A Representative in Every Sense of the Word
October 22, 2020 1:57 AM Subscribe
Masha Gessen profiles Chase Strangio and his recent victories for transgender rights in the US as the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice (The New Yorker). Previously: Bostock v. Clayton County (June 2020).
I am so happy that Chase and people like him are working to advance our legal rights. Last month they were named one of Time's Most Influential People. We still have a long way to go. The ACLU is still fighting for trans people who want to openly serve in the military, and against state laws that allow people to discriminate against us on the basis of religion, for the safety of trans people. Basically for our right to belong.
I definitely personally identify with Chase on not wanting to discuss medical decisions. Our bodies should be ours to control, ours to make decisions over, and that includes what we want to tell and show others. We can vary widely in what we decide to do, and what to share, about being trans, but unless we choose otherwise those decisions are really nobody's business but ours. Anyway people are so much more than their bodies, and that's true whether trans or not.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 1:38 PM on October 22, 2020 [4 favorites]
I definitely personally identify with Chase on not wanting to discuss medical decisions. Our bodies should be ours to control, ours to make decisions over, and that includes what we want to tell and show others. We can vary widely in what we decide to do, and what to share, about being trans, but unless we choose otherwise those decisions are really nobody's business but ours. Anyway people are so much more than their bodies, and that's true whether trans or not.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 1:38 PM on October 22, 2020 [4 favorites]
Yes, very much so, Chrysopoeia. Lovely point. It seemed to me like Gessen did well in respecting that privacy, although of course having a New Yorker piece about you in the first place is shining a pretty bright spotlight. I do hope the article sits well with Strangio. What a terrific person.
posted by col_pogo at 3:45 PM on October 22, 2020
posted by col_pogo at 3:45 PM on October 22, 2020
I cannot tell you how much I loved this part:
"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.”
And he has been, to the benefit of us all.
posted by minervous at 4:54 PM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]
"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.”
And he has been, to the benefit of us all.
posted by minervous at 4:54 PM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]
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.
I hope cis people noted this sentence.
Also, I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I was the kid who went in last from recess every day in fourth and fifth grade because they had us line up in gendered lines and if I was last, I was in whatever damn line I pleased. You may safely assume that I was the sort of kid who would want to be first in line as a way of demonstrating that I was “good at recess”. Part of me wants to cry that children are still fucking doing that.
posted by hoyland at 9:33 AM on October 23, 2020
I hope cis people noted this sentence.
Also, I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I was the kid who went in last from recess every day in fourth and fifth grade because they had us line up in gendered lines and if I was last, I was in whatever damn line I pleased. You may safely assume that I was the sort of kid who would want to be first in line as a way of demonstrating that I was “good at recess”. Part of me wants to cry that children are still fucking doing that.
posted by hoyland at 9:33 AM on October 23, 2020
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posted by medusa at 10:38 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]