Chase Strangio and the Death Spiral of Gender Ideology

By the time Chase Strangio stood before the Supreme Court in Skrmetti v. United States, she was no longer just a lawyer arguing a case—she was the embodiment of a movement that had traded evidence for identity, public consensus for ideological purity, and legal strategy for cultural warfare.

Her story is not one of civil rights expansion, but of institutional capture, medical overreach, and political self-sabotage. Strangio, a trans-identified female and ACLU attorney, helped transform the American transgender movement from a marginal cause into a dominant elite consensus in just under a decade—only to drive it into catastrophic backlash by refusing to engage with basic biological reality or democratic legitimacy.

A Lawyer Who Doesn’t Believe in Law

Strangio has proudly described herself as “a constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” She doesn’t mean it metaphorically. In her view, the American legal system is not something to navigate or improve—it is something to dismantle. And that radical posture has shaped the trans movement’s most consequential legal strategies, with disastrous results.

She rejects the concept of biological sex entirely, insisting that there’s “no such thing as a male body” and that a penis is “just an unusual body part for a woman.” She fought to block trans advocacy ads that referred to transwomen as “born male,” calling even that language too compromising. She demanded full affirmation of gender identity as innate, infallible, and beyond question—ideological absolutes that alienated the very public she claimed to represent.

This kind of rhetoric might win likes on social media, but it collapses in a courtroom. And that’s exactly what happened. Before the Supreme Court, Strangio was forced to retreat: admitting there’s no evidence that these treatments reduce suicide, using the phrase “born male,” and watching the case fall apart under cross-examination from justices who had no patience for activist slogans dressed up as legal arguments.

Censorship as Strategy

Throughout her career, Strangio has tried to suppress—not confront—debate. This prominent member of the organization most know for its commitment to free speech stated (in a now-deleted tweet) that stopping the circulation of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage was “100% a hill I will die on.” When journalists, physicians, or even detransitioners raised concerns about the experimental nature of pediatric transition, Strangio responded not with facts but with fury. The message was clear: fall in line, or be destroyed.

And yet behind the wall of enforced consensus, the ground was crumbling. European countries like Sweden, Finland, and the U.K. were reversing course. Systematic reviews exposed the “very low certainty” of the evidence base. The so-called medical consensus turned out to be circular—a handful of activist-driven guidelines propping each other up like a house of cards.

Strangio didn’t care. Her job, as she saw it, wasn’t to respond to criticism, but to make it unutterable.

The Politics of Resentment Disguised as Liberation

Perhaps the most revealing—and disturbing—part of Strangio’s worldview is her contempt for civil marriage itself. In her own words, she resented the movement’s past focus on “gay white men with social capital and political power” and the “fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage.” Not content to achieve legal equality, Strangio and her ideological cohort wanted to tear down the very institutions that gay and lesbian Americans had fought to enter.

This wasn’t a movement for equal protection. It was a movement to queer the very notion of stability—of sex, of identity, of family. The goal was not civic belonging, but permanent revolution.

It’s no coincidence that the same figures pushing child transition and self-ID are also working to dissolve the meaning of marriage, erase sex from public life, and redefine children as autonomous agents of the state. In Strangio’s politics, permanence is oppression, and every norm is an act of violence.

That’s not liberation. It’s cultural sabotage.

A Generation Set Back—By Design

In the end, Skrmetti was a total rout. The Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on medical transition for minors, slamming the door shut on a constitutional right to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. And it’s no exaggeration to say Strangio helped engineer that defeat. She insisted on staking everything on the right of children to undergo medical transition—at a time when public support was collapsing and evidence was evaporating.

She framed the loss as a moral win—visibility, resistance, community. But for a generation of children now caught in this ideological crossfire, that posturing is no comfort. The Supreme Court didn’t just reject the movement’s claims—it exposed them as incoherent and ungrounded.

What began as a civil rights effort has mutated into a cult of self-ID, fueled by resentment and driven by activist lawyers who mistake power for truth.

The Courage to Say “Enough”

Strangio’s approach has not just damaged public trust. It has endangered children, discredited the gay and lesbian rights movement, and poisoned political discourse. She and those like her have declared war on reality, and reality is finally hitting back.

We don’t need more Chase Strangios. We need truth-tellers, not silencers. We need medical ethics, not ideological capture. And above all, we need to reclaim what was lost in the queering of everything: that sex is real, that childhood is not a test site, and that marriage is not a violent institution—but a deeply human one worth defending.

Let the backlash to gender ideology also be a rebirth of moral clarity. And let it start with saying the simple truth Strangio refuses to: biology is not bigotry