On the morning of Monday, June 15th, Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice at the American Civil Liberties Union’s L.G.B.T. & H.I.V. Project, woke up in his childhood bedroom, in Newton, Massachusetts. After three months of isolating in his small apartment, in Queens, Strangio had driven with his seven-year-old child to Newton, an affluent, liberal suburb of Boston, to see his mother, Joan. Strangio had just buzzed the sides and the back of his head—his quarantine substitute for what used to be a weekly barbershop visit, and a grooming ritual for whenever the Supreme Court might be expected to hand down a decision. The thatch of dark, glossy hair on the top of his head had gone untouched since mid-March. He’d also brought a blazer to his mother’s house, in case he was asked to make media appearances.
The Court never says which decisions will be announced on a particular day, although the three biggest decisions advancing L.G.B.T.Q. rights arrived, coincidentally, on June 26th: Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down sodomy laws, in 2003; United States v. Windsor, which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, in 2013; and Obergefell v. Hodges, which affirmed the constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry, in 2015. By that precedent, it still felt early to expect a ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which took up the question of whether an employer who fires a worker for being gay or transgender is in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Two plaintiffs, Gerald Bostock and Donald Zarda, whose cases were consolidated, were gay men; a third, represented by the A.C.L.U., was Aimee Stephens, a transgender woman who, in 2013, was fired from her job at a funeral home in Michigan after she informed her employer that she was transitioning.
It seemed unlikely to Strangio that the decision in Bostock would be a victory for his side. Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018, had been the swing vote in earlier cases. Now the L.G.B.T.Q. advocates’ hopes hinged on Neil Gorsuch, perhaps the Court’s strictest proponent of textualism, the idea that a court should adhere to the words of a law—in this case, Title VII’s prohibition of discrimination “on the basis of sex”—without taking into account the lawmakers’ original intentions. David Cole, the national legal director of the A.C.L.U., aimed his arguments plainly at Gorsuch. Still, it was difficult to fathom that Gorsuch, President Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee, would take a stand in favor of gay and transgender rights. On Friday, June 12th, the Department of Health and Human Services had released a new rule that eliminated protections against sex discrimination in health care for transgender patients—the latest of the Trump Administration’s many blows to trans rights. A good outcome in Bostock, however, might render the new health-care rule moot. Strangio told me, “I had spent all weekend saying, ‘The Trump Administration doesn’t have the final word on sex discrimination—the Supreme Court does.’ And I was thinking, Yes, and then we’ll lose.”
At 9:50 A.M. on June 15th, after Strangio rushed his child through online school assignments, he joined a Zoom call with most of the A.C.L.U. team that worked on the case—twenty-two people, including interns and assistants. In pre-COVID times, they would have attempted to cram into Strangio’s tiny, windowless office at the A.C.L.U. At 9:59, he started pressing the Refresh button on the Supreme Court Web site. He and his colleagues could see that an opinion in their case was posted to the site, and that Gorsuch had written it—possibly a good sign. But the document refused to load. Strangio, punching Refresh again and again, and still talking to his colleagues, started tweeting:
A minute later, a single page loaded, enough for Strangio and the others to see “Held: An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII’s terms.”
Then:
One minute after that:
Chief Justice John Roberts, who had dissented in the Windsor and Obergefell decisions, had joined the majority.
Finally, all thirty-three pages of Gorsuch’s text loaded. (Slowing things down was Justice Samuel Alito’s furious hundred-and-seven-page dissent, which included eleven pages of dictionary definitions of sex and twenty-six pages of images of military-enlistment forms.) Strangio tweeted a screenshot from the last page of the Court’s opinion: “An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law. . . . It is so ordered.”
Around this time, Strangio got a call from Laverne Cox, one of the stars of “Orange Is the New Black” and a fellow trans-rights activist. Cox had taken Strangio to the Emmys as her plus-one and later accompanied him to oral arguments at the Supreme Court. They laughed and cried together on Instagram Live over the decision; Strangio marvelled that the trans-rights movement had convinced the likes of “Gorsuch and Roberts and this generally awful Court that we exist.” Cox wore a black tuxedo gown and mesh gloves over manicured hands—a glamorous apparition from pre-COVID days. Strangio realized that he was still wearing his mother’s hoodie over the T-shirt he had slept in.
