ACLU litigator Chase Strangio made history in December by becoming the first openly transgender attorney to argue a case before the Supreme Court. In U.S. v. Skrmetti, Mr. Strangio argued on behalf of the young plaintiffs that Tennessee’s ban on minors receiving puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
The high court’s conservative supermajority wasn’t sold. The 6-3 decision in the Skrmetti case, issued last month, dealt the ACLU a bruising defeat. It left transgender rights advocates, who have placed promoting and defending minors’ access to gender-transition interventions at the forefront of their crumbling movement, at a demoralizing turning point.
In turn, Mr. Strangio has shifted course, presenting a countervailing argument to the court of public opinion:
He has blamed the Skrmetti loss on The New York Times.
Mr. Strangio blamed the Times at a speaking engagement in Provincetown, Mass. He has blamed the Times in popular queer podcasts, pointing to what he said is the paper’s “role in the current, very successful anti-trans panic.” And even before Skrmetti was decided, Mr. Strangio laid the groundwork for this name-and-shame campaign by heaping blame on the Times in interviews for a buzzy new documentary, Heightened Scrutiny.
The documentary, directed and produced by Sam Feder, debuted at the storied Sundance Film Festival in January and in recent weeks has made the rounds at screenings in select cities. Part legal drama, part character study, part media critique, the film charts Mr. Strangio’s fraught and frenetic path to the nation’s highest court. It presents the ACLU litigator as the reluctant, scruffy and, above all, scrappy hero of a civil-rights movement that, due to forces far beyond his control, is doomed, at least in the short term, to fail.
“The law is a system of violence,” Mr. Strangio says in Heightened Scrutiny. “The role of the lawyer, in my view, is to minimize that violence through advocacy.”
This scapegoating and, indeed, scrutinizing of The New York Times—The Atlantic takes a beating as well—is the pulse that keeps Heightened Scrutiny beating throughout its brisk 89-minute run time. This is not a subtle argument as presented by the 42-year-old Mr. Strangio and a chorus of trans-advocate talking heads. The documentary does not engage in a careful, incisive deconstruction of the Times’ reporting to expose the Gray Lady’s supposed invidious intent where transgender children are concerned.
Instead, the film paints in broad strokes, accusing the Times, for example, of favoring framing “trans people or the trans movement as a threat to others.” In what way? We never do learn. Mr. Strangio and the cast of commentators rely on an argumentum ad nauseam strategy: If they simply repeat a sweeping claim about the Times’ culpability enough times, what’s known as the illusory truth effect will take over and the public will simply accept the film’s underlying thesis as fact.
This is an ironic rhetorical strategy to employ when criticizing the work of reporters, who are themselves charged with providing the public with cogent, incisive and, above all, factual information. But Heightened Scrutiny does not hit the intellectual high road. The film is there to cut and run.
Unacknowledged is Mr. Strangio’s clear motivation to minimize his own role in the Department of Justice’s loss before the highest court in the land in Skrmetti. (While the ACLU shepherded the case through the lower courts, the Supreme Court accepted only the Biden DoJ’s complaint in the case, not the ACLU’s. Mr. Strangio was nevertheless granted permission to present oral argument.) And, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision, it is quite evidently in Mr. Strangio’s best interest to deflect criticism coming from none other than the Times itself.
The day after Skrmetti was decided, The New York Times Magazine published a damning investigation suggesting that Mr. Strangio’s own tactics and rhetoric, in particular his radical and inflexible demands for a society-wide reordering of the conception of sex and gender alike, played a key role in inspiring the backlash that has engulfed the entire transgender project. At the Provincetown talk, held two days after the magazine piece was published, Mr. Strangio never acknowledged the article and its scathing critique of his career; instead, he trained his ire back on the paper, lambasting its transgender coverage as “insidious.”
The Film Flips the Script
The best Heightened Scrutiny can do in its own effort to flip the script on the Times is to back up its case with circumstantial evidence.
“State legislatures cite The New York Times; state attorneys generals cite The New York Times; and judges cite The New York Times,” Mr. Strangio says in the film, referring to bans of pediatric gender medicine and the subsequent lawsuits filed against them by the ACLU and others. “There is a direct link to how our care is discussed in the media, how the laws are passed, how they’re defended in court, and how they’re upheld in court.”
This facile reasoning presumes that the movement to ban pediatric gender medicine has been so dependent on the Times’ reporting that conservatives never would have thought to instigate a mass, state-by-state campaign to ban these treatments, and that they could not have successfully defended these laws in court absent the Times serving as a fertile resource for their political rationalizations and legal citations.
As if Fox News–focused Republicans make it a habit of waiting for permission from the Times before throwing culture-war carrion to their ravenous base. And as if conservatives’ legal filings and opinions in the cases leading up to Skrmetti hinged decisively on Times citations. Trans advocates have made much hay of the fact that, in his concurring opinion in Skrmetti, the ultra-conservative Justice Clarence Thomas cited the paper’s reporting seven times. But in the case’s majority decision, Chief Justice John Roberts made no such reference.
Heightened Scrutiny presumes the audience will simply take for granted that Mr. Strangio and the others in the film who bash the Times and The Atlantic do so substantively. We are to take on faith that the many fine reporters who have published work on this subject for these publications—and who have been brutally and shamefully attacked and intimidated as a consequence—have been part of a nefarious cabal determined to undermine a sterling and faultless field of medicine by pulling the wool over the public’s eyes with shoddy, nefarious, and fact-challenged reporting.
