Law Dork Video: Reporting on and fighting for trans kids in 2024

"Everything is on the line," Chase Strangio says. The ACLU lawyer joins journalists Nico Lang and Orion Rummler in an essential Law Dork Video discussion.

I normally do an introduction up top here for the video discussions, but — beyond thanking Nico Lang, Orion Rummler, and Chase Strangio again for their time and talents — I realized that my introduction on the video works as well as anything I’d write here, so I’m going to let the video take it away.

The following transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.

LAW DORK: Welcome to another Law Dork Video discussion. This is sort of our back-to-school episode, and I think that there could not be a better topic going into this fall than to discuss the impact and effect of the past few years of attacks on transgender people, and specifically transgender kids.

And I was lucky enough to get three of the best voices out there to come and talk with us about what they've been seeing, what they've been reporting on, what they've been litigating.

Today we have with us Nico Lang, who's an award-winning journalist and the voice behind Queer News Daily, who has an incredible forthcoming book, American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era. We also have Orion Rummler, who is another award-winning journalist, and his articles at the 19th, I read every one. They center the humanity of the people whose stories he is telling so well in a way that very few journalists today are doing. And, finally, we have Chase Strangio, who is the co-director of the ACLU LGBTQ and HIV Project. He is the counsel of record for the private plaintiffs in the case challenging Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors that will be heard at the Supreme Court this term, and has been in court at all levels throughout the summer, litigating these laws.

To start, I just wanted to turn to you Orion, and talk about, what is this legislation that we have seen over the past, really three years, but starting a little before then and what has that done to the discussion of trans people's lives?

ORION RUMMLER: Thank you so much, Chris. So, over the past four or so years, we've seen state legislation, especially all over the south, to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth, which means puberty blockers and hormone treatments. And we've also seen a big effort to restrict how teachers can interact with students in schools, whether they can affirm students questioning their genders or using the right pronouns for students, or teaching about LGBTQ issues or referencing LGBTQ issues. And we've seen a resurgence of bathroom bans in schools, and a resurgence of trying to ban how and whether trans girls, specifically, in schools can participate in sports.

So it's a lot of laws to keep track of and when I think about the real-life impact of all this legislation, I think about an interview I did in 2022, when I spoke with a trans teen in Florida who told me that he experienced suicidal thoughts and attempted to take his life because of what Florida state legislators were saying about people like him, and because those legislators wanted to ban discussions of LGBTQ identities in classrooms. He had other experiences going on in his life, but that was one of the things that was driving him to experience suicidal thoughts.

So this is hurting kids’ mental health, and it's also doing more than that. It's exposing them to violence. A week or two ago, a 16-year-old transgender boy was beaten by dozens of other teens in Massachusetts. He said he'd been bullied by them for years. So we're seeing severe mental health effects, suicidal ideation, and then direct attacks, including by other children.

LAW DORK: It's been this spreading out over the past few years, that we've seen, and, particularly with the gender-affirming care bans. Just this morning, actually, I got the latest update from the Movement Advancement Project, and as of September 18, they published this, that there are now 26 states with a ban or restriction on medically necessary prescribed health care for transgender youth, which they estimate as two of five transgender youth living in states with these bans.

However, enter Chase. There are also lawsuits currently pending against 17 of of those bans. Can you talk with us about what this litigation is? There are so many lawsuits dealing with so many issues. What is the 35,000 feet look at where things stand now?

CHASE STRANGIO: Well, thanks, thanks, Chris. The 35,000 foot look is, it's bleak. It's as bleak as it sounds.

I think that when we think about the litigation trends, when states started to pass these bans on medical care for trans adolescents, beginning in 2021 with Arkansas's ban, we went to court immediately. We went to federal court. We challenged the bans under the equal protection clause and the substantive component of the due process clause — and were successful.

We were successful in district courts when we put on the evidence showing that this is medical care that is accepted by the mainstream medical community in the United States, this is care that is only provided with the consent of parents, and so what the state is doing is overriding the aligned judgment of doctors, parents, and adolescent young people. And the courts that looked at the evidence said, "Yes, these are laws that discriminate based on sex and trans status." And ultimately, we blocked the laws. And that was the trend up until the summer of 2023.

And then we had the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

LAW DORK: I would like to just note like that this was not the reverse of when the right-wing goes to the most convenient judge. They find a judge because they had to go in the states where these laws were passed, and a bunch of these injunctions were from Republican appointees, including some Trump appointees.

