Chase Strangio, the Deputy Director for Transgender Justice with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, and host Rafa Kidvai of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How know that their movements’ path to freedom depends on one another. They go deep on the interdependence of transgender and reproductive justice, and explore what true liberation should be founded on–love.
Visit Repro Legal Defense Fund to learn more. Follow Chase on Twitter and Instagram @chasestrangio.
If you have questions about your legal rights or access to abortion, go to the Repro Legal Helpline or call 844-868-2812. If you are being criminalized for something that happened during a pregnancy, go to reprolegaldefensefund.org.
Rafa Kidvai: This is No Body Criminalized how the state controls our bodies, families, and communities. I'm Rafa Kidvai, director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund, at If/When/How. On our podcast we talk with experts, activists, and advocates whose daily work intersects with reproductive justice and the state's targeting of marginalized communities. SisterSong, a reproductive justice collective, led by women of color defines reproductive justice as the human rights to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. You will hear us restate the shared commitment throughout our interviews because regardless of the issues guests focus on, that is ultimately the world we all intend to create.
Our guest today is Chase Strangio. Chase is the deputy director for Trans Justice with the ACLU. About a year ago, Chase and I collaborated on a Twitter thread. It was called We Must Love One Another: Why Trans and Repro Justice Movements Should be Building Solidarity, based on a W. H. Auden poem we both loved called September 1st, 1939 where he writes, "There is no such thing as the state and no one exists alone. Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police. We must love one another or die." Here to elaborate on how our movements can love each other and perhaps be more successful for it, is Chase Strangio.
Hi, Chase. It's so nice to have you here.
Chase Strangio: Thank you for having me. It's so good to be here.
Kidvai: Okay, so we wrote a thread about the sort of siloing of trans and repro movements and it felt so important then, and it still feels really important now in part because I think there's this way in which trans and repro movements are painted as separate or even in conflict. And I guess I would love to hear how you think they're actually maybe interdependent, related, the same.
Strangio: Yeah, I really still can't believe they're in any way separated because both the state created structures to attack both trans justice and reproductive justice are the same. It's the same actual physical human beings. It's the same legal imperatives, it's the same limited constitutional framework. Sort of we're dealing with the same set of enemies, so to speak. And then also the demands are so aligned, which is demands for self-determination, for bodily autonomy, for ability to control one's reproductive and bodily choices in the service of having a full, free and expansive life. And it's actually the same movement, I would say overall, we've just been separated by our opponents who strategically divide us and pit us against each other and we unfortunately I think have allowed that to happen.
Kidvai: At least on the repro front, we could do a whole lot better about being inclusive to trans and gender nonconforming people. And actually I feel like it's really kind of slowed us down or been to our detriment as a movement. And I'm wondering if you have some rage or feelings about that you would like to share.
Strangio: I have so much rage and so many feelings all around. I think I'm not uniquely rageful towards the repro movement, as much as any movement, especially movements that have been so aligned with law as the sort of leading intervention. And I think because you have reproductive rights, so to speak, as opposed to reproductive justice being such a salient framework in the US in particular, it just means that there's this turning towards the law and this notion of rights that are always so constrained. And that is part of why I think it's been such an abject failure, which I would also say of trans rights movements and alt movements that rely on rights. And I think one thing I think about a lot is that the Supreme Court in Geduldig v. Aiello and other cases in essence said "It's not sex discrimination to discriminate based on pregnancy, to discriminate based on reproductive capacity." That it’s sort of entrenched this turn towards, "No, of course it's womanness that is at the center of this." It sort of becomes this very perverse reaction to the law–as if the law was ever going to be responsive to our full bodily autonomy and capacity. In this particular moment, what is troubling–remains very troubling–is even in the wake of Dobbs, even with the same people and state legislatures attacking trans access to medical care as well as access to abortion, we're still not joining forces in the way that we could. And that to me is inexcusable.
Kidvai: Right. Because people are trying to live and survive and they're dying when they can't access care emotionally, literally. And that's a problem.
Strangio: Exactly. Yeah. It's like there's so many problems and why are we sitting here sort of continuing to just have arguments about what words are used and when and how instead of looking at the material consequences of the very world that we're living in.
Kidvai: I think a lot about self-managed care, including self-managed abortions and people self-manage on the abortion front for lots of reasons. It's because your home feels safe or better because your providers are trash sometimes and they don't make you feel safe or because there's lots of red tape. Whether you need a therapy letter to get your gender affirming care or whether you need a judicial bypass to get your abortion, some of these ways in which we're used to being gate-kept have always been true. And then in the face of what both our movements are facing right now, which is really sort of unprecedented limitations on accessing care, I imagine people will have to self-manage. And at least on the abortion front, we're concerned not about medical risks when people self-manage abortions. We're concerned about legal risks. Is there a conversation around self-managed care and the criminalization of self-managed gender affirming care that you feel like you want to comment on?