Mr. Strangio’s arguments presume that the Times’ marquee reporting on the topic, by journalists such as Emily Bazelon, Pulitzer Prize–winner Megan Twohey and Azeen Ghorayshi, and Jesse Singal’s 2018 Atlantic cover story were not, in fact, nuanced, robustly reported reflections of contemporary reality as as well as vital explorations of a subject that is personally salient to an increasing number of Americans.
Trans Issues Strike Home
Since the early 2010s, transgender identification among adolescents has suddenly grown from a rarity to a rate as high as 3.3 percent. Meanwhile, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, has increasingly banged the drum that providing minors with gender dysphoria blockers and hormones is “medically necessary.” Last year, WPATH asserted that such treatment is the preferable route for the majority of youth who identify as transgender.
Consequently, for many parents, these issues quite literally strike home. Americans with children experiencing gender dysphoria or who have a cross-sex identity need help understanding this relatively new and complex medical field and how it might impact the rest of their children’s lives.
And yet, as Times reporters and Mr. Singal have reported in exacting detail, researchers have produced little long-term evidence about the impacts of pediatric gender-transition treatment. And while the treatment protocol was first established, by Dutch researchers, nearly four decades ago, few American prescribing physicians have lengthy experience with providing these medications to minors. When the first U.S. pediatric gender clinic opened in 2007, barely more than 100 gender dysphoric children had been put on blockers worldwide. Gender clinics didn’t truly take off in the United States until about a decade ago.
A raft of systematic literature reviews—the gold standard of scientific evidence—published over the past five years have made painfully clear that the research supporting pediatric gender medicine is weak and inconclusive. These findings have prompted the health authorities in a slew of European nations to reverse course and sharply restrict minors’ access to gender-transition treatment.
None of these concerns, caveats or developments about the science, all of which played an important role in Skrmetti, are addressed in the documentary.
Heightened Scrutiny of One Journalist In Particular
As for attacks on specific Times or Atlantic reporters, Heightened Scrutiny provides rapid-fire images of many of their articles and bylines. But only a single journalist who has worked on this beat in recent years receives an actual name check in the film: former Times opinion columnist (now a writer at large at The Wall Street Journal) and cultural lightening rod Pamela Paul.
Ms. Paul’s work is subjected to the documentary’s only explicit fact check of journalistic output, which concerns the sprawling editorial on detransitioners that she published in the Times in February 2024. In particular, the film zeroes in on a paragraph in which Ms. Paul discussed the controversial, theoretical concept of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” ROGD was coined by physician-researcher Dr. Lisa Littman in a 2018 paper that, like Ms. Paul’s writing, has been savaged by trans advocates.
Ms. Paul wrote in the Times:
Most of [psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper’s] patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.”
Heightened Scrutiny cites journalist Evan Urquhart, who recently completed a prestigious science journalism fellowship at M.I.T. and runs a blog devoted to transgender issues. Mr. Urquhart notes that a particular fragment of Ms. Paul’s editorial— “several researchers have documented the phenomenon” —suggests, he says, that at least three researchers have documented evidence of ROGD. But, Mr. Urquhart notes, the three hyperlinks Ms. Paul provided in the text only point to two such researchers: Dr. Littman and Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University.
Sabrina Imbler, a former fellow at the Times Opinion section, complements Mr. Urquhart’s analysis by reporting that Times opinion essays are subjected to rigorous fact checking. Accordingly, Imbler expresses incredulity that Ms. Paul’s “several researchers” claim could have passed muster.
Activist Erin Reed, who runs a popular Substack about trans issues, further claims in the documentary that Ms. Paul’s erroneous assertion is “exactly what we’re talking about whenever we say that the centrist, both-sides journalistic media is laundering disinformation.” (Ms. Reed has herself been a font of false claims about pediatric gender medicine.)
Except that the journalist in this equation who did not properly fact check their claim is Mr. Urquhart, not Ms. Paul. I asked Drs. Bailey and Littman for any examples of published papers by other researchers that documented the fundamental criteria of ROGD: minors first diagnosed with gender dysphoria during adolescence who had no history of expressing a cross-sex identification in early childhood, including those with a high rate of other psychiatric conditions.
The two researchers provided me with plenty of citations, including the following that make either explicit reference to rapid-onset gender dysphoria or describe patients who fit the basic ROGD criteria. Between them, the papers have 16 authors—more than enough to count as “several”:
2018: “Gender/ed identities: an overview of our current work as child psychotherapists in the Gender Identity Development Service”
2019: “‘Taking the lid off the box’: The value of extended clinical assessment for adolescents presenting with gender identity difficulties”
2020: “Transsexuality: Transitions, detransitions, and regrets in Spain”
2023: “Developmental Pathway Choices of Young People Presenting to a Gender Service with Gender Distress: A Prospective Follow-Up Study”
Dr. Bailey told me in an email that many other publications prior to these papers documented an increase, starting in about 2010, in patients fitting the ROGD criteria. “None of them looked for signs of social contagion, to my knowledge,” he said, “which would be the only major aspect of ROGD omitted. These changes called for an explanation, and ROGD is the best explanation.”