‘Fights for our material survival’: documentary goes inside the battle for trans rights

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Trans documentarian Sam Feder’s latest feature Heightened Scrutiny is a kind of two-for-one – an affecting portrait of one of the most important trans activists of our time, and a continuation of the media critique he established through earlier films, particularly his groundbreaking 2020 Netflix doc Disclosure. It’s a powerful look at the fight over civil rights for trans people, while also posing as a critical rebuttal to supposedly center-left media like the New York Times and the Atlantic, which have aided and abetted rightwing forces in setting off a moral panic against trans existence.

The film follows the ACLU attorney Chase Strangio as he prepares for oral arguments in the supreme court case US v Skirmetti. These arguments occurred on 4 December 2024, with the court ruling several months later in favor of Tennessee’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, and in effect allowing restrictions on the medical transition of trans minors in over 20 US states to remain in place. As with many other rulings in the Trump-era court, it was one that has been widely decried by legal analysts for shoddy reasoning and clear bias.

“We made Heightened Scrutiny in 16 months,” Feder told me during a video call. “By contrast, Disclosure took me five years, so it was a real push. It was a rush to raise more dialogue so people would know more about the case, not with the intention to change the outcome, because we knew what that was going to be. We wanted people to be more informed. And still, despite knowing where it would go, it was still terribly demoralizing and dehumanizing when the opinion came out.”

Although Feder offers a wide-ranging and devastating examination of how major media properties have laundered anti-trans pseudoscience and bigoted talking points, the film’s most valuable contribution may be the compelling portrait of Strangio. A seasoned attorney who generally moves with careful deliberation in media appearances and who only posts occasionally to social media, Strangio here lets his guard down, allowing Feder’s camera a rare chance to soak up his humanity. In the film, Strangio’s authenticity seems to come so easily, but it was not as simple as it appears.

“That was a big challenge, to open up parts of my life to a camera lens that I worked really hard to keep private,” Strangio told me over video call. “I was making a series of calculations about where I would remain very boundaried and how to navigate the presence of a camera. Early on in the process, Sam basically said to me, ‘You know, I want the next generation to know that we tried, I want them to see what was done in the service of these fights for our material survival, for the protection of our spaces and our bodies.’ So it was a navigation of giving up this privacy in the service of something that also felt important.”

To aid Strangio in telling this story, Feder enlists a remarkable list of trans advocates, including Laverne Cox, the Semafor executive editor, Gina Chua, documenter of bias at Media Matters Ari Drennen, journalist Evan Urquhart and many others. The doc also hears from some major cisgender allies, including the Columbia Journalism School dean, Jelani Cobb, and former NYT Global editorial director Lydia Polgreen. Feder weaves together these voices to create an incisive critique of the hit job perpetrated against trans people by respected media outlets, noting that many of these pieces have later shown up in legislation and court cases as support for the effort to degrade and restrict trans lives.

The perspective of the trans kids at the heart of US v Skirmetti is provided by a remarkable 12-year-old girl named Mila – Feder first shows her advocating for her community at a school board meeting in New York City, where Strangio has shown up due to attacks against trans people in his child’s own school. Later we see Mila speaking out for trans rights just outside the supreme court.

“I think the most difficult moment of filming was that moment with Mila at the school board meeting,” said Feder, who shared that he had gone to film the meeting because many of his cisgender friends did not believe that governmental attacks on trans people were happening in the Big Apple. “When I approached the school with my camera, out of nowhere this young woman comes up to me, and she was just like, ‘You have my permission to film me,’ and that was my introduction to Mila. [At the school board meeting] I was getting personally attacked, and you see in the film how they treated Mila. Just witnessing all that in real time was really hard, to be honest.”

There are also poignant moments in Heightened Scrutiny where Feder steps outside of the never-ending battle for trans rights, such as when he films Strangio vacationing in Italy, and elsewhere getting lines from the poem Prophecy by the Black civil rights activist Pauli Murray tattooed on his back. Although the lines do speak to Strangio the crusading attorney, they much more so speak to Stangio as a transgender human being: “I have been cast aside, but I sparkle in the darkness. / I have been slain but live on in the rivers of history. / I seek no conquest, no wealth, no power, no revenge: / I seek only discovery / Of the illimitable heights and depths of my own being.”

“The tattoo scene is among my favorites in the movie,” said Strangio, “because tattoos and art are so important to me. Being tattooed is almost like a meditative experience to me, to be fully present in my body and to be thinking about it as a vessel for things that are meaningful to me. Both having tattoos and being tattooed are very central to how I inhabit my body. And then to have it be with an artist who I really love and a quote from someone who has been an architect of so much of how I think about my use of law really just encapsulates a lot of different threads that are so important to me.”

The fact that Feder took such time to lovingly show Strangio adding to the many tattoos on his body points to the fact that Heightened Scrutiny is very much a film about trans bodies – not just those of the youth who will be denied the right to live in their own bodies due to hateful laws passed in order to harm them, but also the bodies of the many guests who sit for Feder’s camera.

Chase Strangio and Sam Feder at Sundance

“I make films with a message, and part of that is that I pick people who are brilliant and concise enough to hold the camera.” said Feder. “That’s hard to do. I can’t hold the camera, I’ve seen myself in interviews and it’s a snore-fest. It just goes back to my politics, and connecting with people on a visceral level. When people ask me what they should wear to be interviewed, my response is ‘whatever makes you feel hot’. So that’s how people are showing up, and we have hair and makeup if they want so that people can feel their absolute best. That is important to me – as trans people, we do struggle so much with our image.”

One of the things that makes Feder’s documentaries soar like few other works in the genre is his clear talent for making his trans informants feel comfortable, seen and admired. This certainly must account for a large part of the clear chemistry between Feder and Strangio, and it is what lets Feder succeed in his ambitions to show Strangio as a human being and to leave a testament for future generations as to how resiliently he and others have fought for trans rights. And, as Strangio compellingly states, those legal rights are only a part of the liberation that he aspires to.

“I don’t want people to end up in a place of incessant despair by virtue of what the law is not giving us,” Strangio said. “I want to be in a practice of using the law to minimize harm, but not to turn it to some sort of channel for our liberatory potential. The government is not going to be the mirror through which we are going to see ourselves. We are that mirror, and it’s really important that we continue to have that conversation alongside conversations about fighting back against these policies and practices.”