Strangio: Yeah, I mean I think this is hugely important. I mean, one reason why it's important is because one of the things we're going to be facing is just the absolute sense of despair that people will feel, particularly in 2023 with the landscape around these bans on gender affirming care. And I think people will think there's nothing left for them. And I feel very invested in having historically accurate stories about our lives, which is: most people have always self-managed gender affirming care and continue to.
The notion of getting this care from a doctor covered by insurance is incredibly new, but the care itself isn't new. And that's true of course with abortion too. I think that as always the right is 10 steps ahead of us. So I was just reading an amendment to a Tennessee bill, and Tennessee is moving forward with a ban on gender affirming care, but they're amending it to have a prohibition on telehealth, to have a child abuse definition so that in essence it would become child abuse to administer the care, which means people couldn't leave to get the care and their parents couldn't take them out of state.
I think that's sort of what we're seeing with the aid and abet language that we saw in SB 8 in Texas that's now making its way into a lot of the anti-gender affirming care bills so that they're also trying to chill our ability to organize around the categorical bans.
Kidvai: This leads me to my next question, which I think is really that from tactics to messaging to legislation, the attacks against our movements have really looked the same in parts. What are the ways in which you've seen antis, people on the right, white supremacists, et cetera, and transphobes the same people, use the same tactics to harm us?
Strangio: It is so similar and it's so troubling that we just repeat the same things over and over again and we're subjected to the same playbook and yet we still haven't mobilized an effective resistance to it. I find deeply frustrating not to say that there aren't people effectively resisting, but there is not in sort of a large scale effective resistance. So from mapping clinics that provide gender affirming care to sending people to protests care, to having the Proud Boys mobilize in places that are known to provide care, bomb threats to Children's Hospital in Boston. This is exactly what it is in the context of abortion care as we know. So there's sort of those organizing tactics from the right and they are good organizers, they're terrifying organizers, but they're good at mobilizing their people. They use informal networks. They use in some cases church networks to get out the word and show up in ways that deters people from accessing the care that they need.
And then obviously the legal strategies that I mentioned sort of making not just the care itself categorically banned, but making it criminalized and not just the provision of the care criminalized, but the people who support the provision of the care, the ability to move from one place to another to get the care and they know all of the limitations.
And much like in the abortion context, many of the states where these bans on gender affirming care are being proposed, there are barely any providers at the outset. The threshold is suboptimal to no care, and then they're banning it on top of that. So you're already looking at a type of care that's largely out of reach for most people. The small subset of people that can get it have to utilize a lot of hoops and they're then criminalizing that care. And then also, of course, what we know to be true in every single context is the enhanced scrutiny on those with the most privilege will lead to the most criminalization on the people who have always had to self-manage their care and have been able in many cases to do so under the radar.
And that will be increasingly scrutinized and they will face the prosecution, they will face the criminalization, and that means homeless young people, Black and brown young people, people who are in any form state surveillance or custody, homeless shelters, mental health institutions, foster care and otherwise adjacent to criminalization that's already happening in communities.
Kidvai: Absolutely. The wild part to me always feels like that we're being told or it's being pitched to us as it's about our own safety. I think about one of the many myths that we hear, at least on the gender affirming care front is that trans-affirming care is always sterilizing, for instance. And this is supposed to pull people from the repro movement to be enraged. And how have these lies harmed our movement?
Strangio: The care isn't sterilizing, period. So there's that piece that I need to just correct the record that is just an absolute lie. I think the irony, of course, is all of the sort of "pro-life discourse" or protecting children discourse. They also don't care about trans people's ability to procreate. They don't care about children once they're born, as we know. And one of the truly bizarre and really damaging narratives that's being pushed in the anti-trans space around in particular trans-masculine young people, is that actually they are lesbians that are being coerced into transition. And you have these states standing up in court sort of suggesting that it was so hard to be a lesbian so people became trans, which is in and of itself a nonsensical proposition. But it's also hilarious to hear a state that cares not at all about lesbians claiming this. So it's not like Arkansas is out here with their big lesbian rights movement. There are no protections for lesbians in Arkansas under state law. So all that to say, the hypocrisy is staggering. The way that the lies are able to fuel the expansive surveillance of the state is so troubling. And in the context of gender affirming care, they have gone so far as–and I mean it is actually shocking to read this repeatedly–they have compared the provision of gender affirming care to Nazi experimentation during the Holocaust and Tuskegee. And that is what they're saying in their court papers like-
Kidvai: The audacity.
Strangio: The audacity.
Kidvai: Absolutely. Oof. So we like to say Dobbs was not the beginning because I think so many people thought about Roe as liberation and therefore the fall of Roe as the beginning of a movement to fight for that liberation. And instead it was never enough, which I know you've heard people say Roe was never enough. That said, what does this decision in Dobbs mean for our communities? What does it mean for our collective futures?
Strangio: It's like a “both and” for me. On the one hand, in some sense after Dobbs, I was looking around at other lawyers who are feeling like, "Well, now we can't trust the Supreme Court." And I was like, "You trusted the Supreme Court? Like what?" And so, and I felt this at many times litigating where I have never gone to court and thought, "Oh, my goal here is to feel represented by the law." Because A, I don't think the law has that capacity, nor do I want to give the law that power. And so I don't want to suggest, and I don't think it would be accurate to say, that Dobbs was the beginning or the end of anything. It's just part of a legal structure that looks a lot like this. To hold Dobbs up as a uniquely terrible example is actually just very ahistorical and problematic.
And at the same time, we have to honor that it's a catastrophe, materially speaking, and it has paved the way for all of these bans under state law, things to be further eroded in our ability to access reproductive autonomy and control over our bodies. And so for me, what that means is we have to look to different tools for our fights forward. I'm not going to stop litigating. I think it's still a useful harm reduction. Every day that a law is blocked is a day someone's getting something. And I believe in that. It just can't be part of our liberation narrative. The liberation narrative has to come from the more days that we're alive. What are we doing to transform the world that we're living in? Because legal work isn't transforming the world we're living in, it's just reinforcing it.
Kidvai: Why do you think our bodies are the targets of so much state control in the first place?
Strangio: In order to control a population at large, I think that part of the organizing principle is to control the body and the family. The entirety of the Constitution of United States is sort of predicated on bodily control and enslavement and genocide. And so if you start from that premise and then see that all of our movements have likewise turned to that same system for relief, of course we've perpetuated notions of bodily control and not been liberated from them. And that's just one of the reasons, one of the many reasons, why turning to a law as a movement tool is so damaging. So that I think is one of the reasons why when we look at this particular legislative moment, we can trace how we got here by looking at not just the right, but also looking at the left, looking at the choices we've made, how we've built movements, how we've modeled one movement off of an unsuccessful other movement, and now it is just staggeringly bad.
And looking at the legislative landscape in 2023, we're at over 250 anti LGBTQ bills, the majority of them are anti-trans. We already had Utah pass a ban on gender affirming care that basically went unnoticed. I mean we were just talking about bathrooms and sports teams two seconds ago, and now we're talking about taking kids out of homes and banning telehealth and doing all sorts of very significant things to restrict people's ability to get care that we know saves their lives. And the other thing I'll say about this legislative session, in addition to all the gender affirming care bans that are criminalizing access to healthcare, that are very much encroaching into adulthood in terms of the ages that they're focused on, we're also seeing these new criminal bans on drag performance, which are very closely approximating the old school criminal cross-dressing laws.
And so this is actually about criminalizing the trans body regardless of what it's doing. What we need is one of our critical forms of resistance is human connection, and I really worry about what it means and everyone will be looking over their shoulder in so many ways, and that will just take away, too, the joy and playfulness, and that is also part of the objective.
I think targeting drag performance makes that crystal clear. What is drag, if not celebration? It is about joy, it's about playfulness, it's about camp, and it's about fun and they're making it a crime. So there it is. They don't want us to feel joy. They don't want us to survive. And that is another reason why our resistance has to be grounded in those things first and foremost, instead of in things like rights or equality which are meaningless and actually just reinforce those systems that are always predicated on coercion, power, enslavement, genocide. A right is something that the state made up. And when your state is what our state is, you don't want to be predicating your liberation on something that the state created like that.
Kidvai: I feel like this is a call to action to be ungovernable by being joyful in a way, which maybe is a bit of a flip of what you were saying, but it really does feel like joy can be really radical. Connection can be really radical. Breaking down that fence, reaching across it, however you want to say it feels is actually an act of resistance. And it's powerful. It's powerful to love the people around you. It's powerful to keep them alive and care for them.
Strangio: It is.
Kidvai: I have learned so much from you today and in life. I am so grateful for you. Thank you for existing and fighting for all of us to exist. It's been really, really nice having you Chase.
Strangio: Thank you so much for having me, and I love having this conversation with you. And I do think having these conversations is part of what we need to be doing, partly because it's fun to be collaborative and also because the more we sort of strategize, we can excavate other possibilities, and I think that's part of what we need to be doing. So thank you.
Kidvai: Here are some takeaways from the conversation. The repro justice and trans justice movements are interdependent. They even make the same mistakes. Chase argues those mistakes come from believing that legal rights-based frameworks are the path to achieving liberation. While engaging with a flawed legal system as it exists by using the tools we have is important, the way to liberation .. might just be through joy, and love.
Chase is the deputy director for Trans Justice with the ACLU. You can find him on Twitter @chasestrangio. I'm Rafa Kidvai, the host of this podcast and director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. The Repo Legal Defense Fund funds bail and strong defenses for anyone criminalized for something that happens during pregnancy. Learn more at reprolegaldefensefund.org. If you have questions about your legal rights, go to reprolegalhelpline.org or call 844-868-2812. No Body Criminalized is produced by LWC Studios for the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How Sage Carson and Jen Gerdish are the media and marketing team at If/When/How. Pamela Kirkland is the show's producer. Paulina Velasco is the managing producer at LWC Studios. Kojin Tashiro is lead producer and mixed this episode. And remember, keep your community safe and don't talk to cops.
CITATION:
Kidvai, Rafa, host. “When Movements Love One Another.” No Body Criminalized, Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. March 13, 2023. Reprolegaldefensefund.org.