Two days after the decision, Strangio sat on the pavement in the courtyard of his apartment building, in Jackson Heights, wearing an Adidas baseball cap, a gray T-shirt, black skinny jeans, and a pin-striped mask. He has big, captivating blue-green eyes and elfin ears, and even beneath a mask it’s obvious when he’s smiling. He smiles a lot, especially when he talks about himself; he appears to find himself amusing, perhaps ridiculous at times. He was still processing news that seemed almost impossibly good. “I feel the concept of happy, but I don’t feel the emotion of it,” he said. “It’s hard to know how to celebrate in isolation. We have been grieving in isolation, and now celebrating in isolation. I am thinking about all the connections that went into this case, and now everybody is in their own homes.”
During the months of COVID-enforced seclusion, two people who played large roles in Strangio’s life had died. His friend Lorena Borjas, a Queens neighbor and trans activist, with whom Strangio had co-founded a bail fund for transgender immigrants, died of COVID in March. Stephens, the transgender plaintiff in Bostock, died in May, after years of ill health. “I was thinking, At least she went out with the hope that we might win,” Strangio said. This sentiment might have provided some comfort had they lost the case. He was crushed to think that, after seven years of fighting the employer who fired her for being transgender, Stephens died without knowing she had prevailed.
Strangio, who graduated from law school in 2010, has worked on some of the most important civil-rights cases of recent years, especially in the area of transgender rights. His clients have included Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army whistle-blower, and Gavin Grimm, the Virginia high-school student who sued his school district for the right to use the bathroom that corresponded to his gender identity. Strangio has achieved a sort of celebrity as a lawyer and a trans activist. Last year, Annie Leibovitz photographed him for a Google ad campaign, and this summer he appeared in two new documentaries: “Disclosure,” which looks at portrayals of trans people in film, and “The Fight,” which profiles five A.C.L.U. attorneys battling the Trump Administration on various fronts, in which Strangio is featured with his colleague Joshua Block as they craft a case against Trump’s ban on transgender military personnel.
Strangio describes designing a legal strategy as “a combination of a puzzle and an analytical game, and then having to merge a lot of people’s views of those things. It can be brutal. Each sentence gets rewritten fifty times.” In the Stephens case, the process was laced with dread. Stephens’s lawsuit was originally brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. By the time it reached the Supreme Court, Trump had been President for more than two years and the federal government was now arguing that employment discrimination against a transgender person was legal. Then Strangio read an article in the Wake Forest Law Review by Katie Eyer, a professor at Rutgers Law School. Eyer argued that a truly textualist interpretation of Title VII would leave the Justices no choice but to acknowledge that discriminating against people because they are gay, lesbian, or transgender is to discriminate against them on the basis of sex. “In the briefing room, I said, ‘We can win this!’ ” Strangio said. “Then, after the meeting, I thought, But can we?”
During oral arguments, Gorsuch affirmed the A.C.L.U.’s approach—“I’m with you on the textual evidence,” he told Cole—but he asked if the Court should “take into consideration the massive social upheaval that would be entailed in such a decision,” affecting workplace dress codes and public bathrooms. Cole responded that trans people, and transgender rights, exist, and are widely recognized already. “There are transgender male lawyers in this courtroom following the male dress code and going to the men’s room, and the Court’s dress code and sex-segregated rest rooms have not fallen,” Cole said. “So the notion that somehow this is going to be a huge upheaval . . . There’s no reason you would see that upheaval. Transgender people follow the rule that’s associated with their gender identity. It’s not disruptive.”
One of the lawyers to whom Cole referred was Strangio, who was seated at the counsel table. (Another was an A.C.L.U. colleague, Gabriel Arkles.) Strangio was wearing a blue plaid tie in a Windsor knot with a white shirt and a gray suit, the sides of his head freshly barbered and the hair on the top gelled solid. It was perhaps not the first time that trans lawyers had sat at the counsel table before the Supreme Court, but it was certainly the first time that they had been seen for who they were. Still, Cole’s reassurance that trans people, if granted full civil rights, would behave appropriately—would remain more or less invisible—had a tinge of humiliation. It was also imprecise: Strangio identifies as trans but not as a man, uses both “he” and “they” pronouns, likes to paint his nails, and generally defies expectations of gender performance.
Legal cases make up a disproportionately large part of the way that the wider society views queer and trans people. We are represented by our sexual practices or our coupledom, or we are seen, as trans people often are, as impostors, liars, or interlopers. The image is rarely nuanced, even when it’s positive. As a trans lawyer, Strangio works as a representative in every sense of the word: in court, in the media, and sometimes in state legislatures, for his clients, for the trans community, and for himself.