STRANGIO: Yeah, so out of the, I think, the first six of the federal court injunctions against these bans were enjoined by Trump-appointed judges — in Alabama, in Tennessee, and in Indiana. And those were cases that — I was counsel in Tennessee and Indiana. And in some cases, as the Tennessee District Court opinion shows, it's extensive factual finding and exploration of the record by the district court judges that then, in the case of our case in Tennessee, the Skrmetti case that's now at the Supreme Court, is just really summarily disregarded by the appeals court and in a way that allows the court to not even look at the underlying factual record.

And I think that's something that's so important for people to understand is that when the Sixth Circuit ultimately reversed the district court's injunction, and when the Eleventh Circuit did in Alabama, they did so under rational basis[, the lowest level of scrutiny. (More on that here.)]

So they were not applying heightened scrutiny. They were not looking at the evidence. They did not reverse or find the district court's factual findings clearly erroneous. They said, "If there's any rational reason, that's enough."

These are really, really harmful decisions, especially the Sixth Circuit decision, because not only do they apply rational basis — which you know is, in and of itself, deeply concerning, because it, in essence, green-lights government discrimination against trans people in a host of contexts by virtue of the way in which the court issued its opinion in the Sixth Circuit.

But the court also, and Chris, you and I have talked about this, offers a very expansive reading of one paragraph of the Dobbs opinion, in essence taking what was mostly a substantive due process case and exporting it into equal protection — with to-be-seen implications for sex discrimination in the context of medical care more broadly.

And so when people are asking, "Well, why would you take this to the Supreme Court, knowing that the Supreme Court is a risky place to go for people." Well, the alternative was a spreading map of decisions from appellate courts that not only allowed these laws to go into effect, displacing so many families from their homes, taking away health care that young people needed, with all of the consequences that Orion described, but also creating binding law in circuits that is just untenable for us to leave in place. And so now we're taking this to the Supreme Court, hoping we can get five justices to reverse this very dangerous and damaging appellate opinion from the Sixth Circuit.

LAW DORK: In that context, I think it's really important and amazing what Nico has done, to go around the country and bring us — in two weeks from when this video is coming out — their book that — again, here it is — that tells the stories of what is actually happening to families. And I think that that's what I really got across from this, is that this isn't even just something that's happening to individuals when it happens. That these laws are causing great distress for the families who want to support these children. Can you talk with us a little bit about the idea for this book, and your interactions with Kai, that sort of were the introduction to this book?

NICO LANG: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for having me on. I spent a year traveling the country to go to seven different states to spend time with families of trans youth in their homes, on the ground, trying to see life from their perspective. And the experiences that I document here end up being really diverse.

You have families and kids who live in very supportive states where they have laws on their side to protect them and have lives that are commiserate with that. They've had a very privileged experience, and I think because of that, have a life in a lot of ways that reflect that.

But then, in a lot of states, you have kids who have been fighting their own lawmakers in order to just have basic rights and protections, the same types of medication that other kids do.

A really sobering example of this was in Florida. I spent two-and-a-half weeks there with a family who had recently experienced homelessness. They were just getting into a new apartment after, I believe, three months of being marginally housed. And the girl Jack, who is 19, very cool kind of has this, like Hunter Schafer-like goth thing going on. I loved hanging out with her, but she had lost her health care for a while under the state's Medicaid ban because she was one of the kids who relied on Medicaid to get their gender-affirming care, and she couldn't do that anymore. So for five months, her mom didn't know what to do. They weren't connected necessarily to community to get the right kind of resources that she needed to continue getting her prescription. So she just went without.

So we got to talk about what that experience was like for her. To not only lose your medication, but to have your state do that to you. What does that do to you psychologically? Because I think that for a really long time, Republicans have been able to paper over the real-world impacts of what they're really doing to kids, and, as you mentioned, also their families, too. Because it's it was Jack's mom who also had to go through this with her, who had to hold her every night and like, hope — sorry, I get very choked up when I talk about this — hope that her daughter wasn't going anywhere. She was worried that her daughter might not survive.

You see this all over the country with parents who are just so worried about the psychological, the emotional, and the mental impact on these kids. How do you continue to support them through this? How do you love them through this and just remind them that it's going to be okay? Parents don't really know the answer to that, and there are just so many people are really scared and confused right now and really hurting, but they're also carving out lovely lives around that.

