The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision in the next few weeks in a high-stakes case that could affect transgender people’s access to transition-related care nationwide.
The case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, concerns a law in Tennessee that prohibits certain care for minors, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, and whether the restrictions are discriminatory on the basis of sex and transgender status.
A new documentary, “Heightened Scrutiny,” follows Chase Strangio, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, as he represents trans youth, their families and a doctor who filed suit against the law in April 2023. Strangio became the first openly trans person to argue in front of the Supreme Court during oral arguments in December. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will show at NewFest, a queer film festival in New York, on May 29, and then at other film festivals across the country.
The film’s director, Sam Feder, said it is a follow-up to another documentary he directed called “Disclosure,” which was released in 2020 and evaluated how trans people are depicted in film and television.
“The motivation to make that film was to explore how the rise in visibility could lead to backlash,” Feder said. “I did not know it would be as terrifying as it is now.”
“Heightened Scrutiny” features interviews with trans activists including actress Laverne Cox, and with journalists including Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and a writer for The New Yorker; Lydia Polgreen, a New York Times opinion columnist; and Gina Chua, one of the most high-profile trans media executives.
Much of the documentary focuses on the effects of increasing media coverage, particularly from The New York Times, on minors’ access to transition-related care.
Julie Hollar, a senior analyst at the media watchdog group FAIR, says in the documentary that she evaluated the Times’ front page coverage for 12 months, and during that time, she said, the Times “actually published more front page articles that framed trans people, the trans movement, as a threat to others than they did articles about trans people being threatened by this political movement.”
The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment.
Amy Scholder, who produced both “Heightened Scrutiny” and “Disclosure,” said that while researching media coverage of trans people over the last few years, she was astonished by how quickly much of the public appeared to go from celebrating trans visibility after “Disclosure” to questioning it.
“It was disconcerting how many avowed feminists were questioning health care for trans adolescents and questioning the participation of trans people in sports, and especially adolescents in sports — things that just seemed so against my understanding and experience of what it means to be a feminist,” she said.
She compared the public response to laws targeting trans youth to what she experienced during the AIDS epidemic, when people distanced themselves from the crisis because they didn’t think it affected them or didn’t want it to.
“Then the irony is,” Feder said, “people thought it didn’t affect them, but you chip away at anyone’s bodily autonomy and you’re chipping away at everyone’s bodily autonomy.”
The documentary shows that media coverage that is critical of transition care for minors has been referenced by state legislators trying to pass laws to restrict the care, and by states that are defending those laws in court, with Strangio saying at one point during the film that he had never previously seen news articles referenced so regularly as evidence in lawsuits.
Feder said the film was originally going to focus entirely on media coverage, but Strangio’s story allowed them to show viewers the real-world consequences of that coverage. They followed Strangio from July, just after the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the Skrmetti case, to Dec. 4, the day Strangio argued the case.
The film shows Strangio the day after the election, a month before his oral arguments at the high court, when he says he’s “had moments of ‘I can’t do this again,’ but then I wake up this morning and I think, ‘F— it, we fight.’”
“That’s part of what is so extraordinary about him — he has that fight in him,” Scholder said. “He knows how to be strategic, and he’s such a brilliant legal mind and has always reminded us that we’re going to take care of each other, and that these laws, for better or worse, will never actually take care of us.”
Feder said that going forward, he hopes the film provokes conversations about how laws restricting transition-related care could have widespread effects outside of the trans community. He also said he hopes people will “examine and understand how they want to be able to make decisions about their own body.”
“We’re seeing state after state ban abortion, and soon it’s going to be all contraception, and then it’s who are you going to be able to marry, do you have any privacy in your own home? It’s going there. This is one example of how we are a moment of complete civil liberty freefall,” he said.
