‘LGBTQ+ young people deserve to feel safe in school’

transgender lawyer to make arguments before the United States Supreme Court on Wednesday as he led the fight against a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors.The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney entered the spotlight as the court heard one of its most high-profile cases this session.Strangio has been counsel on other cases involving transgender care, and he argued recently that his very presence at the Supreme Court is possible because of the treatment he is seeking to protect.Newsweek reached out to the ACLU for comment Wednesday morning via email.The 42-year-old attorney grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, during the 1980s and '90s.In a 2019 interview on NBC's Why Is This Happening? podcast, Strangio described the area as wealthy, white and liberal."My family is a little different in that we're that family that sort of fit in, in that we were also sort of white, upper-middle class in many ways, but then I was this sort of radical, queer, trans activist," he said.In that interview, Strangio said he realized he was queer when he graduated high school in 2000 after struggling with the idea as a female athlete and facing anti-queer sentiment in the locker room.When he hit his early 20s, Strangio came out as transgender, citing a much more accepting world at the time than the one he had experienced growing up."Despite feeling more hopeful, I was still confronted by many legal and cultural barriers: transgender people were legally at the margins, marriage for same-sex couples was banned almost everywhere and my goal of being an attorney representing transgender people in court felt hindered by my fear that I would never be seen as a legitimate courtroom advocate," he wrote in The New York Times.Despite those fears, Strangio studied law at Northeastern University and entered the legal profession anyway, although he mostly focused on cases away from gender-affirming care for minors.Instead, he worked on other LGBTQ+ litigation, including