I wanted to provide a little bit of a balance in this book, between being really honest about the trauma that these kids are experiencing because of their own elected lawmakers, but also the joy that they're finding anyway. It's right in the title, right — how kids are finding joy — because they still are thriving in spite of all this. And I wanted to show that, too. I thought that was really important for people to see — that these kids are still finding happiness. They're still finding a way to go on. It just shouldn't have to be this hard.

LAW DORK: I do think that that's something that I find from the work that all three of you do. It doesn't hold back from the risks and dangers that are out there, but doesn't do so in a way that prevents people from living their lives, supporting each other and moving forward — with, I think, something that Chase has often talked about — regardless of what the systems do for us.

I wondered Chase, if you could talk a little bit about — maybe me just using this is an opportunity to get information that we haven't talked about off camera — but, as an Ohioan, I wanted to talk with you a little bit about that case. And obviously that was a case where you chose to go in state court and challenge the ban. And wanted to talk with you about, when these laws pass — and obviously Ohio's was sort of an amalgam of multiple anti-trans laws, because, well, go Buckeye State. But when you are bringing these cases at the trial level, forgetting the Supreme Court for a minute, how do you approach telling these stories to get the facts in the record about what these laws are actually doing to people who are impacted?

STRANGIO: One thing that is so striking and very disturbing to note is there is a very significant difference between what it was like to put together a case in 2021 versus what it's like to put together a case in 2024.

In 2021, we had two doctor plaintiffs and four family plaintiffs in Arkansas, all of whom moved forward under their names — in public, no pseudonyms. And obviously, there's always a risk to moving forward publicly and suing your state government and putting yourself out there. There's a risk to trans people who are naming themselves, and then that's in the public domain forever. But all of those things being part of the discussion in 2021, what wasn't really part of the discussion with this idea that your life could be threatened just by virtue of announcing the fact that you're a trans person, and that your family supports the provision of this care, and that you're a doctor providing this care.

And in fact, in 2021, only one state passed one of these laws, and the Republican then-governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, vetoed it. So they were seen, in 2021, as still extraordinarily extreme and unpopular and uncommon. And obviously there was a complete sea change that took place in, particularly, 2023, where we saw nearly half the country ban this care, which, it was in no small part due to the media coverage of this care and the continued demonization in the public discourse of trans people.

So in putting together these cases, we have to have really honest conversations with families about, on the one hand, we really do want to tell these stories to the court. On the other, we really want to protect people's safety and security, and so we are almost only moving forward, as you know, with pseudonymous plaintiffs, and that just makes it much harder to tell the stories, because, A, you can't tell them publicly, and then, B, even when you're telling them to the court, you're still being mindful of not revealing any details that could betray the identity of the individual.

So even just the way in which the conversations about this care and trans people have devolved have shaped in negative ways how we're able to present our cases in court. And I just think that's something that's something that's really troubling and important to keep in mind.

And then just two quick things about sort of putting it together. That said, the families — even using pseudonyms — their stories are so compelling, they're so moving. You listen to them in court, you read these declarations, and you're like, "these are just like —." As a parent, I'm like, "Okay, yes, as parents, we understand that when our kid is hurting, we are hurting." And these are parents who don't come at their children usually with any understanding of transness. So this ridiculous narrative that parents are pushing their kids to be trans is immediately counteracted by these families' stories, who are often on a journey to understanding their kid and ultimately just want their kid to survive, as Nico was talking about, and get their kid back, because they feel like they've lost them to this despair. So that has just been a central part of of the process.

And even when we're losing — and in Ohio, we unfortunately were unsuccessful — we're on appeal — at the trial court, there is this sense that fighting back is still a critical part of people's story of self-empowerment, of resisting this absolute, egregious government intrusion into their into their lives.

Justice Sotomayor, maybe it was a year ago, was asked about, well, what is your advice to advocates who are going up before a court in which they're going to lose? And I think part of her answer that resonated is, at the end of the day, as an advocate, your job is to show your client that you are fighting for them. And for that client, for these young people and their families, they're showing others that there is a fight to be had, and, in that process, are empowered.

LAW DORK: Orion, when you are looking at these cases, when you're looking at these laws, when you're looking at this legislation, you are also having to make those decisions on the fly that Chase was just talking about.

Can you talk with us a little bit about how you navigate those safety questions, and thinking about how to report on these issues in 2024?

I know, just in the past couple weeks, you were one of the people who reported on the fact that Donald Trump made up this utter lie in a speech to Moms for Liberty about the fact that he claimed that trans kids are getting surgery at school, which is the most absurd — just like, technical, practical, there's no way this could possibly happen. And yet he's just spouting it off, and it wasn't even the sort of main takeaway from that day.

RUMMLER: Thank you so much, Chris. And I've actually seen something similar to Chase in that, over the past couple years, more trans people, not involved in lawsuits, have wanted to be off record or on background for stories when they're telling me about their experiences as a trans person living in their state. I interview plenty of trans people who are academics and experts, and I'm not talking to them about their personal experiences, and then it just doesn't come up. But I've noticed when I'm interviewing trans and nonbinary people in red states about their lived experiences, even if they're not in a lawsuit and they're out — I always ask, "Are you out in your job? Are you out to? Is there any concern for you to be named as trans in this story?" — more trans people have been worried about being identified as trans in a news story.

The process for that, to me, is I usually just talk through with them about, "Okay, so what exactly are you worried about?" Because I feel like that can help people think through, "What am I worried about happening?" Because what I need to know as a reporter is like, "Are you out at your job? Are you going to lose your job if you're out as trans? How is your situation with your family? Are you depending on them financially? Will they cut you off if they know you're trans and you're out in the story?" Those are pretty clear cut reasons why someone would need some kind of anonymity.

And, as a reporter, we have some flexibility in being able to just describe where someone lives and not using their name, just describing where they live, describing what they do, and not saying exactly what their job is. So then I usually just explain to folks, "You can still be in the story if you want to be without your name," and then I work with them to identify the ways I can describe them to readers, to orient readers to where this person is living without endangering them in any way. And I've just also noticed, similar to Chase, that more trans people are worried about being identified due to the political climate right now.

LAW DORK: Nico, when you were putting together this book and crafting where you were finding people and who it was going to be. I want to hear you talk a little bit about that process of choosing those people and, specifically, I found it a really important part of the book having Ruby's story and talking about this idea of what it's like to be a trans person growing up in in Texas — when you when you've got some of the most aggressive, often lawless, actions from Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, not to mention lawmakers, attacking trans people on all sides and even organizations trying to support trans people. How do you tell that story in a way that accomplishes your goal of sharing that story with the world?

LANG: I'm really glad that you asked about Ruby, but I'll get to, I think, the first part of your question first, which is how I got connected with the families overall. And half of the families were folks I already knew from my reporting that I talked to before, but not at a really deep level — that they had these really great stories that I feel like I only scratched the surface of. And it felt really valuable for those families to really get to tell their stories the way I know them. Because there's just so much richness there. You get to kind of go down the rest of the iceberg with people. So that was a fun little journey to go on with them.

But then, with the other families, a lot of it was referrals. I had intersections I knew I wanted to explore and areas of the country I felt like it would be really valuable for readers to go. We got two AAPI families in the book, and that felt really cool to me because I don't think that there's been as much AAPI representation in terms of trans storytelling as I would really like. One of the families was Japanese Hawaiian. Another was Muslim Pakistani. My minor in college was Islamic World Studies, so it felt really good to finally use my minor, and talk about this like this very devout Muslim teen boy's experience with his religion, but also how he balances that with being trans. And it was just so cool, because it felt like it was, it was challenging a lot of narratives that I feel like I've heard — in that you can't be this and this — whereas he feels like he's never had to choose between his faith and who he is. And that just felt like a really refreshing message to hear.

In Ruby's story, it was obviously really important that, as someone in Texas, that we talk about all the things that were happening in Texas, but I kind of wanted to foreground all the other stuff first, because I got really lucky in a way. You know, as a reporter, you often just stumble into these things that you don't necessarily intend, and you're like, "Oh my god, I can't believe this happened." And in Ruby's case, the boy that she likes happened to ask her out three days before I got there, and I was like, "Oh my God." I was just so happy because I would get to tell this story that I feel like I wanted to get to in the book, which is a trans love story of this young girl who was falling in love for the first time and just being there and watching it happen. And they were gracious enough to let me document that, which is really wild that her, essentially, her new boyfriend was like, "Yeah, it'd be totally cool if a reporter just follows us around and writes down everything we do." And they were just so brave and just so gracious for letting me do that.

But I wanted that story to be like the A-plot and everything happening with anti-trans laws there to be the B-plot, because it is very much part of her life. It dictates her future. It's the reason that she'll probably have to transfer to a college in another state, just because she doesn't want to live in a place that might take away her rights any passing, passing month. Because it's not even that we're just waiting for the legislature to do it at this point, it could be Paxton that does it himself. It could be Greg Abbott that does it himself. And they're just tired of having that sword hanging over their heads.

But what really struck me about Ruby's story is that when her mom pitched me on them being being in the book, she mentioned the TV show Schitt's Creek as a reference point, because it's this show that takes place in a fictional Canadian town where homophobia doesn't really exist, where you can have this pansexual shop owner who's just like flaunting around the town with his boyfriend, and it's not really a big deal. And I love that in the center of all this political chaos, this legislative chaos in Texas, here was this girl who had just been loved as who she was from the moment she came out and from the moment she was born. And that's just the kind of message that I feel like trans youth don't always get to hear, especially in a religious community. They're devout Episcopalian.

It just felt like the kind of story I really needed to hear right now. And I felt like if I needed to hear it, then maybe readers needed to hear it, too.

LAW DORK: I really love that. One of the stories that I've been talking about this summer is this idea that so much of what the Supreme Court has been doing, what the right has been doing, is sort of this contingency planning. That everything is up in the air based on the outcome of the election, and that there are sort of two paths that the court is preparing. One is, if Harris wins, that it's the wall against efforts by the left. And, if Trump were to win, it's basically stepping back and giving him the go-ahead to do what he wants.

I find that that is very front and center in trans lives, and that there is a lot of contingency on this. The fact that in the same election, we've got this specter of Project 2025, on the one side, with all of these anti-LGBTQ promises, we've got Trump making the sort of statements he's making, and then, on the left, you've got the fact that that there is almost certainly going to be an out trans member of Congress come January. Sarah McBride, in Delaware, won her primary just a couple weeks ago in a district that that's essentially the end of her race.

And, so, in a wrap-up question with all of you, I wanted to just get each of your takes on how you're looking at those two possible directions the country could go, and what you're thinking about as we go into the less than 50 days until the election. I'll let Orion go first.

RUMMLER: Thank you for this question, Chris, because this is something — everyone's concerned about the election, but in terms of, like, how I do my job, Nico and I spend a lot of time reporting on states, and if Trump were to win, I feel like I would have to turn my attention almost entirely to federal policy, and I'm concerned that I wouldn't have the capacity to focus as much on what's happening in states.

That is concerning to me, because what we're seeing right now, which I think Nico referenced with one of the trans kids he talked to, I'm concerned about not having the capacity to spend time on states because we're already seeing states take executive action. We have been for a while, but we're seeing more of it.

We're seeing more states take executive action to keep trans people from having identity documents. I covered in July that Florida stopped processing gender marker changes on birth certificates. Missouri recently did that quietly on driver's licenses. And Nico covered that Texas has done this for birth certificates. Texas has also done that for driver's licenses.

So when I think about the election and the two different ways it could go, when I think about how I do my job, I'm like, "Okay, if Trump were to win, would I be able to still have the time to focus on the state policies that look like they're just going to keep happening, regardless of who wins the presidential election, when I would also be scrambling to cover the things that Trump has pledged to do himself to dismantle LGBTQ protections, and then the policy pledges that Heritage Foundation would like him to do that he's disavowed, although a lot of those policies are the same thing?” So that's what I think about when I think of the election, and how I would do my job.

LAW DORK: Nico, when you're thinking about — I mean, it's sort of in the title of your book, again, this surviving the hate and finding joy in a turbulent era. How, how does your book serve as a guide for dealing with the coming months?

LANG: God, I hope it's a warning for people.

To me, there's a reason why I didn't want to release it during Pride Month. I wanted to release it during the election because this is a warning about the stakes of the election. In writing this book, I wanted people to fall in love with these families, to feel like these kids are people that they know, to feel like they could be their own kids, because it might remind them that if they grow to care for these kids, then they need to vote like it in November. Right?

The election will decide these kids' future in this country.

