Director: Sam Feder
Stars: Chase Strangio, Jelani Cobb, Lydia Polgreen
Synopsis: Civil rights lawyer Chase Strangio’s courtroom battles against anti-trans laws intertwine with exposing media narratives impacting public perception of transgender rights.
Chase Strangio doesn’t look like an attorney who has argued before the Supreme Court. He doesn’t look like an attorney, period, at least not the way we might imagine one in our minds. That vision is of a slouched figure who looks as though they’re nearing the end of an 85-hour work week, their hair thinning and graying, the bags under their eyes having bags of their own. It’s of the men and women we tend to see in commercials or on billboards as we enter cities where their faces are as recognizable to the general population as that of their favorite quarterback. (Trivia question: What phone number follows the words, “Hurt in a car? Call William Mattar?”) We see people who bring briefcases to steak dinners; the walls of their offices are covered in degrees and certificates, the likes of which no one actually reads, but everyone admires due to the words “Yale” and “PhD”; they don’t film Tik Toks, and if they do, you can bet that their Gen Z intern had a hand in orchestrating their stiff performance.
Instead, Strangio looks like someone you might see enjoying a summer day on the streets of Brooklyn. He wears tank tops and jean shorts while making a pit stop at his office, the headquarters of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City. He has a jet-black asthmatic cat named Raven whom he calls “Ravey,” an ironic nickname for the only cat who has ever calmly been administered a feline-specific asthma chamber. Tattoos stretch up and down his arms, and a stud is pierced into his left ear. Strangio does his hair in the morning, wears a chain around his neck, and anxiously eats an everything bagel with cream cheese on the floor of his office’s hallway as he awaits news of when oral arguments for an upcoming Supreme Court case will be scheduled. In other words, Strangio is more human than most non-fictional lawyers we see on a day-to-day basis, some of whom fight for basic freedoms, while most of them sleepwalk through legal proceedings en route to a hefty payday, no matter the outcome of their case.
He also happens to be a human who, on Dec. 4, 2024, made history when he became the first known transgender person to make oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States in United States v. Skrmetti. The case, which was brought to challenge a Tennessee law that prohibited forms of gender-affirming care like puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors, is meant to look at whether these bans violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which “guarantees that all people within a state’s jurisdiction are treated equally under the law.” A decision is still pending, though it is expected that the President of the United States will withdraw the government’s request for the Supreme Court to hear the case altogether; as Vox’s Ian Millhiser wrote in November 2024, Skrmetti is “arguably the most important trans rights case the justices have ever heard,” yet “it’s hard to imagine a worse time” for the Supreme Court to be hearing it.
This case and Strangio’s presence at its core are what make up the basic framework of Sam Feder’s Heightened Scrutiny, and if Feder had elected to limit their film’s focus to that of a follow-doc tracking Strangio’s argument before the highest court in the land, it would have theoretically made for a captivating enough watch by documentary standards. But Feder’s films, including their Sundance debut, 2020’s Disclosure, tend to go the extra mile when it comes to broadening the scope of the film in question’s principal topic. With Disclosure, the equation was examining the history of Hollywood’s depiction of transgender people on screen and the cultural impact these stories had on transgender people and the country at large by way of personal stories from transgender figures in the film industry and beyond, those of which provide concrete examples of how the distortion of trans tales on screen affected their individual experiences. Heightened Scrutiny is even more sweeping, as it captures the lead-up to a historical legal case while also detailing how the transgender experience has been negatively portrayed in the media, and how such portrayal has influenced federal legislation in recent years.
“We’re up against a manipulation machine that is incredibly effective,” Strangio says early on in the film. “So I am constantly thinking in those terms. ‘How is this going to be used against us?’” In order to examine the broad, harrowing “this” that Strangio refers to, Heightened Scrutiny brings in a seemingly-endless lineup of journalists and forward-thinking celebrities from in and intimately around the transgender community, all of whom have had their own experiences arguing for gender-affirming care, whether in writing or in oral arguments of a sort. These figures highlight how the mainstream media – from Fox News to The New York Times, from Matt Walsh to The Atlantic – have all played a part in outlining a playbook for anti-trans legislation to overtake the United States of America like an endless storm cloud. Whether that effort was subconscious or deliberate isn’t the point so much as that it has already happened, and it’s in the hands of people like Strangio to fight for the betterment of the country and its marginalized people.
