Unpacking US v Skrmetti

Since last fall, when the United States v. Skrmetti arguments first landed in the Supreme Court, Mama Dragons has been at the forefront—supporting families at rallies, hosting virtual listening circles, and amplifying the voices of trans youth and their parents. We’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with them through every legal hearing and public moment. Today In the Den, Sara joins political strategist Sam Ames to unpack what the Court’s decision allowing states to enforce bans on gender-affirming care for minors–and other recent rulings–mean for our families, our communities, and our collective future.

Special Guest: Sam Ames

Sam Ames (they/he) is a legal and policy strategist with 15 years of leadership experience in the LGBTQI+ movement. Sam served in the Biden-Harris Administration as Chief of Staff in the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights and Senior Advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration. Sam began their legal career as a staff attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, working on impact litigation cases involving marriage equality, employment discrimination, and family law, and in 2013 founded the Born Perfect Campaign, a national effort to end anti-LGBTQI+ conversion therapy.

Sam has spent their advocacy career working on behalf of a broad range of organizations focused on the intersections between mental health and civil rights. In 2016, Sam took a brief hiatus from law and policy to earn a graduate degree in religion, ethics, and politics with a focus on religious trauma, and spent a year in a hospital chaplain residency at UCSF Medical Center and Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital. Sam received their B.A. from the University of California Santa Cruz; their J.D. from George Washington University Law School; and their Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University. They are a member of the U.S. Supreme Court Bar and the State Bar of California. 

In their abundant spare time, Sam is a theatre lover, a shark enthusiast, and a five-time AIDS LifeCycle rider (You can even donate to their 2025 ride). They have also authored several children’s books on the places where science, history, and social justice intersect.

Links from the Show: 

• More about Sam: https://thresholdstrategies.org/about 
• Sam’s post, written after Skrmetti: https://samamesesq.medium.com/what-u-s-v-skrmetti-did-and-what-it-can-never-do-72465ad39a70 
• Join Mama Dragons today: www.mamadragons.org

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org.  

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. A podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here. 

Mama Dragons is growing! We are currently searching for passionate, dedicated individuals to join our Board of Directors. So, if you’ve got some lived experience, leadership skills, or a heart for supporting LGBTQ+ families, we’d love to hear from you. You can learn more by emailing m.v@mamadragons.org. Your voice could help shape the future of Mama Dragons.

This week on In the Den, we are honored to be joined by Sam Ames, attorney, strategist, and fierce advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. Sam is here to help us make sense of this difficult Supreme Court term. And in particular the Skrmetti decision that came down last month. This is a term that will echo through queer and trans lives for years to come. 

Since last fall, when the United States v. Skrmetti arguments first landed in the Supreme Court, Mama Dragons has been at the forefront—supporting families at rallies, amplifying the voices of our trans youth and their parents. We’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with them through every legal hearing and public moment.

Now, with the Court’s decision allowing states to enforce their bans on [gender-affirming] health care for minors, or to institute bans if they don’t have them already, we’re here to unpack what this ruling means, its impact on us and our families, how we can go forward, what strategies we can use to keep going in this moment. And Sam’s also going to help us unpack some other recent decisions regarding the LGBTQ+ community and what they mean for our families and our future.

Sam Ames (they/he) is a legal and policy strategist with 15 years of leadership experience in the LGBTQI+ movement. Sam served in the Biden-Harris Administration as Chief of Staff in the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, and Senior Advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration. Sam began their legal career as a staff attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, working on impact litigation cases involving marriage equality. Sam has spent their advocacy career working on behalf of a broad range of organizations focused on the intersections between mental health and civil rights, including as Director of Advocacy & Government Affairs for the Trevor Project

Sam brings both legal expertise and deep compassion to this conversation. They are going to help us navigate the heartbreak and the hope. We’ll name what’s at stake and talk about what we can still do to fight for a world where every queer and trans person can thrive. 

Sam, welcome to In the Den. It is so good to have you with us. 

SAM: Thank you so much for having me. I am really grateful to be on. I’ve known the Mama Dragons for like almost a decade now and love the work so much. So Thank you for what you are doing. 

SARA: I’m really glad to be having this conversation together today because I know many of us are still kind of processing and reeling from the Skrmetti decision in the last several weeks feels like it’s been a lot. And for those in our community who might not be following quite as closely as some of us, can you give us a brief, quick overview of the case and its context? 

SAM: Last month, you are correct, a case came down in a way that we did not want it to come down. US v Skrmetti was a case about gender-affirming care for transgender youth under 18. And I want to be clear about those words because it is a narrow decision in many ways. Narrow in a way that we are relieved about. It’s not a good decision. It sets us back years. It could’ve set us back decades. 

So what the decision says is, under the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause, a state can pass a law restricting access to gender-affirming care for youth under 18 without running afoul of the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause. The case turned almost entirely on something called heightened scrutiny which is a kind of niche area of constitutional law that I’m going to take 30 seconds to explain as a not-niche area of constitutional law as I can. But, actually, it’s a really interesting area of constitutional law. So the 14th Amendment was in many ways passed because we don’t always trust governments to pass laws that differentiate between people on account of in the past they haven’t always done that well for the right reasons, or in a way that wasn’t just straight up enacting violence. So the 14th Amendment was passed in many ways because we recognized that. 

