- Pritzker Fellows
- Former Fellows
- Chase Strangio
Chase Strangio
Lawyer & Activist; Deputy Director for Trans Justice, LGBTQ & HIV Project at the ACLU
Fall 2023 Pritzker Fellow
Seminar Series: “On the Frontlines of Transgender Legal Battles: An Exploration of Law, Culture & Politics With Nationally Recognized Expert on Transgender Rights”
Chase Strangio is Deputy Director for Transgender Justice with the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. A national leader in transgender rights litigation and advocacy Chase has been counsel in some of the past decade’s most pivotal legal fights on behalf of transgender litigants including the ACLU’s challenge to North Carolina’s notorious HB2, Carcaño, et al. v. Cooper, et al, the ACLU’s challenge to Trump’s trans military ban, Stone v. Trump, the case of Aimee Stephens, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v EEOC at the Supreme Court, and recent challenges to anti-trans laws and policies in Idaho, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Indiana and Oklahoma. Chase was also counsel in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that struck down bans on marriages for same-sex couples. In addition to his advocacy in the courtroom and in state legislatures, Chase appears regularly in media and has produced multiple short films including the Emmy-award winning short, Texas Strong. In 2020, Chase was named to TIME Magazine’s List of the most 100 influential people of the year. Chase is also a co-founder of the Lorena Borjas Community Fund, TranSanta, and the Trans Week of Visibility and Action.
Seminars
“On the Frontlines of Transgender Legal Battles: An Exploration of Law, Culture & Politics With Nationally Recognized Expert on Transgender Rights”
Debates over rights for transgender people in the United States - once largely invisible to mainstream political discourse - have morphed into one the largest political and policy battles engulfing the country. Chase Strangio, the Deputy Director for Transgender Justice with the American Civil Liberties Union, has been at the center of key fights, and a leading architect of legal challenges to anti-trans bills in the context of restrooms, sports, and health care.
He represented whistleblower Chelsea Manning in her lawsuit against the Department of Defense; former high school student Gavin Grimm, whose case to use the school restroom went to the Supreme Court, and Aimee Stephens in the historic Supreme Court case that led to the Court’s 6-3 decision that LGBTQ workers are protected under federal anti-discrimination law.
In his seminars, Chase, a visiting fellow during week seven, will orient students around the history of trans rights, trans bodies and trans justice. Students will have an inside view into how the nation got to this political moment and where things are likely to go, legally and politically. Expect a comparative analysis of legal strategies, an exploration of art and advocacy and guideposts around advocacy.
In 2023 alone, state lawmakers pursued hundreds of bills in at least 33 states targeting transgender youth and adults. There have been scores of proposed restrictions on sports team participation, bathroom use, medical care and access to survival spaces like homeless and domestic violence shelters, as well as attempts to ban drag shows, library books and to limit what teachers can say about and do to protect LGBTQ people and history in the classroom. This seminar will focus on the way in which the American legal structure and pivotal moments in legal history created the conditions for the current political landscape with respect to trans rights and bodies. In this overview of the current legal landscape, Chase will also chronicle his own story and how it led to his decision to pursue a career in law and the ways in which his lived experiences interact with his strategic choices in his practice.
As state legislatures, Congress and the federal courts continue to constrain how we resist government incursions into our bodily autonomy and freedom, activists and organizers are turning to creative strategies to resist violence and build power. The history of queer activism has long been tied to art and disruption and this moment in time demands that we learn from those lineages. This seminar will focus on the importance of creative resistance in contemporary fights for trans survival, the connection between cultural discourse and legal advocacy, and examples of how to connect law, organizing and art in the fights ahead for transformative gender justice.
Special Guest: Paola Mendoza, Co-Founder & Artistic Director of the Women’s March
Weaponized debates over the bodies of trans people and their health care have been at the center of political discourse over the past two years and, in particular, in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election. In Congress, state legislatures, and courts, anti-trans forces are using public anxiety over gender and trans bodies to expand upon Dobbs – the landmark Supreme Court decision that reversed Roe V Wade – to build a larger framework for eroding bodily autonomy. This seminar will focus on cross-movement legal and cultural strategies in the post-Dobbs, pre-2024 political moment with an eye towards the consequences of different potential inflection points.