Feder has a knack for interviewing incredibly intelligent, thoughtful minds in their work, not merely using sit-downs with celebrities and journalists for expositional fodder that recaps well-known historical information for the sake of their desired narratives. And to be clear, Feder has a clear-cut goal with Heightened Scrutiny, one that the film itself outlines painstakingly, but one that the director specifically stated in a pre-festival interview with the Sundance Institute’s Lucy Spicer: “Between January and June 2025, [the U.S. Supreme Court] will be determining the future of trans rights. I want to impact the public discourse before the court releases their opinion.” But they are not willing to take the easy route, as it were, in providing that information. It’s not rare to see archival footage put to use in Feder’s work, but far more of an emphasis is placed on sit-downs with perceptive thinkers on their chosen subject, specifically their history in covering or dealing with its realities.
In Disclosure, the journalist Tre’Vell Anderson – who identifies as gender nonconforming – offered insight into the history of transgender faces in popular culture that came not solely from an intellectual root, but a personal one. The writer and activist Tiq Milan, the professor and historian Susan Stryker, and Strangio himself also appeared in the documentary, which focused on Hollywood’s depiction and featured familiar figures like Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Angelica Ross, Alexandra Billings, and Laverne Cox (who also appears in Heightened Scrutiny). Here, it’s the likes of The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb and The New York Times’ Lydia Polgreen who profoundly examine topics like, in Cobb’s words, the “adaptable argument” that focuses on children’s safety when it comes to transgender and/or non-binary couples having kids, and how similar criticisms have been leveled in other cases, like interracial marriage.
It’s through these interviews that Heightened Scrutiny can become slightly too in the weeds for its own good, despite the fact that its all-encompassing nature is imperative to the story Feder and his featured subjects are telling. The manner with which it unfolds can feel too academic, almost too well-researched for an 85-minute documentary to properly carry the message it wishes to deliver as effectively as desired. The weight of its central argument, to use legal parlance, may have been easier, for lack of a better word, to grasp if it was consumed in a court setting, or even in a peer-reviewed essay. In fact, that’s a topic Feder briefly lends some time to in the film’s midsection so as to highlight how often right-wing voices making broad claims against gender-affirming care based on generalities and one-off cases go unchecked, nevermind how harmful the declarations within can be to the transgender community at large. Perhaps it’s a case of lead-fingered editing, the desire to cut from point to point to point in order to pack as much information as possible into one document so that nothing is left out. But if anyone can understand that dilemma, it’s a writer, and given how crucial it is that every point is properly represented in Heightened Scrutiny, maybe the best takeaway regarding its contents is that it warrants a longer runtime, one that would make for a more streamlined and informative viewing experience.
Better yet, it’s already an incredibly informative film that will require revisitation for all audiences, not because it’s difficult to pin down in one sitting, but because nothing it emphasizes can be properly understood in less than an hour and a half. If you think about it through the lens of Heightened Scrutiny’s contents being its primary character’s lifelong pursuit, then of course it makes sense that a dense and intellectual work of activism can’t serve as a one-stop shop for the education of less-informed audiences. Feder said so themselves: The characteristic that contributes most to their success as a storyteller is the act of asking questions. Heightened Scrutiny asks many of them, and it often provides answers. But the trend that serves as its throughline has been publicly persistent for decades – that being the lack of trans sensibility guiding cases like Skrmetti, something Strangio directly bucked by making his historic argument before the Supreme Court – asks a question of its own: What happens now? It’s not Feder’s job, nor is it Strangio’s, to provide a concrete answer. But a work of documentarianism as vital and dynamic as this is an act of activism in and of itself. It’s another punch thrown in a fight that, if our government has its way, will end in June, when the court is expected to deliver its United States vs. Skrmetti ruling. Heightened Scrutiny is here to astutely say, “Not on our watch.”
