinion actually affects Kavanaugh who's not running for office. He's sitting in a seat, but he walks it back because it matters to him. Because they are people, they have families, they have clerks, they have children in a lot of cases. And so it's sort of like. Or a lot of children in a few cases. Many, many children. There you go. It can be both or no children. In. Some cases, but still nieces and nephews. And. So it's. People, they're keep humanity and they're trying to separate themselves so that they think that they want to control us. Honestly, I don't even want to give these GULs this compassion, but they think that they want to have distance from us to control us, but it's like you actually just want to be part of humanity. You really do. People are paying attention. People are impacted by what we're doing and saying. And you don't always notice it right away, and you don't always notice it because it's not necessarily visible to us. Well, can I ask, how did he walk it back? How did you see Kavanaugh walking it back. Because he basically sort of clarified what he meant in a subsequent opinion? As much as it feels like there's too much that's out of our control, our organizing, even our discourse is impacting what's happening. And so yes, it does not mean that we are going from where we are now to where we want to be quickly. It doesn't mean even in our lifetime, but we are moving things. And so we have to not think that we're stuck. And just coming back to the marriage fights, we didn't change our legal arguments. We changed the way our legal arguments were received, and that is the way that people have a role to play. There's something here. In 2016, I started organizing and doing advocacy work, and I've become so obsessed. I'm so into it, and it feeds into my art. And not even necessarily that my work is always talking about politics or something, but I really want artists to see and hear the way in which we work together, artists and policymakers, and the culture. The idea of Kavanaugh Stops, that's somebody tweeting a good one, Kavanaugh stops, and it's like that's just human sauce that is now just over the entire buffet, and we need it. And it makes the difference. It makes the fucking difference in policy. I mean, it makes a huge difference because there's so many ways it can make a difference in policy. One way is that what someone's art creates in the world changes how people start to see themselves. They build on that, like you were saying, it's like a draft that you take and you adapt. And then once you have people doing that, their ability to make change changes. If I don't start seeing people, how am I going to step into my advocacy? How is anyone who's doing this work going to start to evolve sort of their sense of possibility, their sense of their humanity, that's coming from art, and then that's changing individuals who are doing law policies. That's just one way. And then there's the way where every single way in which policy is made, both formally and informally, is done by human beings who are themselves consuming art and culture. Lena wasted this interview recently, and she was saying Artists are empathy dealers. And that is why fascists are so afraid of art, because artists bring people closer to each other. That is a threat to the despair of fascism. That's right. And that is the way in which art is what sort of creates the distance between the authoritarian leaders and the people who are resisting and narrows the distance between us as people to see ourselves and others and to build from a place of love and humanity. So gorgeously stated, okay, so the third and final act of your career that I wanted to discuss is the most recent hearings, legal proceedings that you've led regarding healthcare and trans kids in sports, which is just like, oh, chase. It's just, it's painful because people. Are just not. Getting it. It's. So absurd. And the thing that I'll say again and again about cis people caring about the trans sports bands is that they're trying to make it legal and normal for some grownup who isn't part of a school system to check all children's genitals. That's right. That's right. Because we normalized through Jerry Springer, through these other media tools that transness is a fraud that you can uncover. And through this repeated media suggestion that you know who is trans, you have right to know who is trans, and you have a right to expose who is trans. That opened a norm of deciding that you can just look at anyone and say, I don't think you're the right kind of man. I don't think you're the right kind of woman, and I'm going to figure it out. And that has been so normalized. And the reality is you cannot look at someone and know their genitals. And in fact, you should not look at someone and want to know their genitals. That's right. And yet we're normalizing this type of exchange with children through these anti-trans paradigms and. Trying to bring parents. I think a lot of people don't understand this. They're also trying to normalize it in schools. Having somebody who isn't a teacher, which by the way, no teacher should know the students' genitals or be inspecting them. It was weird enough that we had, remember we had the scoliosis test? That was fucking weird, dude bending, bending. Over. I was just thinking about that. I had a weird dream about scoliosis. I don't know why. But see, I think maybe it was all related. Bending over in a gym teacher's closet for somebody to run their finger down my spine. That was weird. Now we're talking about kids genitals. It doesn't matter what they identify as. That is fucked up. But when the administration is all over the Epstein files, then the connection really makes sense. And the Republican party shut down the government so as not to look in these files. Wasn't it December 19th, 2025 that these files were supposed to be exposed? This is all connecting in a way that is insidious. It's sexual abuse of children and adults, and it's fucking psychotic. I mean, I literally couldn't agree more. I think psychotic, you're just like, what are we doing? And sometimes in these court arguments about trans people, the number of adult men who get up and talk about little girls bodies is gross. It's gross. It's like, what are we doing? It's gross. We're not the ones as trans people as advocates for trans people coming in and introducing a conversation about genitals. We are coming in and saying, you know what? I want to be left alone and. For our children to be left alone. It is gross. It is creepy, it is disgusting. And it really does connect back to the Jeffrey Epstein files in which so much of our government and our government's history is implicated. It is so gross and terrifying. It is terrifying. And I don't like to say trans people being