The Supreme Court is expected to make a decision in the coming weeks in a high challenges case that could affect the access of transgender persons to the nationwide transition.
The case, US c. Skrmetti, concerns a law in Tennessee This prohibits certain care for minors, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, and if the restrictions are discriminatory on the basis of sex and transgender status.
A new documentary, “strengthened exam”, follows Chase Strangio, a lawyer for the union of American civil liberties, because he represents trans youth, their families and a doctor who brought an action against the law in April 2023. Strangio became the first person openly trans to discuss before the Supreme Court during the oral arguments in December. The film was created at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will present itself to Newfest, a queer film festival in New York, May 29, then to others Film festivals across the country.
The director of the film, Sam Feder, said that it was a series of another documentary that he made called “DisclosureWhich was published in 2020 and assessed how trans people are represented in cinema and television.
“The motivation to make this film was to explore how the increase in visibility could lead to counterpouss,” said Feder. “I did not know that it would be as terrifying as today.”
“Strengthened exam” presents interviews with trans activists, including actress Laverne Cox, and with journalists such as Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia Journalism School and writer for the New Yorker; Lydia Polgreen, opinion columnist for the New York Times; And Gina ChuaOne of the most publicized trans media leaders.
A large part of the documentary focuses on the effects of the increase in media coverage, in particular the New York Times, on the access of minors to the care related to the transition.
Julie Hollar, main analyst of the media surveillance group fair, said in the documentary that she evaluated the coverage of the first page of the Times for 12 months, and during this time, she said, Times “has really published more articles from the first page that framed trans people, the Trans movement, as a threat to others than they have done with transfers to be threatened by this political movement.”
The New York Times did not respond to a request for comments.
Amy Scholder, who produced both a “in -depth examination” and a “disclosure”, said that when looking for the media coverage of trans people in recent years, she was amazed at the speed with which the large part of the public seemed to move from the celebration of trans visibility after the “disclosure” to question it.
“It was disconcerting the number of admitted feminists calling into question health care for trans adolescents and calling into question the participation of trans people in sports, and in particular teenagers in sport-things that seemed just against my understanding and the experience of what it means to be feminist,” she said.
She compared the response of the public to the laws targeting the young Trans to what she experienced during the AIDS epidemic, when people moved away from the crisis because they did not think it affected or did not want it.
“Then the irony is,” said Feder, “people thought it did not affect them, but you distance the bodily autonomy of anyone and you get away from everyone’s body autonomy.”
The documentary shows that the media coverage which criticizes the transitional care for minors has been referenced by the legislators of the States trying to adopt laws to restrict the care, and by states defending these laws before the courts, with Strangio saying at a given time in the film that he had never seen press articles previously referenced as proofs in prosecution.
Feder said that the film was originally going to focus entirely on media coverage, but the story of Strangio allowed them to show viewers the actual consequences of this cover. They followed Strangio from July, just after the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the Skrmetti affair, on December 4, the day Strangio argued.
The film shows Strangio the day after the elections, a month before his oral arguments at the High Court, when he says that he has “moments of” I can’t do this “, but I wake up this morning and I think:” F — It, we are fighting “.
“This is part of what is so extraordinary in him – he has this fight in him,” said Scholder. “He knows how to be strategic, and he is such a brilliant legal spirit and has always reminded us that we are going to take care of each other, and that these laws, for better or for worse, will never take care of us.”
Feder said that in the future, he hopes that the film provokes conversations on how laws restricting care related to transition could have generalized effects outside the Trans community. He also said that he hoped that people “examine and understand how they wanted to be able to make decisions about their own body.”
“We see the state after the ban on the ban on the state, and soon it will be all contraception, and then who is you going to be able to marry, do you have an intimacy in your own house? It goes there. This is an example of the way we are a moment of free fall of civil freedom,” he said.