And so, under the Equal Protection Clause, depending on what government is doing – in this case the state government – we are sort of varying levels of nervous about it. The differentiations that we are most nervous about are ones based on race. The history of this country has been a fairly clear indicator that when governments are making laws that distinguish based on race, rarely do they have a good reason for doing that. So when they do that, we subject it to the highest form of scrutiny, something called Strict Scrutiny. We want to make sure that that government has a really, really, really compelling reason for passing that law and that the law that they made is really, really, really narrowly tailored so that it doesn’t catch anything that isn’t totally necessary to enact that goal. 

On the other side, there is something called Rational Basis Review which is the lowest level of scrutiny. This is the stuff that we are least nervous about. As several Supreme Court Justices have said, the 14th Amendment empowers them to strike down laws that are discriminatory but not laws that are stupid. There are all kinds of stupid laws that survive rational basis review. And in that review, the state just has to have a decent reason for it and they did a vaguely good job of passing a law that was designed to meet that need. 

In the middle, we have something called Intermediate Scrutiny. And Intermediate Scrutiny is really what was at issue in this case. The prototypical example of Intermediate Scrutiny is sex. So, classifications based on sex. There are some cases in which a government has a reason to pass laws that classify based on sex. There are some times, every so often, they have a good reason for that. They have to prove that they had a good reason for that. But there are probably more of those laws that will withstand scrutiny than there are based on racial classifications. 

So when we’re talking about transgender people, and a law like Tennessee’s law that said, if a 12-year-old wants to get puberty blockers for precocious puberty, they can get that. If they want to get it for gender transition, they can’t. The ACLU argued, I think correctly, that if a 12-year-old who was assigned male at birth can get puberty blockers but a 12-year-old who was assigned female at birth can’t get puberty blockers, that is a sex-based classification. The Supreme Court said no. What the supreme court could have done was say this wasn’t a sex-based classification and they could’ve said that trans people don’t deserve any sort of additional protection. They didn’t do either of those things. Justice Roberts actually did some real legal acrobatics so as not to touch that question at all. What they could’ve done in setting us back decades is say, “When you distinguish based on whether someone is trans or not, that’s not a sex-based classification.” They could’ve said that, and they didn’t. They also could’ve said, “Trans people don’t make up their own suspect class.” And they didn’t say that either. So this is bad news for gender-affirming care for youth under 18. But it could be much worse news for a whole slew of other issues that are impacting the trans community right now. 

SARA: Because there was an earlier court case where they actually upheld some protections for trans folks as a class around employment? Housing? 

SAM: Employment. So, yes. Right you are. And the very, very long and good dissent by Justice Sotomayor brought this in. The case was Bostock. It happened a couple of years ago. And the differentiation that Justice Roberts makes is that it was not based on the Constitution, it was based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which is a super important law. Sex appears only once in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it is in Title VII. It is in this one little area of employment discrimination. And there are a lot of theories that it was actually a poison-pill amendment that somebody added at the last second trying to tank the entire bill and just sort of nobody noticed that it got in there. So we have very little legislative history to guide us about what they meant. One thing I do want to say is that for all that we talk about, and in Bostock they talked frequently about how Congress couldn’t possibly have meant to include trans people in a prohibition on discriminating employment on the basis of sex. One of the people who was most active in passing that was Pauli Murray, who did not at the time – we did not have the language of transgender like we do now – but Pauli Murray is one of our trans sisters for sure. I tend to just not use a pronoun around Pauli Murray at all because gender was very complicated. But Pauli Murray might be one of the first people who ever had access to testosterone therapy. This is somebody whose history is deeply embedded with ours. I digress. Bostock is the decision that you were talking about. And what Bostock said was that under the Civil Rights Act of ’64, under Title VII which prohibits discrimination in employment based on sex, you cannot discriminate against a transgender person without discriminating based on sex. It was written by Justice Gorsuch who also didn’t fully say why that is. It was sort of a, you can’t discriminate based on sex because if you replace the word female with male you would come to a different result. It could be that trans people make up our own category under sex discrimination. It could be that this just does qualify. He basically was, it doesn’t matter why? It just matters that it is true. So Justice Sotomayor in the dissent in Skrmetti said, “You can’t say that it’s true for Title VII and not true for the Equal Protection Clause. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.” Title VII is really, really persuasive authority when it comes to interpreting any other nondiscrimination law basically in the country because so many are modeled after it that the language is very similar. So courts consider it really persuasive. But in this case, they wrenched in it’s not sex here because they’re differentiating based on a medical diagnosis and age. Age is one of those things that gets rational basis review. Medical diagnosis isn’t in there at all. So they said that because of that, we can sidestep the entire question of scrutiny. We don’t have to deal with whether this is sex discrimination or not. This is discrimination based on a medical condition and based on age. And those things survive review. 

SARA: That makes a lot of sense. 

SAM: I just talked in a lot of circles. I apologize for that. 

SARA: You know, every time I talk about the case with someone, with all of my attorney friends, I hear new things in the legal analysis. I learn new things. So in states like mine, in Idaho, that had a ban in place. That ban remains in full effect. 

SAM: It does. And if there were bans that were sort of caught up in court cases in the lower courts about whether or not they were constitutional, most of those cases are very quickly resolving right now because the Supreme Court has given the final word on this, or what they think is final that I suspect one day will be overturned. But that is certainly not going to be tomorrow. 

SARA: However, parents still have the ability to support their kids if they have the resources to seek care in states where there are no bans, where care is still legal. 

