When Heightened Scrutiny played at the Sundance Film Festival in January, audiences didn’t know how United States v. Skrmetti, the trans healthcare case argued in front of the Supreme Court by ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, would shake out. Arguments in that case, which Sam Feder’s intimate documentary gives ground-level context for, were heard on December 4, 2024. The justices’ decision wouldn’t come down until June. In the interim, the end of the documentary relied on Schrödinger’s ruling; Strangio’s efforts were relentless and surrounded by the rapturous support of his community, but the film had also laid bare the prejudice stacked against them. Donald Trump had not yet retaken office, open hatred was not yet so publicly encouraged. Winning or losing seemed equally possible, equally implausible. Now, though, Heightened Scrutiny is being released to general audiences who already know its ending. That means the majority of its power comes from another case it argues: One against high-profile media outlets and the writers who made targeting trans people into a professional beat.
While much of Feder’s film follows Strangio as he practices, preps, and advocates on a grassroot level for trans youth, some of the most painful and infuriating segments give context for where this apparent surge of nationwide transphobia came from. As the film’s mix of journalist and trans advocate talking heads—like Columbia Journalism dean Jelani Cobb, Semafor executive editor Gina Chua, and Mina Brewer, the 22-year-old model misgendered on The Atlantic‘s famous fearmongering cover—unpack, at its root are a few well-respected publications and the lucrative business model that’s always accompanied moral panic.
These interviewees, shot by Feder in the same diner-style booth at a restaurant (a place for a chat, not a pulpit for a sermon), movingly explain how public opinion had been astro-TERFed against them. A decade ago, Laverne Cox (who also appears in and executive produced the film) dominated the cover of Time, the face of the “transgender tipping point” that would lead to increased visibility of and rights for trans people. For a bit, that inclusive shift seemed true. In 2016, for example, the NBA relocated its All-Star game out of Charlotte because of its discriminatory “bathroom bill.” Trans rights were good PR, worth backing up with a billion-dollar pocketbook. But, between 2021 and 2024, the nation went from having absolutely no states with laws banning gender-affirming care for adolescents, to 23. This turn seems to have originated from far-right Christian nationalists, but was given a massive platform, and an Anita Bryant-like rallying cry, by outlets with a bit more clout than The Daily Wire—all “just asking questions.”
“By writing about trans kids instead of trans adults, [Jesse Singal] can express his concern over the ways we live our lives by framing his concern as a parental one, thus looping parents into the conversation,” Harron Walker wrote for Jezebel in 2018. “It’s a children’s issue, not a trans issue, which gives any reader, cis or trans, permission to weigh in on the subject with authority. It’s that classic ‘think of the children’ strawman.”
This framing, analogous to Bryant’s claim in the ’70s that those dastardly gays were “trying to recruit our children into homosexuality,” paved a path for an onslaught of op-eds. Media analyst Julie Hollar provides Heightened Scrutiny with research showing that, over the course of a calendar year, the New York Times was far more likely to run stories portraying the trans rights movement as a threat than to cover any threat against trans people. In the kind of journalistic “if it bleeds, it leads” strategizing that had Nightcrawler‘s star orchestrating his own crime footage, the click-inducing backlash to and credulous consumption of transphobic rhetoric only encouraged editors to greenlight more of it. The floodgates were opened. Hate-reading developed into actual hate. It became such a transparent trend that it led to one of the best Onion headlines in years: “It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible.”
But that’s not all it led to. In the most shocking scene of Heightened Scrutiny, Feder constructs a montage explaining how, in Strangio’s words, “the coverage of trans people by the center-left morphs into far-right policy in a matter of a few years.” The scare tactics of writers like Singal and Pamela Paul are directly and immediately echoed by lawyers, judges, and “experts” brought into courts around the nation.
Paul’s NYT column titled “As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.” ran on February 2, 2024. On February 6, it was cited by the state of Idaho in Poe v. Labrador as evidence that gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth should continue to be criminalized. On June 15, 2022, the Times published the widely condemned piece “The Battle Over Gender Therapy” by Emily Bazelon. That July, a Texas court was trotting it out in order to redefine gender-affirming healthcare as “child abuse.” If it was good enough for the New York Times, these courts reasoned, it should be good enough for the people of America. This means lawyers like Strangio aren’t just arguing against the law, but arguing against rhetoric that judges are consuming in their free time—rhetoric seen as mainstream enough to make it into the paper of record.
It’s not like the aggressive regression of these outlets—musing on trans athletes and children and the locker rooms and school bathrooms they should be forced to use—has been a secret, but their influence on the laws of the land has rarely been spelled out with such directness and clarity as in this film. Though Skremetti may have prompted the Supreme Court to reopen a slew of trans rights cases, the case was itself prompted by the endless poking and prodding of a select few columnists trying to stay in the spotlight by egging on a witchhunt. No amount of fair, compassionate coverage could fully combat a court literally stacked against pretty much every thinking member of the American public. But as Heightened Scrutiny makes plain, selling out your neighbors for a cushy op-ed gig sprays gasoline on the oppressive flames.
