‘A reminder that we can resist’: hard-hitting documentary takes aim at anti-trans rhetoric

A new documentary at the Sundance film festival delves into the fight to preserve access to gender-affirming care for minors via the US supreme court, with a major decision due in June 2025, and details the mainstream media’s role in legitimizing anti-trans legislation.

Heightened Scrutiny, directed by Sam Feder, argues that the fear-based ideology underlying bans on hormone therapy or puberty blockers for minors has been pushed not only by conservative activists but center-left publications such as the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal, whose articles have fixated on surgery, potential regret or risks. As the film notes, such therapies, with the same side effects and risks, are prescribed for other conditions and only raise alarms when applied to trans youths, and the rate of “detransitioning” is less than 1%.

Feder addressed the precarious moment for trans youths in the US – as of 2024, 23 states passed such measures, part of the standards of care endorsed by every major medical association in the country, up from zero in 2021 – as he introduced the film in Park City on Sunday, referring to his previous Sundance premiere, the 2020 documentary Disclosure, on the history of trans representation on screen. “When we were here five years ago with Disclosure, we never could’ve imagined where we’d be today. And in particular, how the mainstream press has impacted the anti-trains legislation that we’re seeing passed across the country,” he said. “So Heightened Scrutiny is our response to that.”

The 85-minute film focuses, in part, on efforts to fight the bans in the US courts. Feder follows Chase Strangio, a lawyer for the ACLU, as he prepares for oral arguments for US v Skrmetti, becoming the first openly trans attorney to argue before the supreme court. Strangio represents three trans youths and their parents in Tennessee, who argue that the state’s ban on accessing gender-affirming healthcare violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment because of sex-based discrimination. The upcoming decision will have sweeping implications for trans youth across the country; the Human Rights Campaign estimates that 39.4% of trans youth in the US live in a state with some ban on gender-affirming care.

Chase Strangio and Sam Feder. Photograph: Robin Marshall/REX/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival

The film also explores the ideological underpinnings of these bans beyond the conservative movement which views trans people as a target of the culture wars, along with books, vaccines, critical race theory and other “woke” concerns. Media figures such as Jelani Cobb, Lydia Polgreen, Gina Chua, Samantha Irby and many others, as well as actor Peppermint and actor/producer Laverne Cox outline the surge of mainstream media coverage in the past decade questioning the legitimacy of gender-affirming care and fixating on the trans minority – about 3 million people, or 1% of the population – with particular focus on the New York Times.

The film criticizes such articles as They paused puberty, but is there a cost? published on the New York Times front page in 2022, a 2019 Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled The transgender war on women and the 2018 Atlantic cover story When children say they’re trans, by Jesse Singal. That cover included headlines for other, less highly billed stories, including We’re not prepared for the next pandemic – the implication being, according to film subjects, that the issue of gender-affirming care was viewed as more eye-catching and pressing than pandemic preparedness. As one participant noted, there have been more articles framing trans people being a threat instead of trans people being threatened.

Those articles were cited, some at length, in various legal defenses upholding state bans in court. “There’s a direct link to how our lives are discussed in the media and the formation of laws,” says Strangio in the film, which also includes an example from the Guardian. Lawyer Alexia Korberg refers to the trend as the new “pipeline” from publication to legal defenses for bans – one New York Times op-ed titled As kids, they thought they were trans. They no longer do, by Pamela Paul, who once wrote a column in defense of vocally anti-trans author JK Rowling, was quoted in chunks by the state of Idaho in their defense of a law criminalizing gender-affirming care for trans youth, just six days after publication.

“When our identity becomes an ideology, then it becomes something that you can debate,” said Feder of the coverage after the film’s premiere. “I want people to understand the power that mainstream media has in creating pubic rhetoric, which has a direct impact on litigation.”

The film also connects the arguments put forth for the bans – “looking out” for the children, concern over the difficult road ahead and what is the “best” environment for a child – to the logic underpinning bans on interracial marriage, which the supreme court overturned in 1967. During the arguments for US v Skrmetti, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made the same comparison: “Some of these questions … sound very familiar to me, [such as] the arguments made back in the day, the 50s and 60s, with respect to racial classifications.” Jackson added: “I’m worried that we’re undermining the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases.”

Jackson is in the court’s liberal minority; the conservative-led court appears poised to uphold Tennessee’s law when a decision is released in June 2025, overturning decades of civil rights precedent, even as the state of Tennessee relies on testimony from doctors rebuked by other judges as “conspiratorial”, “deeply biased”, “far off” and deserving “very little weight”. But Feder and Strangio expressed hope that better information will still make an impact. “The judges are not immune to public discourse,” said Feder. “And so the more we talk about it, the more people understand that the healthcare for human beings is being decided by nine people. And the more the country, the more the press, hopefully, will pick up on the fact that it is an inhumane concept. We hope maybe that the judges will hear that.”

The film, Strangio added, is “a reminder that we can resist, and it’s a reminder that we have a role to play in being critical thinkers about the information that we’re absorbing every day”.

• Heightened Scrutiny is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution