Chase Strangio

Chase Strangio (born circa 1982/1983) is an American lawyer and transgender rights activist. He is a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Strangio grew up near Boston, Massachusetts.

Strangio attended Grinnell College, graduating in 2004. After graduation, he worked as a paralegal at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD).He went on to attend Northeastern University School of Law. Strangio came out as a transgender man while in law school.

After graduating from Northeastern in 2010, Strangio received a fellowship from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) to continue developing his legal skills.

After law school, Strangio worked as a public defender for Dean Spade, the first openly trans law professor in the U.S. Spade's work had inspired Strangio while he was in college.

In 2012, Strangio and trans activist Lorena Borjas founded the Lorena Borjas Community Fund to provide bail and bond assistance to trans people.

In 2013, Strangio began working for the ACLU. Strangio served as lead counsel for the ACLU team representing transgender U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning. He was also part of the team suing on behalf of trans student Gavin Grimm, who was denied access to the boys' restrooms at his school.

In October 2019, Strangio was one of the lawyers representing Aimee Stephens, a trans woman who was fired from her job at a funeral home, in the U.S. Supreme Court case R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The previous month, trans actress Laverne Cox brought Strangio as her date to the 2019 Emmy Awards, and the pair spoke to reporters on the red carpet about the upcoming court case.

In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 6–3 in favor of Gerald Bostock, a gay man terminated from his job due to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, in Bostock v. Clayton County. Strangio was one of the lawyers on the case. The case ruled that it is illegal to discriminate in employment on the basis of transgender identity or sexual orientation.

Strangio has appeared on television programs including The Rachel Maddow Show, Democracy Now!, For the Record with Greta, AM Joy, PBS NewsHour, and Up.

In November 2020, journalist Glenn Greenwald criticized Strangio—whom he called the ACLU's "most celebrated and popular lawyer"—for "cheering the corporate and cultural repression of a book whose ideas he dislikes." Greenwald described the book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier, as an exploration of "the rapid, massive increase in teenage girls self-identifying as trans boys and undergoing permanent gender reassignment therapies and surgeries in their teens." Strangio, who had tweeted that "stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on," responded that he was not speaking for the ACLU and said he deleted his tweet because "there were relentless calls to have me fired, which I found exhausting as I was navigating work and childcare."

In 2014, Strangio was named to the Trans 100 list for "outstanding contributions to the trans community".

In June 2017, Strangio was one of those chosen for NBC Out's inaugural "#Pride30" list.

In May 2018, Strangio was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by his alma mater Grinnell College.

In November 2019, he was awarded the American Bar Association's Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity's 2020 Stonewall Award.

Strangio was included in 2020's Time 100 most influential people in the world.