SAM: Yes. Yes, they do. There is some concern, and I do understand it, that some of these laws are going a little far in their language. They’re saying “anybody who helps a kid get access to gender-affirming care” and there’s some nervousness that that could include things like helping somebody cross state lines. We, in many ways, are following the lead of our reproductive justice colleagues here. In part because they are a bit ahead of us just in how the laws have been passed the last few years. After Dobbs in particular, overturned Roe V Wade, we’ve seen a number of laws that have tried to criminalize abortion and adding and abetting abortion. And there are those making the argument that that includes helping people get over state lines. Those arguments have not yet survived in court which bodes really well for us as well. It’s very difficult to say “you can’t leave the state to do something that we have said you can’t do here.” Legally, that’s a difficult case to make. But it’s not an impossible case to bring. Right now, though, I am grateful to say that that is not number one on the worry list. 

SARA: I mean, it’s disheartening because I know other states like mine have tried to criminalize healthcare for trans youth so there are penalties for doctors. And we’ve watched that also play out with all the abortion bans in this chilling effect. Where then it just scares doctors to do anything, even talk to families and patients about what their options might be. 

SAM: Yeah. That is, in so many ways, part of the strategy here. It’s a legal strategy as much as it is a communication strategy. Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles just stopped offering gender-affirming care, just announced that they will be doing this. California, which is my home state which I am evangelically in love with, they did not need to do this. They are scared that they are going to be sued. They are scared that they are going to be punished for this, and so they’re complying in advance. Which is something we’re seeing more and more as this presidential administration has taken hold, that there is so much legal chaos, there’s so much uncertainty, that institutions who are naturally risk-averse are saying “We’re going to start making policies based on the most conservative interpretation of these laws just to keep ourselves safe.” Unfortunately, keeping them safe endangers trans youth. 

SARA: Yeah. It’s terrible. And those impacts, like Children’s LA, then just tightens the availability of legal care that folks can access, especially if they’re in states with bans or in places where they don’t have care immediate in their city. 

SAM: Exactly. 

SARA: When you think about Skrmetti, and I do want to talk about some of the other decisions that have come down, this time of year. What do you see as the broader legal ripple effects on LGBTQ+ protections in general? Does this signal a shift in how the court is going to approach these questions in the future?

SAM: Yes and no. 

SARA: You look into your crystal ball and tell me the answer to that question. 

SAM: Emphatically no, because anybody that tells you that they know, thinks a little too highly of their own opinion. The truth is we don’t know. This is conjecture. And it’s educated conjecture, but it is conjecture. I really thought that we were going to lose Bostock. After that oral argument especially, I was not optimistic about that. And it wasn’t even a close decision. We won that 6-3. Justice Gorsuch, who wrote the opinion, I was really relying on during Skrmetti. And he was silent at oral argument and didn’t issue a concurring opinion, didn’t issue a dissent, nothing. So you never know, is the point. You never know what mood someone’s going to be in that day. Justice Thomas, who is famously silent during oral argument, during Skrmetti was one of the most active ones. You can’t ever predict. You can make some educated wishes, to quote Deadpool. You can make an educated wish. 

SARA: I know you’re a member of the Supreme Court Bar, but it sounds like you were there. Were you there in the room during oral arguments? 

SAM: The Supreme Court Bar has a special line to get into the room. And usually it’s about 60 or 70. They stopped that line after 19. And I was number 20. So I listened to it from the car outside the court. And then, as soon as it was over, went to the rally where most people were, which was the opposite of what was happening in the room. It was life-giving. But listening to that oral argument was fascinating in no small part – and I’m going to get back to your question, I promise – there is something really important that happened in this case. I worked in the last administration. I worked in the Department of Education where we were passing regulations on Title IX to do many things, in part to protect trans kids. And it’s amazing being inside the buildings where people are making decisions that impact hundreds of thousands of people. It’s incredible to see how that happens and how much it comes down to individuals, to rooms, to a meeting that you didn’t even know was going to be that meeting, or to a day that you didn’t know there was going to be an oral argument. I remember the fights that we won and lost in those rooms. And you don’t win every one. The nature of this is you don’t win every one. And, also, when someone is going to make a decision that impacts a community of people, I think it does matter that they have to look someone in the eye from that community first. I think that matters. And something happened in Skrmetti that had never happened before, which was that we had a transgender attorney arguing that case. We had Chase Strangio who was given an absolutely impossible job to do and did it extraordinarily well. 

SARA: Beautifully.

SAM: So Justice Thomas, for his active as he was, he had to look Chase in the eye before ruling against our rights. He had to look someone in the eye before pulling that trigger. And I don’t think that’s nothing. 

SARA: Agreed. And it was a really powerful experience to be able to hear Chase in the room making those arguments. So I appreciate you pointing that out. 

SAM: You did ask what this portends. I’m going to answer, I promise. 

SARA: Okay. Let’s go. Let’s go there. 

SAM: The answer is yes, and. Right? This is bad news for gender-affirming care for youth under 18 in the states in which legislatures are inclined to pass restrictions on that. Because it was such a narrow opinion in some ways, it isn’t directly impactful on things like sports discrimination protections and employment and housing. It doesn’t impact those as directly. What Justice Roberts said was that this was based on age and this was based on medical condition. So he was really clear. He had some language in there that, at least to me, felt clear, that if a law like this had come before them that applied to everyone regardless of age, that that would not pass his muster. He also gave some indication that if a law tried to restrict social transition, that that wouldn’t either. And that feels a little far out there, but Florida tried to do that three or four years ago. Their State Department of Health issued an advisory that talked about kids clothes and haircuts as part of transition. I’m like, it’s kind of wild to make a parents’ rights argument out of one side of your mouth and then out of the other say you can’t get your kid a haircut. Pretty extraordinary. So in some ways, the legal reasoning here isn’t something that I think is immediately direct threat to the other kinds of cases that we have percolating in the lower courts right now. That said, we did just see the Supreme Court grant certiorari, so agree to hear a case next term called West Virginia V B.P.J., which is on trans athletes. And it’s under Title IX. And it’s also under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. So they are going to have another opportunity to address this heightened scrutiny question. I don’t know if they’re going to take that opportunity. They have thus far tried really hard – and often in the last few decades even – when it comes to LGBTQ cases, they kind of try to sidestep saying exactly what it is, what the basis is. You see this in Bowers and Lawrence, even in Obergefell and marriage equality. There is this tendency to talk around the issue of something like scrutiny. And so there is some hope. I have some hope that even as they take this athletics case – which let me be clear, we didn’t want them to take – I would not have chosen the Supreme Court that currently sits to be hearing this case. But they’re going to. And I hope that they will sidestep that argument again. I don’t know that they will. I wish that they didn’t have an opportunity this quickly to do that again. But they will have another opportunity. And that, depending on how they handle it, could have wider reaching implications. What Skrmetti did does not have as wide-reaching implications as it could have. 

SARA: Meaning it’s only really just applied to minors and health care, and can’t expand outward from there. 

SAM: That’s right. That’s right. It can, in that lower courts could take it as a signal that they should be interpreting the equal protection cases before them in a more conservative way. But there isn’t direct language that they could be citing to deny other claims under the 14th Amendment in the way that they could have if that opinion had gone farther. 

SARA: But it also feels like it, then, gives legislatures fuel to either continue down the path to pass bans where they haven’t been successful before or – like in my wild state – they just make things worse. Just more crazy discriminatory nonsense every session. Every time a ruling or something happens in their favor the overreach is significant. 

SAM: Yeah. This is a psychological game as much as it is a legal one. And I think what we’re seeing a lot of very quickly is the Overton Window moving very rapidly, the Overton Window is a thought experiment created to discuss fascism and specifically nazis about if you just move to the right a little bit on something that once felt too far, it can push people slowly into a kind of extreme that a few years ago would’ve felt extreme. But now, because it has been slow, it’s a crab boiling in water. So we’re pushing that Overton Window really quickly, actually. And I think that what we’re seeing from the Supreme Court is pushing that in ways the legislatures are paying attention to. We are seeing legislatures take absolutely unprecedented actions against LGBTQ people with a laser focus on trans people. And it’s not an accident. It is a strategy. It is a nationwide strategy thought up by think tanks around 2016, 2017. Right after Obergefell was decided and marriage became the law of the land. They knew that LGBTQ issues were really salient for conservative voters. They had, up until then, a really, really dependable thing that they could use during electoral seasons to get their candidates elected because they knew it would bring people to the polls and they needed a new one. So a couple of think tanks led by the Heritage Foundation around 2017, started throwing some noodles at the wall, collecting people in rooms, trying to figure out what the next thing was going to be. And over some trial and error found this is the issue that accomplishes the same thing that 20 years ago, same-sex marriage did for them. 

SARA: Wow. It makes me worry about what the future holds in thinking about what cases the court will take and how things will unfold in legislatures. But there was another ruling that also then just quickly followed Skrmetti that applied to LGBTQ+ and young people. Can you talk about that case a little bit and particularly what parents and families might need to think about how this will impact them and their schools?

SAM: Yeah. I think you’re talking about Mahmoud v Taylor. Is that right? 

SARA: Yeah. 

SAM: So, what Mahmoud v Taylor, it was a case about essentially curriculum bans or some version of what we are seeing in many schools. We are seeing book bans. We are seeing real efforts to interfere with the curriculum of schools to tailor it toward a more conservative agenda. This was a school in Montgomery County – actually where I am talking from right now – right outside D.C., what my friends like to call Fake D.C. There was a decision by the school board to include a couple of optional books in their language arts curriculum. And a couple of them included LGBTQ people. One of them was literally called Pride Puppy. We are not talking about serious intense gender analysis here. We’re talking about Pride Puppy. For the first year they had this, they allowed parents to opt their kids out of those lessons. And for the second year they said that is logistically difficult. There will no longer be an opt out option. Several families brought a case, saying that this impinged their religious freedom because their kids were being taught things that they did not want them to be taught. There was a case some years back in the context of Amish families where the Supreme Court had said that a law requiring kids to be in school after 12 years old infringed on the religious freedom of Amish families who wanted to keep their kids home and school them at home. And what the families here said was, if a family has the right to opt their child out of education entirely, they should have the right to opt their kid out of one book or one lesson in education. And the Supreme Court agreed with that. There were, again, some really vehement dissents, notably by Justice Jackson, saying this is a really slippery slope. We are allowing religious freedom to be used as a cudgel it wasn’t designed for. There is a slippery slope here. I am a Unitarian Universalist. I think you know that about me. My faith teaches that violence is wrong. There’s nothing really stopping me from asking to opt my kid out of history chapters on the history of war in our world and our country. This is a really slippery slope that gets dangerous. It doesn’t impact breadth of activity that Skrmetti does. But it is a sign that the court right now is not sympathetic to LGBTQ families and people. I think that that is something that we can take from that. Even if we’re not going to be deep in the free exercise clause forever. And I do think we’re going to run up against it again. It is a sign that this is not the court that we want many of these cases coming before. That said, if we don’t bring those cases, someone else will. Which is what we’re seeing elsewhere in the country. And if somebody else brings these cases, they are going to be ones that do not reflect our values in the ways that when we bring a case on behalf of a 12-year-old, really untalented track and field runner who just wants to play, that reflects our values. Right? We’re saying this is about fairness. This kid is being forced to sit on the sideline and serve Gatorade when she could barely make the team to begin with. So I do think it’s important that we’re bringing these cases. And also, I know that this is a court that might not be sympathetic to those cases in ways that they always have been or will be again. 