When Strangio was in tenth grade, and his brother, Noah, was in sixth, their parents, Joan and Mark, split up. Mark was soon in a new relationship, with Noah’s best friend’s mother. Joan, a social worker, stayed in the family house, which has preserved the rupture of the divorce: Strangio told me that his father “took all the good furniture” when he moved out, in 1997. The great room, with its double-height ceilings, is half-empty and apparently unused. The heart of the house is the cozy kitchen, which Joan recently renovated in hues of gray and white; Strangio and I talked at a small white table in the breakfast nook.
He remembers little of his childhood and adolescence. His best friend from those years, Jenny Rossman, who is now a sex-crimes prosecutor in Orlando, Florida, told me that Chase took care of Joan and “made sure that Noah was protected.” Noah, who was awarded a Bronze Star while serving in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and now works in tech in the Bay Area, has maintained friendly relations with their father; Chase, who described his father last year as “a die hard Fox News watching Trump voter,” is more distant. (He continues to be protective of Joan. I met her on my visit to Newton, but she was the one person he didn’t want me to interview.) In high school, Strangio played on the girls’ soccer team, and gained early admission to Williams College. The summer after graduating from high school, he worked at J. P. Licks, an ice-cream parlor in Newton Centre, where some of the other employees were students at Oberlin College, in Ohio. “They were all queer,” Strangio recalled. “Or at least some of them were.” So, it seemed, was he. Rossman said, “I don’t remember him coming out that summer—it was more like ‘This is who I’m hanging out with. This is what I’m understanding.’ ” It wasn’t a surprise. Rossman didn’t recall any of Strangio’s high-school boyfriends, but she remembered that, as far back as seventh grade, he decorated the walls of his bedroom with pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow but not Paltrow’s then boyfriend, Brad Pitt.
As uneventful as Strangio’s coming out may have seemed to those closest to him, it upended his world. He left Williams after orientation week and started making long visits to Oberlin to be near his summer friends. He took a job at another ice-cream parlor and felt very angry, “at myself, probably, for not finding my way.” He cut off contact with his family and his high-school friends, did drugs, and struggled with an eating disorder. The following fall, he enrolled in Grinnell College, in Iowa. During his first week at Grinnell, Strangio went to Bob’s Underground, the student-run coffee shop, on open-mike night. A group of queer sophomores spotted him immediately, and one, Maggie Field, motioned to him to come sit at their table. “It’s a small school, and you see someone who is queer,” Field, now a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, told me. In Strangio’s walk and dress, Field said, “there was a toughness that a lot of queer folk might have to have.”
In 2018, fourteen years after Strangio graduated from Grinnell with a degree in history, he received an honorary doctorate in law from the college. Speaking on the occasion, he told the story of his child coming home from preschool upset that boys and girls had been told to line up separately. The child (who currently uses the pronoun “she”) had argued that she was both a boy and a girl, and was instructed to get in line with the girls. Strangio asked her what she did next:
His persistent sense of not fitting in had a lot to do with his decision to become a lawyer. Explaining his thinking at the time, he said, “If I’m a freak, but I can tell people that I’m a lawyer, it will discursively settle things.” After college, Strangio returned to the Boston area to work as a paralegal at Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, which had just won a staggering victory: after a long, high-stakes litigation campaign by GLAD, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had sanctioned same-sex marriage. Like the A.C.L.U., GLAD devotes many of its resources to “impact litigation,” the practice of setting a legal goal and then finding exemplary plaintiffs to make the case. The primary intent of such cases is to secure the decision of the highest possible court, insuring legal change for the greatest number of people.
The “perfect” plaintiffs in impact-litigation cases are rarely the people who most need pro-bono legal services; instead, they tend to be like the seven middle-class, mostly white couples in the Massachusetts marriage case, or like Edith Windsor, the wealthy, charismatic white widow with a forty-year love story to tell. Strangio wanted to provide direct services to clients who wouldn’t otherwise have access to legal counsel. “Meeting people where they are,” he told me, seemed “the best way to do law.” Later, he said, he learned that “there is no best way to do law—rather, there are lots of flawed ways.”
