Boston.com, December 2024
On a recent day in early December, Northeastern University law students gathered in a classroom in Boston to listen to a broadcast of a U.S. Supreme Court case’s oral argument. The high-profile case, the students learned, challenges a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming health care for transgender minors and imposes civil penalties on doctors who violate the restrictions. Similar laws have been passed in several other states. A few hundred miles south of Boston, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Chase Strangio stood before the Supreme Court justices in Washington D.C., asserting that the Tennessee law violates the Equal Protection rights of transgender adolescents.
That day, Strangio became the first known transgender person to argue before the highest court in the land. “I don’t think he’ll stop fighting until he’s out of breath,” Strangio’s former Northeastern University Law professor Libby Adler told Boston.com. “He’s a model for what [law students] are training for, and what they can go out there and do.”