SARA: You have a lot of history in civil rights work and civil rights legal work. You mentioned working for the Department of Education and the Office for Civil Rights under the Biden administration. And I know you began your legal career as a staff attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights. So you’ve been doing this kind of civil rights work for a while. So I’m curious from that standpoint, are there other legal strategies? You mentioned continuing to bring lawsuits or policy moves that are still available to try to help protect our queer youth and families in this current climate. 

SAM: There are. I think that we have some of the best attorneys in the bar right now. Something that is becoming abundantly clear as headlines are escalating every day is that when we’re up against, particularly in a presidential administration right now, we’re up against not very good lawyers. We have incredible lawyers. I’m sorry. That was the gentlest form of attorney shade that I could muster there. 

SARA: Very gentle, but it brings me some delight to hear that, actually. Like there’s a little sliver of hope right there. 

SAM: We have incredible strategists. We have some of the best legal minds alive today. And I trust those attorneys with the litigation strategy. I think that as some avenues are foreclosed to us, yes, we absolutely have to start pursuing others. And I think that some of that probably isn’t actually in civil rights law – which is obviously my area of expertise. But also, we have a really rich history here. It is in the last decade or so, maybe couple of decades if you expand this to some state legislatures, that we have started to, as queer people, locate our worth in state recognition. But up until really, really recently that was not a place that we have ever looked to for validation on account of the state was beating us up, sometimes legally, sometimes literally. We have a really, really long tradition, not just of legal strategy, but of mutual aid and of community support. And I think that if we’re talking about strategy right now, we’re not just talking about law, we’re talking about remembering who we are as a community. Returning to the roots that made us, which is that the best of us is taking care of one another, and we have always looked to one another before we have looked to the government. Always, in our entire history, up until very recently, we located our power in one another. And I think that that power still exists regardless of what the Supreme Court does, regardless of what the White House does or State Legislatures do. They have never once, in millennia sometimes of trying, managed to eradicate us. They’re not going to start now. We are still going to be here. Trans kids have always existed. They are going to continue to exist no matter how hard some people might try. And I genuinely think that there are some people, if given the choice between a world with us and a world without us, would choose a world without us. I don’t think that that’s the majority. And I think that the great thing about returning to mutual aid and community support is that our job is to widen what qualifies as community. Our job is to find new ways to embrace one another every day. And as we widen that community, communities support us more and more. 

SARA: Thank you for that. You got there before I could even ask you, because I was going to ask you to share a little bit about that beautiful post that you wrote right after Skrmetti. I know when many of us parents were just reeling. And it felt very hopeful to me and in that post, you said everything you just shared right now about what’s important for us to remember in these times of struggle and what feel like significant setbacks is turning back to community. And so I just want to tell all of our Mama Dragons out there, look at the time stamp in this moment of this episode. You can just replay Sam’s answer there. And when you need a little pick-me-up, when you need to remember where the hope is, you just shared that with us. I really appreciate that. Thank you. I’m curious, Sam, if you’ll share a little bit of your story. How did you find yourself in this line of work and why is it so important to you? 

SAM: That’s a great question. A little bit accidentally, I have a little bit followed a call and service, and mistakes. The actual answer is I was raised Unitarian Universalist. I am one of the rare cradle UUs out there. And the theology that I was raised with is that our rent for existing on this earth is that we do justice and we make it better. When I was in college or so – because when you instill that in a teenager they take it to the extreme – I took a step back and I retreated into the arts for a little while. Theater was always a real home for me. And I was surrounded by as many queer people as I had ever been there. And I still really genuinely believe that arts education is what is going to get us out of this moment. That said, I was in college in 2008. I was just getting out of college. 2008 was – if you may remember – a year that two really important things happened. The first thing was that we elected our first Black president and Barack Obama who would go on to make an enormous amount of history in the white house. The second thing that happened, happened on the exact same day which was in California where I was at the time and where I grew up. Proposition 8 passed. Proposition 8 was a ballot measure in California in which the majority of California voters voted to eliminate the right to same-sex marriage. Waking up on that day was a little bit surreal. I think that we think about that day in regard to marriage. But really it was about waking up and realizing that half your neighbors had voted against you. That was the primary feeling. And so I went and I got myself into trouble as I had been taught to do. I went out into the streets. 

SARA: Some good trouble. 

