I'm Lee Rowland from the ACLU welcome to At Liberty, the podcast where we grapple with today's major civil rights and civil liberties topics.

Today, the fight for transgender rights.

The civil rights of transgender Americans are in rapid flux in state legislatures, in federal law, in the courts, and at the ballot box.

Progress is consistently met with backlash. In the past midterm election, Massachusetts voters staved off an effort to dismantle legal protection for trans individuals in public spaces. But the

Supreme Court is poised to reconsider legal victories won by trans plaintiffs in the federal courts,

and Trump's White House has all sorts of plans to exclude trans people from the military and from federal anti-discrimination law.

Here with us today to help us understand the current landscape of transgender rights is Chase Strangio,

staff attorney with the ACLU's LGBT and HIV project.

Chase is a dogged advocate for transgender and gender non-conforming people,

and there's probably nobody better to help us understand the state of transgender rights.

Chase, thanks for being here.

Thanks, Lee.

Can we start with simple legal basics?

At the federal level, what laws protect transgender people from discrimination?

So there are a wide array of laws that protect transgender people, and they do so in different ways.

So first, we have the Constitution, and I think that's an important place to start, because that protects transgender people from discrimination by the government.

And many courts have recognized this and have applied

the exact same type of review that is applied when anyone is discriminated against because of their

sex. Where is it in the Constitution that trans people like anyone else is protected from

discrimination? Well, the Constitution, like many of our federal civil rights laws as well, was written broadly.

And so it protects people from discrimination and guarantees equality.

And so even though it doesn't have enumerated categories, like it doesn't say women, it doesn't say people of color.

...