He was accepted at Harvard and N.Y.U., but chose Northeastern University, in Boston, which had an unusually strong emphasis on training students expressly for careers in social justice and public service. “Every so often we get one of those,” Libby Adler, Strangio’s law-school mentor, told me—meaning a person who chooses Northeastern over Harvard. “And we know that they are going to be super-successful public-interest lawyers.” Strangio took Adler’s classes in constitutional law, administrative law, and gender and sexuality, and worked with her on a project to provide legal services to low-income L.G.B.T.Q. youth of color, under the auspices of Boston Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services. Adler was critical of the mainstream gay-rights movement, which she viewed as pursuing the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people under existing law—for instance, the right to marry or to serve in the military—rather than trying to transform the legal framework itself. Adler used homeless L.G.B.T. youth as an example: changing laws that criminalized running away from home or that precluded minors from being direct recipients of child-support payments would immediately benefit these young people in ways that equal marriage would not.
While still in law school, in 2008, Strangio moved to New York City, where he interned at the Urban Justice Center’s Peter Cicchino Youth Project, working with homeless queer and transgender young people. There, he met an attorney named Nadia Qurashi; the two became friends and, later, romantic partners and co-parents. “This was the best job ever,” Qurashi told me, at a coffee shop in Jackson Heights. “These young people were asking Chase about his gender and coming out, and he was so open. He challenged the boundaries between client and attorney.”
In other ways, Strangio was private about his transition. When he changed his name, in 2008, college friends received a brief e-mail. (“It was probably hard to send that e-mail, despite us all being queer and progressive,” Maggie Field said.) When he had chest surgery, in 2009, he didn’t tell anyone about his plans until the last minute, when it occurred to him, “What if I die and someone has to tell my mother?” For a long time, he remained a “sister” and a “daughter” to his brother and mother. “But then I had a kid, and I was Dad, and I thought, O.K., I don’t want to put my weird fragmented self onto my kid.” He talked to his family. He recalled that his mother mourned losing a daughter: “She said, ‘I didn’t even want one boy. And now I have two?’ ” Noah, according to Chase, said, “But we should always be Noah and your old name.”
Noah remembers the conversation differently: “Chase sat me down and said, ‘You can call me what you want.’ I said, ‘I’ll call you Chase.’ ”
After law school, Strangio won a fellowship at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, to work in prisons. The S.R.L.P., named for a legendary New York queer street activist, is collectively run and fully devoted to direct services to clients in need. At the time, it had an annual budget of around half a million dollars and a staff of seven people, all of them overworked. Strangio’s mentor there, Dean Spade, who had founded the S.R.L.P., was just five years his senior. Strangio learned by trial and error, and made some bad mistakes. In an attempt to aid a trans woman who was serving time in a men’s prison, he wrote to prison authorities, alerting them to violence at the institution. “As a result, the entire wing was put on lockdown, and that got everyone pissed off and created a heightened system of violence,” he said. “What was really needed was to get the person out of prison, or at least to a women’s prison.”
He teamed up with Lorena Borjas, the unofficial den mother to transgender Latinx women in New York City, to start the bail fund for transgender immigrants, and he joined a working group of lawyers who were drafting recommendations for President Obama’s Department of Justice on the incarceration of trans people. “We asked people in prison what they needed, and they all said that they wanted a trans unit,” Strangio said. But the lawyers in the working group, including Strangio, believed that L.G.B.T. units were stigmatizing, and only served to perpetuate the prison system. They advised that inmates’ housing should not be determined solely on the basis of sexuality or gender identity. The D.O.J. accepted the recommendations, and a number of units were shut down. Strangio now regrets the outcome. “We acted as though the real stakeholders were the law professors,” he said.
By 2012, after two years at the S.R.L.P., Strangio was burned out. “Oh, my God, nothing is improving,” he recalled thinking. He was living with Qurashi in Jackson Heights with their newborn. (They have since amicably separated, and share parenting duties.) Strangio was making fifty thousand dollars a year, and was a hundred thousand dollars in debt. “This is not a sustainable situation,” he thought. Sleep-deprived and full of misgivings, Strangio interviewed for a job as a staff attorney with the A.C.L.U. “I thought never in my life would I be interested in such a job,” Strangio told me. The A.C.L.U. focusses on impact litigation; it doesn’t provide direct services to clients. And, he said, “everyone there went to Harvard or Yale and clerked.” This was not exactly true, but almost no one else at the A.C.L.U. had gone to Northeastern or worked at scrappy grassroots organizations where the lawyers order their own office supplies and take out the trash. Strangio had little practice in writing briefs and had a weak grasp of federal-court structure; for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel smart. The old feeling of not belonging returned. The A.C.L.U., at that time, had no all-gender rest rooms and just one single-user bathroom, which was on a different floor.
