This Substack, which concerns a previously unreported 2021 speech by top ACLU litigator Chase Strangio, is the second an ongoing series. Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be publishing and providing analysis about a long-hidden cache of hundreds of videos of conferences held by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and its U.S. branch, USPATH.
I obtained near-exclusive access to these videos after Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, subpoenaed them and a federal judge unsealed the lot last year. The videos include USPATH’s 2021 and 2023 conferences, WPATH’s 2022 conference, and a 2023 WPATH conference devoted to training care providers.
I’ll be posting links all of the videos I publish here:
After spending months reviewing over 130 of the videos that concern the care of minors who identify as transgender, I reported my findings in a feature article for Compact magazine on Wednesday. I encourage you to read that piece, which charts how WPATH responded to a mounting political backlash against gender-transition interventions for minors by doubling down and trying to manage the message. (Kindly comment on and share my thread about the Compact article on X.)
I hope you’ll consider supporting my efforts to make public—and put into context—these fascinating and edifying historical documents by becoming a paid subscriber to my Substack. This project demands an extraordinary amount of time and energy. Thanks very much.
My Compact article opens with an account of a rousing speech Mr. Strangio gave at USPATH’s virtual conference in November 2021, the full video of which is posted above. The speech was entitled “Criminalizing Trans Bodies and Medicine: a Look at the Pivotal Next Year in Trans Advocacy.”
At that moment in history, the transgender movement stood at a critical precipice. During 2021, Arkansas had passed the first state ban of gender-transition interventions for minors—a harbinger for what came next as Republican legislatures in other states geared up to do the same.
In his address, Mr. Strangio, who is a transgender man and the co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, called upon USPATH members to rise up and fuse trans activism with their work as care providers.
The speech serves as a remarkable time capsule, revealing Mr. Strangio’s various absolutist stances: demanding transgender inclusion in sports and opposing engaging with critics—positions that he would wind up walking back (and in the case of calling skeptics transphobes, would claim he never held) by the time of his December 2025 sit-down with The New York Times’ Ross Douthat.
“This is an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Mr. Strangio said at USPATH 2021. Referring to pediatric gender-transition interventions, he continued: “We need people testifying in every state legislative hearing in 2022, to make clear that this is care that is effective, that it is safe, that it is important and that it is provided pursuant to protocols—that banning it, which is fundamentally unlike how medical care is treated in every single other context, is inappropriate and deeply harmful, not only to our trans community, not only to your patients, not only to my clients, but to the practice of medicine.”
(Mr. Strangio failed at this point to note that abortion was treated with similarly draconian legislative restrictions. And yet, a few minutes later, he compared the backlash to pediatric gender medicine to “entrenched backlash that we see to abortion.”)
Looking to the uncertain future, Mr. Strangio asked the USPATH crowd, “Are we on the verge of moving towards increased gains in law and policy and public discourse? Or are we about to be set on a trajectory of defensiveness and loss?”
“I would say 2022 is probably going to be the year that determines the trajectory of the next 10 to 15 years,” he said, in a prediction that now seems wholly accurate. “Because if we end up in a situation where five to 10 bills criminalizing care for trans minors pass, it may be that we spend the next 40 years trying to undo that rather than moving the ball forward.”
Perhaps the most remarkable moment in this speech was when Mr. Strangio appeared to dismiss sex-based differences in athletic competitiveness—contradicting what he told Mr. Douthat four years later. (More specifics on that contradiction below.)
A spurious specter of suicide?
In his speech, Mr. Strangio repeatedly characterized the burgeoning legal attacks on the transgender movement as posing an existential threat to transgender youth in particular.