SAM: Some good trouble. That’s right. I also applied to law school. I applied to law school from those streets. And I found out that I had gotten into law school on a hundred mile march that we did from San Francisco to Sacramento to protest while the California Supreme Court had that case out. I found out that I had gotten into law school right as we were going into the final rally of that march. And I literally called the California Bar from the car and said, “Hey. If I wanted to become a lawyer and was arrested before that happened, could I still become a lawyer?” And the very patient woman on the other end of the line said, “Listen, I am a lawyer so I’m not going to commit to anything. But I will tell you, we know the difference between civil disobedience and a DUI,” is exactly what she said. It’s burned into my memory. So I did indeed go out and make some trouble that day, and continue to. But as I was doing so, I also realized that tempermentally, I am not a yeller. I’m not as good in the streets as I was at helping the National Lawyers Guild attorneys that were helping to defend us. And I am a big believer that we use the gifts we are given in the ways that they can be the most useful. I had a brain that worked this way through no real fault of my own. But I decided to go train it up to work this way, and have been in this movement ever since and have been incredibly, incredibly fortunate to be housed at some extraordinary organizations, NCLR being the first. And they are now the National Center for LGBTQ Rights as of just last month, I think. But they are one of the – when I say that we have some of the brightest legal minds in the country right now, I’m talking about NCLR. 

SARA: Which was the National Center for Lesbian Rights, NCLR. 

SAM: Was the National Center for Lesbian Rights, now is the National Center for LGBTQ Rights. But it’s consistently existed to advocate for whoever’s been left behind in any given moment. When they were founded, that was lesbians. Right now, it’s often transgender people. It’s often trans women of color. And that is the cases that they take on consistently. They are always the ones taking on the cases that get overlooked. So I am incredibly lucky to have ended up in some great organizations with incredible mentors. And 17 years later, I’m still here. 

SARA: That is an incredible story. That whole breadth and context of it is so beautiful. And you brought me back because I was in California in 2008 as well. 

SAM: Oh, wow. Do you remember?

SARA: Yeah, oh, I remember. And I remember sitting, watching those election results, and just the pain, everyone around you is cheering and at the bottom of the screen is all the statewide propositions, and it was just so… 

SAM: That’s exactly what it was. Yeah. 

SARA: So dissonant. But here you are, and you just continue to do some incredible work and make such an incredible impact. And thank you for reminding us of all the of the people using all of their gifts in all of these different ways sounds like an invitation for organizations like Mama Dragons and for parents and families to get involved in whatever ways feel best and useful for them. 

SAM: Yeah. And I think that there is also a unique argument to be made for an organization like Mama Dragons. I have testified at a lot of state legislative hearings. And something that is so clear to me is that when you have hundreds of people testifying on any given day, the legislature starts to know what is going to be said based on who is getting up and what they came from. If someone’s coming from the Family Research Counsel, they know where they stand on an issue of transgender rights. If someone’s coming from the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, they’re pretty sure they know where they stand. When somebody comes up and speaks from the point of view of a person of faith, legislatures think they know what they’re going to say. And it’s not true. We cannot cede the ground of religion to people who would use it as a cudgel. We cannot let faith be used as a weapon when we know that it is our responsibility to use it as a shield. Every single religious tradition I can think of says, “We shield the people who cannot shield themselves in any given moment.” So when an organization like Mama Dragons is founded with some of the people who you wouldn’t predict what is going to come out of their mouths at a legislative hearing, those are my favorite people. And it’s often because they’ve had to fight really, really hard to be able to get there in the first place. And the forces in this world that are powerful enough to keep somebody sustained during that are not many. And one of them is love for your kid. And I am in consistent awe of this organization and how it came to be and how it continues to exist in the world. 

SARA: Thank you for that. That’s beautiful. And it’s a really good reminder for all of us about how we can lean on those organizations like Mama Dragons. We lean on each other a lot, provide each other a community to turn to. But turning to community, just finding those supports in your own space, wherever they show up, is so important. What else might you say to parents in this moment who are feeling scared, isolated, unsure how to support their trans child after this ruling? I know I’m hearing from parents where we are trying desperately to protect our kids as we do, and to shield them. But our kids are smart. And they’re watching the news and they’re on TikTok. And they go down the rabbit hole. And the anxiety is really high among trans youth right now. I’m watching it in my house. I’m watching it with my friends. And I think a lot of us, we are feeling it too. And we don’t quite know what to do to help counterbalance that. Because it’s not just Skrmetti, it is the whole country and the government, that systematic attack. 

SAM: Yeah. And on the same day that Skrmetti was decided, quieter, the Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse, Mental Health Services Administration where I also used to work, announced that they would be pulling funding for the option when you call 988 to send somebody directly to a hotline that is trained to serve LGBTQ youth. I want to be very, very clear that they did not eliminate that hotline all together. That hotline still exists. Those hotlines still exist. Mental health supports still exist. And also, what we know about moments like this is that they are isolating by design. We are less of a threat when we feel disconnected from one another. And, again, something that, when we are at our best, faith communities do is we support one another through community. I was incredibly, incredibly lucky to grow up in a way where the queer people that I met, the first ones that I met, were at church. I think it matters so much that we are showing up for one another in whatever place we make meaning. Right now, faith communities are one space that we make meaning out of community. But they are not the only ones. I think kids get it so quickly, right? Especially, you tell a four-year-old that their friend changed their name. And that four-year-old goes, “Great. When’s our next play date? And can we or can we not go into the back yard?” Those kids are the ones that I worry about, right? I used to run an organization called Trans Lifeline which is one of those crisis hotlines for trans people in crisis. And the youngest caller that we ever got, at least when I was there, was six years old. 