I've been — outside of the book — profiling families who have fled the U.S. over anti-trans legislation in recent years. Not all families have the privilege to do this, but many families feel that they just don't have a choice, that things are only going to get progressively worse. And I think it's been really sad to hear from so many of the families that I worked with for this book that they're wondering if they're going to have to do the same thing. It's just devastating to think that they've been through so much, they've survived so much together, and they're somehow still all doing okay. That's such a victory to me, that they're all still here, and they're finding a way to make it work. And the idea that, after all of that, that there would be this other devastating blow, it's just unfathomable.

Because the sad fact is that a lot of these families probably won't be able to move. Sure, they would like to, but — I would like to do all kinds of things. I would like to be in Ireland right now, but we can't do everything we always want to all the time. So they would have to figure out a way to make it work once again. They would have to figure out a way to like, protect their kids and to keep going. And they just shouldn't have to keep doing this.

And we just do this to these kids over and over again, because, sure it's going to be the election. And maybe Harris wins, maybe Trump wins. But even if Harris wins, we still have the next year's legislature coming up in Texas, right? We're going to see even more and more and more bills that are not only attacking rights for children, but that are also attacking rights for adults — access to driver's licenses, access to birth certificates, as Orion was talking about, and we just keep being stuck in this cycle over and over again, where we're treating other people's rights as if they don't matter. We're treating some people like they're less than human.

And, when you're a kid, it really matters that people see you as human because you're still trying to figure out who you are in the world. And I just hope that we can ever get to a place in this country where we can just send a collective message that these kids are valuable and that they deserve to be here, because they really, really, really need to hear that right now.

LAW DORK: Thank you. And finally, Chase, regardless of what happens in the election, we're going to have these Supreme Court arguments in Skrmetti in December or January, probably. How does this election — how are you thinking about how to deal with sort of that contingency yourself right now?

STRANGIO: Part of me is curious is what will happen if the Supreme Court arguments aren't scheduled for December and Trump wins the election. The United States is the petitioner. We're respondents in support of petitioner, but obviously that would have a dramatic change on the position of the federal government. What does the court do with that? They could keep it because they have respondents in support of petitioner up. But you could imagine a Trump SG's Office dismissing the petition, or something along those lines. And so the ability to try to secure the protections of the trans community and many others under the Constitution is so up in the air in this election.

And then, I don't think people realize — some people — that it's not going to look like the first Trump administration if he wins, in so many different ways. But one of those ways is that we're not going to be able to go into court and have initial successes like we were when he took office in 2017, for a lot of reasons. The federal judiciary has changed dramatically. The Supreme Court has changed dramatically. The use of the shadow docket has changed dramatically. And so, we aren't going to be able to block in the same way this sort of greatly enhanced executive authority, and in the hands of someone who has no regard for any of its limits, and in the context of a court that seems to have no interest in checking his power.

So, we won't have those tools that we still had in 2017 to a certain extent. I mean, obviously, if you think about the Muslim ban or the military ban, ultimately they found ways around those initial successes that we were able to have in court. But people should be very scared. I can't be more blunt about it, because we will not have the same tools at our disposal.

And we will have a Ken Paxton-like attorney general at the federal level. We will have people investigating our organizing activities, moreso than they already do. We will have people in so many communities feeling destabilized and unsafe — even in blue states — such that they can't organize, they can't push back, they can't report on what's going on. Then, we can't go to court because we can't even travel to some states safely.

So these material realities are very much at stake. All we can do is fight every day to make sure people understand those stakes and to protect our ability to organize to defend our communities. That's what I'm doing. Doing what I can in court, doing what I can to push back the power of the government, so that people like Orion and Nico and the people that they're reporting on — and you Chris, too — are able to keep existing and pushing back against the government in other ways.

But everything is on the line as far as I see it. And I'm not someone who believes much in the government, at all, but I believe in the risk that a second Trump term poses to me as a person, to people I care about, and to our ability to organize, first and foremost.

LAW DORK: Thank you all so much. I think that it's just so important that we have time when we can stop and talk about these greater stakes, the ways that we're choosing to tell stories, the ways that we're able to tell stories, and I think that that's something that all three of you keep centered in in your work at every different level — whether it be online, whether it be in the courts, whether it be in your reporting. And I just I can't say enough good things about all of your work, so I think that that it's been great to have all three of you sharing your wisdom with the world today, and I really appreciate your time.

RUMMLER: Thank you so much, Chris.

LANG: Thanks, Chris.

STRANGIO: Thanks, Chris.