In August, 2013, Strangio appeared on television for the first time, on “Democracy Now!” He had been invited to talk about Chelsea Manning, who was then serving a thirty-five-year sentence in a men’s military prison for violating the Espionage Act by giving military documents to WikiLeaks. Manning had just come out as transgender, and the Army was refusing to provide her with hormone treatment for her transition, which Strangio argued was unconstitutional. The show’s host, Amy Goodman, said, “Couldn’t you tell us your story? You are transitioning from woman to man.” One can see Strangio gulping air before diverting the question. “I am someone who identifies as transgender,” he replied. “And, as a transgender person, hearing from Chelsea Manning yesterday is especially, you know, empowering. I think it is so brave to come out.” He told me that as he responded he thought, I am never doing this again.
For three and a half years, Strangio was part of Manning’s legal team, one of her most visible public advocates, and the only trans person with whom she could communicate in person. Strangio and the A.C.L.U. fought to get Manning hormone treatment, then to get the prison administration to allow her to grow her hair, and then to get her sentence commuted, collecting more than a hundred thousand signatures on a petition. “I really thought she was going to die in prison,” Strangio told me. “She had had multiple suicide attempts.” Then, in 2017, Barack Obama, in his last hours as President, commuted Manning’s sentence, and a few months later Strangio travelled to Fort Leavenworth, in the middle of the night, to pick Manning up.
After her release, Manning came into a kind of queer celebrity. During Pride Month, she attended gala fund-raisers; Annie Leibovitz shot her for Vogue; the Times put her on the cover of its magazine. Yet a backlash against trans visibility continued to gain momentum. Bills that would require people to use bathrooms in accordance with the sex marked on their birth certificates were being debated in states around the country. The Supreme Court, after agreeing to hear the case of Gavin Grimm, the Virginia teen-ager fighting to be able to use the boys’ bathroom at his high school, sent the case back to a lower court after the Trump Administration reversed the Department of Education’s previous guidance on trans students’ rights.
“Nobody wanted a trans case at the Supreme Court,” Strangio said—the movement wasn’t ready. The fifteen-year legal and political campaign that led to the marriage victories at the Court had crafted a compelling, textured picture of same-sex couples as deserving of empathy and rights. Strangio wanted the A.C.L.U. to be the storyteller for trans people in America; because Trump’s election spurred an enormous influx of donations to the A.C.L.U., Strangio suddenly had the money and the organizational will to undertake a trans-advocacy campaign. The A.C.L.U. had expanded its office space in the financial district, and now there was an all-gender bathroom on the floor where Strangio worked.
He teamed up with Zackary Drucker, a producer on the TV series “Transparent,” to write the script of a four-minute animation on the history of trans activism, illustrated by Molly Crabapple and narrated by Laverne Cox. This was followed by three short documentaries on trans people: a car mechanic in Georgia, a former inmate struggling to make a new life in Chicago, and a six-year-old girl in Texas, named Kai Shappley. The film about Kai and her very religious mother, Kimberly Shappley, won an Emmy in 2019. “It is less that we need to create a linear narrative to convince the courts of anything than we simply need to get trans stories out there,” Strangio said. “My sense of the narrative that we have to create is just that trans people exist.”
The summer of 2020, Strangio said, “brought some amazing wins” following the decision in Bostock. The Fourth Circuit decided in favor of Grimm, who graduated from high school three years ago, ruling that a policy requiring transgender students to use “alternative appropriate private facilities” was unconstitutional. In another case that Strangio worked on, a federal judge in Idaho issued an injunction against a state law that banned trans women and girls from women’s sports teams. The decision in Bostock had changed the terrain, yet, before its session was over, the Court was cutting back on Bostock’s implications, broadening the “religious exemption” from anti-discrimination statutes in a 7–2 decision, with Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissenting. In its new term, the Court will consider whether the city of Philadelphia can refuse to give a contract to a Catholic adoption agency because it discriminates against L.G.B.T. parents.