SARA: Oh, wow.

SAM: That number is burned into my memory. And what I want for that six year old is other six year olds, is other people like them who know what they’re going through and can talk to one another and support one another through this. I think the best thing that parents can be doing right now is to keep being supportive, finding other parents to keep them going because being a parent right now of a trans kid is stressful unto itself, making sure that their kids have a community where they can go. We know that kids talk about issues with each other and with other trusted adults that are important to have that kind of diversity around. Keep connecting with one another. Isolation is part of the design. It is how they disempower us. And the way that we keep the power that we know is going to be necessary to sustain us and to get us back from this really difficult moment is by staying connected to one another insistently. 

SARA: What gives you strength to keep doing this work? 

SAM: I often say that the best thing about me is my friends. The people who I have surrounded myself with, chosen family, I’m incredibly lucky that when I do go lock myself in a cave, they drag me out to the movies whether I want them to or not. I’m very grateful for that. And truly, I spent two years working inside the government, and some of that is by necessity isolating. There are so few people who look like me who have ever gotten their foot in the door of a position of power like I had access to when I was in the last administration. And because of that, there’s an enormous responsibility, and you cannot be seen as biased. And in part, that means that you cannot be connected to the community that you come from in the same way that you have been. Part of the service is the loneliness. And being in this moment, back on the outside, able to reconnect with a community, man, you never know what you take for granted until you lose it. Queer community is lifegiving. It is lifegiving because we have an intimate relationship with life being taken away. And what sustains me right now is watching the incredible things that my friends, my family, my colleagues are doing. And I consider that family growing every day. I look at the news and I look at these kids who are skipping school to go testify at legislative hearings to protect their friends and their teammates. Cis girls that go into these legislative hearings and say, “Hey. My friend is not a threat to me. This is about you. Not us.” I take so much strength from that. And I am not here to tell kids to skip school. I do think that it’s probably a great lesson in civics. But I will say that it gives me absolute life seeing them show up for one another, seeing them create these communities younger and younger that my generation didn’t even have the language for. That gives me life. Expanding what we consider family and community and watching the next generation find newer and newer ways to do it gives me life. 

SARA: Oh, yes. Thank you for that reminder. I enjoy listening and watching those posts with athletes supporting each other while everyone else freaks out. 

SAM: Yeah. 

SARA: It really is so delightful to hear athletes just say, “Actually, this makes me a better athlete.” 

SAM: Yeah. When we’re talking about sports,and I wish we talked about them less because the number of actual trans athletes in this country is so, so, so small, this is the issue that they found was most salient to bring out voters when the Heritage Foundation was doing that research. This is entirely a massive, massive success of a communication strategy is what it is when we talk about sports. And, also, there are kids that want to play sports. And what we’re talking about isn’t the less than ten college athletes in the country who are trans. It is the really untalented 12-year-old who is sitting in the outfield looking at clovers because there’s absolutely no danger of a fly ball getting hit into the outfield. It is making sure that that kid can sit in the outfield rather than being forced to be handing out Gatorade to their friends. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about fairness. And I actually think that that is where both sides of this can and should be connecting. We don’t necessarily have all the answers on this yet. I think anybody who tells you they do is trying to probably sell you something. But what I do know is that we are all here to make things fairer. Let me restate that. 90% of us are here to make things fairer. And 10% are trying to manipulate that 90%. 

SARA: Yeah. That is a good picture. I want to go back to something. We’ve had a lot of attorneys on the podcast. But I want to go back to court cases for a moment because I have been curious about this question and I think this would be interesting to some of our families. You talked about the value of bringing lawsuits, of having the talented lawyers that are working in this space are great and the value of continuing to bring lawsuits so that we can shape the conversation even with an unfriendly Supreme Court. I wonder if you can talk about, just for a little bit, what it takes to be a plaintiff. I know that in my home state, we sue the government all the time, these amazing, fabulous lawyers. And I know they’re always looking for plaintiffs, and particularly in this space of trans youth with bathroom bills. And they’re being very kind and sensitive. But what would you say to parents? How might parents think about that and consider if that is a good fit for them and their family? I know that’s a really hard question because I don’t want to come from this place of “Step up and let’s all be plaintiffs.” But I also think that perhaps some families haven’t even thought about it. And this is one way that is part of the whole ecosystem of taking action and chipping away at these harms. 

SAM: Before I answer this question, I want to be clear that I am not a parent. And I in many ways have no business giving parenting advice. 

SARA: Okay. 

