<
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/nov/17/heightened-scrutiny-trans-documentary-sam-feder>
"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 such as 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.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