targeted is a distraction because it has very serious consequences. But I do think it's important for people to look at when it is deployed by this administration. So as one example in Minneapolis after Alex Prey's murder, and after there starts to be widespread backlash in the public discourse to the way in which ice officers and CBP officers are terrorizing people in their communities, what does the Trump administration do? It threatens education funding to the state of Minnesota because they let one trans girl play on a softball team in high school. So they threatened to defund the entire one one. And so it's like they're like, look, we have a problem with our immigration policy. Look over here. We actually look, everyone hates trans people. Let's go back to that. We're going to threaten Minnesota because they had a one trans softball player. These things are happening and they are connected. So I met you through this human rights work, just community organizing. But if you're looking through a certain lens, that's what it is. And it's really hard and people think it's this painful thing or a sacrifice, how do you find the hope outside of it? For a long time in therapy, I realized I was calling real life and work as separate things, and I've learned to see this all as my life. Let's just talk about the beauty within the work and what powers you to keep going in spite despite all as one thing. Yeah, I mean, I think long ago I sort of abandoned the dichotomy between work life and non-work life. And there's upsides and downsides to that. There's sort of the risk that just work is just infuses everything. And everything I'm doing is somehow connected to the paid work that I do, which takes over. And at the same time, I love my work and I get a lot out of my work. It doesn't mean I'm thrilled to go to the office every day or that every meeting I have is exhilarating. Quite the opposite often, but it's like I am exhilarated by creating ideas or possibilities with other people. And that's what we're doing. And so even if you are up against sort of fight that you know are going to lose in this sort of common understanding of win-loss, we are going to lose in court. I just refuse to hold that sort of binary way of thinking about the work in part because of what I think about the law, which is it is inherently constrained. You can win in law and still have not done a lot from the community. And conversely, you were actually talking about, you've been also arguing at the Supreme Court level around trans healthcare for kids and trans kids in sports. And even bringing a case to the Supreme Court knowing it's going to lose Marx it in history, which is a win in the humanities sense. And you are declaring to the nine justices to history, to people listening that there is a fight to be had. We are not going to lay down and let this happen to us. We're telling a story. Of. Who we are, and these things really matter. People seeing other people fight for them, inspires them to find fight within themselves. I truly believe that there is just, you just don't know where people are going to find power in what you're doing. But that finding of power and possibility is a building process. Whatever a court says, whatever a presidential election ends up doing to our lives, yes, there is scary damage, there is loss of life. The consequences of these things are huge, and that is just part of being part of the human condition in society. And so we have to build through it and it's okay and necessary to find happiness, exhilaration, joy, pleasure in that. I mean, I think one of the things that makes queerness so thrilling and beautiful across all movements is queerness seeks out joy, pleasure, celebration, parties fun. And that's not all it is, obviously. But queers are fun. That is why you see a lot of queer people in art. That is why you see a lot of queer people in creation because you have existed outside one of the fundamental demands of a constrained society, which is that you be a man or you be a woman and you have this one form of intimate bond. And if you're already outside that you already failed that game, you're free. And there's a freedom to queerness that scares the shit out of people because it offers so much choice and choice scares people. But it is like we are here I am am. Just the thing that scared me the most when I was a little closeted kid was like, what is my life going to be like? And now the thing that gives me so much hope and joy is like, whatever else is going on, thank fucking God. I'm gay and queer and trans and all these things. It is just like that is where I'm like, everything else, we're going to make it. We're going to make it fun. We're going to make it something beautiful. And that's also why I'm so driven to art and to sometimes I'm so stuck from doing the work where I'm compartmentalized. And then I just went and saw Hamnet and I was just broken open by it and I was just like, I was like, oh, I need this. I need to be shattered and put back together. And then in that you sort of realize that, yeah, we can be fragile and strong and hold all of these polarities at the same time. Thank you so much, chase. Thanks for talking to me. Thanks for being my friend and collaborator and human rights for every single American and for being a hero who is trans and queer and gay. You're phenomenal. Thank you so, so much. Thank you. Thank. You. Thanks for being in it with me. We're making a big queer exciting future. Oh my gosh. It really is fun and meaningful to be in community with people and making the world a better place. Chase Strangio is a fucking genius. Thanks Chase for joining us, and thank you for your leadership through this terrifying time in which techno fascism descends upon the United States and globally. Everybody around the world who may be watching this. It's coming for all of us, so we got to organize, be together in it and resist, and we can because love truly wins. Bad Bunny said it. Love. The only thing more powerful than hate is love Bad Bunny, just thinking about him. Anyway, thanks so Wow. Joining me in Chase and follow Chase's career. It really is so inspiring and heartening and enlightening. This has been a star pick production. I'm going to swallow. I want to thank my creative producers, Annika Carlson, David Rooklin, Madeline Kim, Glennis Meagher, and Kelsie Kiley. I want to thank our editor Tovah Liebowitz. Tova, love you. I want to thank the people who made this set look, sound, and feel so beautiful today. Rachel Suffian, Lexa Krebs and Kevin Deming. And I also want to thank Raymo Ventura for his beautiful graphics and opening musical sting, as well as the band Don Hur for the outro music. Did I mention this was a Starrpix production? Anyway, see you next time at Its Open with Ilana Glazer.