SAM: I’m going to shy away from that. But what I will say is that right now, being alive in America, is a constant risk assessment. And that risk assessment changes every day. And it changes depending on who you are and who's being targeted that day, and how much privilege you have that day, how much you can fall back on, what kind of community support you have, what kind of financial support you have. There are trans kids who I have been in relationship with for years, for sometimes a decade. And if I’m ever in relationship with a trans kid, I’m in relationship with their parents. These are incredible, incredible parents who do hard things and are willing to do the thing that I think every parent should do regardless of whether your kid is trans or not, which is: believe your kids when they tell you what is true for them. There are many kids who have been doing this kind of advocacy since they were seven years old. I am in awe of those kids. I love those kids. Some of them are now driving and going off to college. But I’ve been in awe of these kids forever. And I’ve been in awe of their parents forever. And I was having a conversation with one of their moms about a year ago, I think, who was like, “I don’t think we ever could’ve stopped our kid from being an advocate. I don’t think we could’ve stopped them from getting up at whatever podium was available to them. And also, if we knew now what we knew then, I would’ve tried to stop it. I don’t think that I could recommend anybody who hasn’t already been in the public eye, get in the public eye right now.” And I take that incredibly seriously. At the end of the day, this is about love for your kid. And protecting your kid is the most important thing. And there are valences of risk and of privilege for everyone and there are really some kids who you can’t stop from getting to a podium. And you’re going to do harm reduction and make sure they’re as protected as possible. You are going to get them a Delete Me account today and make sure that it is hard to dox them. And also, it’s not for everyone. Being a plaintiff is a hard way to go. Not only is your life suddenly up for court scrutiny, it’s up for media scrutiny. The plaintiff in an incredibly impactful and really bad decision in the Korematsu case back in World War II, a man brought a case basically saying you shouldn’t be able to put me in an internment camp because I’m Japanese. And the Supreme Court did that heightened scrutiny analysis. It was a race-based classification. And they did strict scrutiny. And the Supreme Court decided that laws putting Japanese people in Internment camps survived strict scrutiny. Under the Constitution, that was legal. That probably isn’t true anymore. Korematsu has been not directly overturned, but all but overturned. But the man who brought this case spent the rest of his life feeling guilt about it. He wrote more amicus briefs to the court than I think maybe anyone in history has in subsequent cases because he felt like this was, in some way, a reflection on something that he had tried to do. When he died – and he’s buried in Oakland which is the town that I most often call home – he died without knowing that that case would eventually become a relic of history. He died, I think, not knowing what an impact he had. And the truth is he had an incredible positive impact on this world. But this is as much psychological as it is legal. And getting into this kind of world as a plaintiff is not a small task. It is a task that some people are called to. It’s a task that some people consider service. And I think he did. And I certainly know that there are those who are giving that service right now and feel like it is their call. And, again, I’m not going to give anybody the advice to do it or, frankly, to not do it. I think that we listen to one another. We believe our kids when they tell us what’s true for them. And we follow the best ethics we have on any given day and do the risk assessments we can knowing that we are not perfect and we can never predict what is coming. And also that when we make decisions from the right values, the right ethics, and they don’t turn out the way we hope because somebody has decided to cause harm, that is also not our fault. 

SARA: Thank you for that very honest and real answer. I think that was great and gives folks a lot to think about given the landscape. This has been a beautiful conversation. We do like to end the podcast, we ask all of our guests the same two questions, final questions at the end of each episode. So, here are my questions for you. The first question has to do with the Mama Dragons name. Mama Dragons name came about out of a sense of fierceness and fierce protection for our kids. And so we like to ask our guest, besides the work or what we just talked about, what is it you are fierce about? 

SAM: I am fiercely protective. I said earlier that the best thing about me is my friends and my family and my community. And the thing that, probably more than ethics, more than faith, more than anything, I draw almost everything back to, is I am protective of my friends and my people. And on any given day, sometimes that looks like sitting outside the Supreme Court in the rain. And sometimes it looks like buying a trans person a burrito. But when it comes to ferocity, that is probably the fiercest part of me. 

SARA: That’s great. I love that. That’s just good advice in general. You said that when we were together at our conference a few weeks ago. Just buy a trans person a burrito. And I thought, “There it is. So simple.” 

SAM: I’ve only said this twice in the last month. But you have been there for both. 

SARA: The final question that we like to ask our guests is, what is bringing you joy right now in this moment when we know we have to cultivate as much joy as we can? What’s bringing you joy?

SAM: Honestly, what’s bringing me joy right now is reconnecting with the land, with the roots. As I am thinking about our history and our ancestors and those who paved the way for us, I also know that we are animals, that I am fallible among other things. But one of the things that I am is a mammal and I desperately need, sometimes, to reconnect with the part of me that lives in dirt. And as headlines just attack us more every single day, sometimes I take a step back and remember that joy is not granted by the political process. It is part of our species. It is part of being alive. And it’s not a right. It just is. 

SARA: It’s just there. 

SAM: Yeah.

SARA: That is beautiful. I haven’t heard it put quite like that before. But I’m going to take that with me today that joy is not granted by the political process. 

SAM: It sure is not.

SARA: It is ours for the taking. 

SAM: We would not be well served to place our hope for joy in the political process, I think no matter the political moment. 

SARA: Right. Which is why it’s such a good reminder because it is so, unfortunately, easy in this moment to get stuck and a little bit lost in the pain and in the despair and in what feels like hopelessness. So just remember that joy is there. 

SAM: Joy is there. Go jump in the ocean. The ocean is always there. 

SARA: Sam, Thank you so much for your time. 

SAM: Thank you. 

SARA: I’m so grateful to you and to the great work you do in this world. Thank you. 

SAM: The feeling is so mutual. Thank you for having me and Thank you for doing this work. 

SARA: Thank you so much for joining us here In the Den. Did you know that Mama Dragons offers an eLearning program called Parachute? This is an interactive learning platform where you can learn more about how to affirm, support, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ people in your life. Learn more at mamadragons.org/parachute. Or find the link in the episode show notes under links. 

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