Meet the Newton native who became the first transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court
Boston.com
Local NewsMeet the Newton native who became the first transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court
“I don't think he'll stop fighting until he's out of breath.”
4., Chase Strangio, a Newton native, became the first known transgender person to argue before the Supreme Court.
December 23, 2024 | 6:00 PM 7 minutes to read
On a recent day in early December, Northeastern University law students gathered in a classroom in Boston to listen to a broadcast of a U.S.
Supreme Court case’s oral argument.
The high-profile case, the students learned, challenges a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming health care for transgender minors and imposes civil penalties on doctors who violate the restrictions.
Similar lawshave been passed in several other states.
A few hundred miles south of Boston, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Chase Strangiostood before the Supreme Court justices in Washington D.C., asserting that the Tennessee law violates the Equal Protection rights of transgender adolescents.
Advertisement: That day, Strangio became the first known transgender person to argue before the highest court in the land.
“I don’t think he’ll stop fighting until he’s out of breath,” Strangio’s former Northeastern University Law professor Libby Adler told Boston.com.
“ He’s a model for what [law students] are training for, and what they can go out there and do.”
Strangio grew up in Newton, in what he described as an “upper middle class suburban community.” For his brother, Noah Strangio, it was an “idyllic place to grow up.”
“I think I really struggled as a kid and was really lost,” Chase Strangio told Boston.com in a recent interview.
“I had a fire inside me that I knew would eventually find its way out, but I suffered and stressed a lot before it did.”
Advertisement: Chase, four years ahead of his brother in school, went to Newton North High School, where he was an avid soccer player.
Noah attended Newton South.
The family of four was paired off: Chase was constantly with their mother, Joan, while Noah was with their father, Mark.
“My mom would often be taking Chase to soccer games,” Noah told Boston.com.
“On the average weekend my dad and I would go on hikes and go and see movies.”
Meanwhile, Chase’s father remarried.
Chase never stayed with his brother at their father’s house, Noah recalled, and the two fought often.
“He would stop by our house, and they would have heated discussions,” Noah remembered.
“For Chase, that certainly created, I would say, an even further wedge between them.”
For years, Chase challenged his father on his political views, but ultimately decided to stop discussing it with him.
“My way of approaching it now is to not really talk about it,” he said.
“It continues to be one of the things that I just simply don’t understand, but don’t really engage in regular exchange about.”
After high school, Strangio was ready to leave New England.
He packed his bags and shipped off to Grinnell College, a private liberal arts school in the midwest.
In 2004, he moved back to Boston and worked at GLBTQ Advocates and Defenders for several years before enrolling in law school at Northeastern.
Advertisement: But Strangio worried he might never be seen as a legitimate courtroom advocate.
His fear, he wrotein a recent New York Times op-ed, was reinforced during his first year in law school.
“One of my law school professors at Northeastern told our class that we needed to abide by traditional gender norms in court,” he wrote.
“She instructed that women should wear skirts to appear before juries, and after a presentation in class she told me that I was too ‘soft-spoken’ to be seen as an effective male advocate.”
“It gave me a very negative feeling of my first year of law school overall,” he told Boston.com.
“But as in all institutional aspects of life, you will encounter people who are bringing in the overall biases and power dynamics of the professions and society in which you’re engaging, and that was what happened in my first year.”
While pursuing his law studies, Strangio lived in Jamaica Plain, where, he said, he found comfort in the neighborhood’s “queer community.”
After his first year, things got better.
He served as a research assistant on a clinical project to support LGBTQ youth for Professor Libby Adler.
Over the course of his studies, the two developed a close relationship.
“He’s always got his eye on who’s suffering and who’s left behind,” Adler said.
Strangio came out as transgender while he was attending Northeastern, and had access to medical care that he said made him “feel more at home” in his body.
“To be alive … also means to have the life you want to lead.”
‘It’s one thing to have an idea, another thing to make it happen’
After graduating from Northeastern in 2010, Strangio secured a fellowship at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, where he co-founded the Lorena Borjas Community Fund, which provides bail assistance for LGBTQ immigrants.
Strangio spoke about the fund during his job interview for the ACLU.
While he was younger than most other applicants, James Esseks of the ACLU said Strangio’s initiative to create the fund won him over.
“It’s one thing to have an idea, another thing to make it happen,” Esseks told Boston.com.
“That’s exactly the kind of initiative that I prize.”
Esseks and Strangio now direct the ACLU LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project together.
Since he started in 2013, Strangio has worked on his fair share of cases at the ACLU, including a challenge to North Carolina’s law prohibiting transgender people from accessing restroomsand Donald Trump’s ban on transgender service membersfrom serving in the military.
Advertisement: “In terms of what it means to be a trans person litigating trans cases, I think, of course, I have a personal connection to the material impact of the work, and I also can relate to my clients’ experiences to an extent,” he said.
“We’re all bringing our subjectivity to bear on our interpretation of the law and our interest in how any one or another legal problem impacts us.”
Strangio also defended whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a transgender woman who was arrested for disclosing classified documentsabout the U.S.
government to WikiLeaks.
The two became fast friends.
“His brain is just very sophisticated in the way he thinks and problem solves,” Hallgren told Boston.com.
“At the same time, he is self deprecating, down to earth, funny, fun, caring … there’s not a lot of people like that.”
In 2016, Strangio wrote a letterto then-President Barack Obama, pleading for Manning’s release.
Strangio’s calls were answered when Obama commuted most of Manning’s remaining sentence the following year.
Hallgren was assigned to document Strangio’s work representing Manning in the film “XY Chelsea,” including their first meeting at a military prison in Kansas City.
“I think people don’t intend on him being the center of a story, and the minute they meet him, it’s just like, it’s so obvious.”
‘Hope for the future’
On the day of his oral argument at the Supreme Court, Strangio felt at ease.
He had reread all the briefs and relevant cases, and regularly spoke out loud to himself, practicing hypothetical answers to his own hypothetical questions.
Advertisement: “At that point I felt like I knew what I knew, and so I was ready to do it and to have it be done,” he said.
About two weeks before his court appearance, Strangio spoke on the phone with his brother for an hour and a half.
They talked about everything from movies, to parenting, to the election.
Strangio sounded noticeably relaxed, a change that Noah observed in his brother over the years in the way he came to approach his work.
On the long-awaited day, Strangio traveled to the court alone.
He recalled meeting a colleague at security and talking with the opposing council before it was his turn to make his case.
“During the argument itself, you are so present, you almost don’t know what is happening,” he said.
“You’re so connected to the exchanges.”
Noah planned to be in the room with Chase while he spoke before the court.
But things took an unexpected turn when his wife went into labor with their second child the day before — three weeks early.
The brothers caught up on the phone the following day.
“Half the conversation … was about me.
Chase asked me about the baby and the birth, and how my toddler was doing,” Noah recalled.
“There was a level of zen or serenity from Chase.”
The argument itself went as expected, Chase told his brother.
But the most memorable moment of the day, Chase said, took place outside of the courtroom.
Demonstrators for transgender rights react after Chase Strangio addressed the crowd outside the Supreme Court building in Washington.
(Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times)
“I think the really most powerful part for me was coming out of the courtroom to the rally outside, to seeing trans young people and their parents, and seeing so many members of the community just out in the cold reveling in the joy of just being together, being alive, being able to be who they are,” he said.
“It was a really beautiful rally, and gave me a lot of hope for the future.”
Skrmettiin the spring or early summer of 2025.
Lindsay Shachnow covers general assignment news for Boston.com, reporting on breaking news, crime, and politics across New England.
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