“We’ll probably lose that one, especially now,” Strangio told me, when we spoke two days after Ginsburg’s death. He was irritated by the discourse surrounding Trump’s replacement for Ginsburg, the conservative Catholic judge Amy Coney Barrett. (A consortium of twenty-seven L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups opposed Barrett’s confirmation to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in 2017.) In an article for Bloomberg, the liberal law professor Noah Feldman, who clerked on the Supreme Court with Barrett twenty years ago, endorsed her as “a sincere, lovely person,” with “an ideal judicial temperament of calm and decorum.” On the phone, Strangio told me, “This is not a legitimate way to think about the material consequences for people’s lives” of a Supreme Court appointment. Attending a top law school, clerking at the Court, and mastering the idiom of civil legal debate, Strangio said, does not qualify a person to decide if certain people should not have access to health care or be protected from employment discrimination.
In the course of several months of conversations with Strangio and people close to him, his mother’s house in Newton, with its abandoned great room and busy little kitchen off to the side, offered itself up as a metaphor. The law, like the suburban American house, is designed to order a particular pattern of relationships, many of them oriented around the heterosexual nuclear family. For real people in contemporary circumstances to inhabit the house the law built, one has to find side doors and discreet corners, while the dominant space changes little and the façade remains unaltered. The two big L.G.B.T.-rights Supreme Court victories that came before Bostock—Windsor and Obergefell—did exactly that: they carved out a place for monogamous same-sex couples who want to marry (statistically, these are more apt to be white middle-class people like the plaintiffs) in the house of the American nuclear family.
Unlike those earlier decisions, Gorsuch’s opinion in Bostock was not written in the soaring language of civic aspiration. Yet it opened the door wider than even the plaintiffs had hoped: his textual analysis of Title VII is so narrow that it requires neither a definition of sex nor a distinction between sex and gender identity; it says, in effect, that sex, whatever it may be, is integral to a person’s transgender status. The Bostock decision might have created the opportunity for someone like Strangio to become visible not as a representative of clean-cut, gender-conforming trans people but as the person he is. Five days after the decision, Strangio tweeted a picture of himself wearing a black muscle shirt, a pink headband, and an upturned ponytail held in place by a pink hair tie. “Happy Saturday,” he tweeted. “We won 6–3. And I am never going to stop fighting for more and true justice. Also I’m queer AF.”
Telling the story of being trans almost inevitably becomes uncomfortably intimate. Strangio described himself to me on several occasions as “weirdly” private. The first time I saw him in Massachusetts, he wanted to talk while walking on slippery, iced-over paths in a public park, until I finally begged him to go inside. In New York, before the pandemic hit, we met in coffee shops and at the A.C.L.U. office, but Strangio insisted that his studio apartment was “not suitable for visitors.” He told me, “It’s a small rental space without nice things, and I’m hyperaware of that.” He allowed filmmakers into his home for “The Fight,” but felt self-conscious when he saw that all of his colleagues appeared to live in well-appointed Brooklyn brownstones. Shouldn’t one of the country’s most prominent L.G.B.T.Q. activists have a more fabulous apartment? “I feel shame about it, like I should have done better,” he said. “But I want to be part of the story that trans people just are, and we live. I am messy. There is nothing binary, nothing neat here.”
When Leibovitz photographed him for the Google ad, she asked him to remove his shirt, and he reluctantly complied. “I don’t feel great about my body,” he told me. “But so much of trans masculinity is images of these skinny, muscular, very binary guys.” The final image was a diptych, showing Strangio reflected in the mirror of his bathroom, and a pair of gray slacks, a white shirt, and a plaid tie hanging on a door. “These are such overused tropes, which show transness as something that’s put on,” he said. (The one happy result of the shoot was that Google gave Strangio a Chromebook, which proved indispensable when his kid needed to switch to distance learning, in March.) In January, when the South Dakota legislature was considering a bill that would have criminalized providing medical transition services to minors, Strangio posted a topless selfie on Twitter. “Gender affirming health care saved my life,” he wrote. “Give young people a chance to live.” (The bill was killed in committee, after lobbying by the health-care industry.)
Strangio hates it when parents of his teen-age clients ask him about his own transition, and he sets boundaries on discussions of his medical decisions. At the same time, he realizes that for young people in rural areas, and for their parents, he is often the first trans person they have ever met. So he is open to other kinds of questions: “Are you happy?” “Do you have a family?” “How did you become a lawyer?” Perhaps when you literally embody your work and your politics, you develop a discerning sense of how to measure social distances. You get used to broadcasting details of your self to strangers. This is not intimacy; it’s education. “I’ve used my body and my story in my work,” he said, “and I hope the next generation may not have to.” ♦
