Supreme Court decision looms over 49th Frameline LGBTQ+ film festival
It's a scary time, but the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, the world's largest and longest-running film festival of its kind, is defiant.
'We need to really lay the groundwork out there,' Frameline Executive Director Allegra Madsen told the Chronicle ahead of the festival, which runs Wednesday, June 18, through June 28. 'We need to stand up for one another inside the community and also we need to look outside the community for effective allyship, one that is actually rooted in supporting the queer community.'
Madsen and her team have programmed a proactive slate of issue-oriented films for the event that sends a clear message: The queer community isn't going anywhere. No film embodies that spirit more than ' Heightened Scrutiny,' Sam Feder's ripped-from-the-headlines documentary about American Civil Liberties Union attorney Chase Strangio, the first out transgender person to argue before the Supreme Court.
A recipient of Frameline's 2025 Completion Fund grant, the film is scheduled to make its California premiere in the festival's traditional 'First Friday' slot on June 20, with a screening at American Conservatory Theater's 1,000-seat Toni Rembe Theater, followed by a party at Charmaine's, the Proper Hotel's rooftop bar on Market Street.
Produced by former San Francisco resident Amy Scholder, 'Heightened Scrutiny' follows Strangio during his involvement in United States v. Skrmetti, in which he is fighting to overturn Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Strangio argued the case before the Supreme Court on Dec. 4, and audio of the arguments (SCOTUS does not allow cameras) is used in the film, which made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
To add to the drama, the high court's decision is expected to be handed down during Frameline.
'We felt this urgency to get the film out while the decision was being deliberated so that the public could really understand what the stakes are and hopefully understand the kind of urgency of coalition and, regardless of the outcome, just what this will mean,' Scholder said. 'Nine human beings at the Supreme Court are deciding the fate of the civil rights of a community and the beginning of, or the continuation of, the chipping away of bodily autonomy for all Americans. Whatever the decision is, we set out to show how we got here, what contributed to this moment.'
Feder, who spoke to the Chronicle along with Scholder during a video interview, first met Strangio while making his documentary ' Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen ' (2020), about Hollywood's depiction of transgender people.
'The ways in which he spoke about the connection to the rise of visibility and the rise of social and legislative violence really struck me because that was the reason I made that film,' Feder said. 'I wanted people to start preparing for the inevitable backlash.'
That backlash has arrived, and with intensity. Not just from the government, but, as 'Heightened Scrutiny' alleges, the mainstream press. Strangio explains in the documentary how headlines about trans issues — both in the New York Times and in other newspapers — subtly changed over a relatively short time leading up to the case.
At issue in the Supreme Court case and in media coverage is the use of hormone and puberty blockers, which have been prescribed to children since the 1980s for various conditions that have nothing to do with gender changes, such as early onset puberty.
'This is a framing issue,' Feder said. 'This is not about unfairness or a threat. If you want to make things fair based on blood tests and hormone tests, you should be doing that across the board, right? Not just for this one class of people. So this is about bigotry. So how we frame these stories creates a very specific narrative that people run with, and that's what I wish the press would do better.'
Frameline felt 'Heightened Scrutiny' was so important that it introduced a pay-it-forward initiative to provide free tickets to transgender and nonbinary attendees (details at www.frameline.org).
The screening, which Feder and Scholder plan to attend, will be preceded by a performance by the New Voices Bay Area TIGQ (Transgender, Intersex, Genderqueer) Choir.
'The outcome of this case is going to affect all Americans,' Feder said. 'People think this is just about a small community that they don't really care about, and they want to talk about other things. But we're seeing the beginnings of coalition building about reproductive rights and trans rights and immigrant rights. This is all about bodily autonomy, what we have the right to do, what our right is to move through space.'
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Who's Afraid of Gay Penguins?
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It was invoked by the Supreme Court in 2009, for example, to allow a Utah town to refuse to install a religious monument in a public park, and again in 2015 to permit the state of Texas to refuse to issue certain specialty license plates. Roughly speaking, the doctrine holds that any action deemed 'government speech' is immune to the First Amendment claims of those whose speech is being censored. No court had ever found that library books represent government speech before May of this year, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit swept aside decades of precedent, including its own previous decisions, to allow the removal of 17 books—Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen, and Jazz Jennings's Being Jazz, among others—from the public libraries of Llano County, Texas. Seven judges in the majority agreed that 'a library's collection decisions are government speech and therefore not subject to Free Speech challenge.' And with that, the books were gone. The ruling will likely be appealed, and many expect that the Supreme Court will eventually have to decide whether the welter of books and opinions found in every public-library collection represents private speech that the government cannot suppress or government speech that it can censor as it wishes. Imagine the implications if the Court decides the latter. With each new school board, town council, or presidential election, a new set of books deemed out of step with the winner's political agenda could be swept off the shelves. The government could choose with impunity to destroy any book it dislikes, whether On the Origin of Species or the Bible. The censorship of other forms of speech in public settings could soon follow. Concern over the expanding use of government-speech claims is not limited to liberals. No less a conservative than Justice Samuel Alito has warned that the doctrine 'is susceptible to dangerous misuse.' When the Supreme Court decided that Texas could censor specialty license plates, Alito issued a stinging dissent decrying what he saw as the doctrine's encroachment on individual liberties. 'Here is a test,' he offered: Imagine yourself next to a highway watching the license plates pass—plates variously honoring colleges, clubs, athletes, and cheeseburgers. 'As you sat there watching these plates speed by, would you really think that the sentiments reflected in these specialty plates are the views of the State of Texas and not those of the owners of the cars?' And what if you walked into your child's school library and saw on its shelves Harry Potter, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Captain Underpants; the writings of James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Philip Roth, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Alison Bechdel? Would you really think that each of these books expressed the views of your government? Read: Read the books that schools want to ban We are not legal scholars. We are a playwright and a psychiatrist who wrote a children's book about penguins. We cannot know how the justices of the Supreme Court might parse the precedents and the details of a case like ours if and when it reaches their bench. But we know where library books come from, and we know what they are for. They are not made by the government. They do not speak the government's mind. Even small elementary-school collections speak in hundreds of disparate voices offering a wealth of perspectives on our children's lives and their world—perspectives that all children deserve to hear. Our daughter is one of them. Bans such as the one on Tango have marched for the past few years under the banner of 'parents' rights.' We're parents too. And as the fathers of a now-16-year-old girl, we are determined to defend our daughter's right to read and write and say what she wishes. Eleven years ago, we followed the Singapore ban from a distant position of privilege that we now find embarrassing. Today, we hope Americans can learn from that example. In a nation where public demonstrations are tightly policed, hundreds of parents stood up to the government's threat to destroy our book. On a July afternoon, they brought their young children—some in strollers, others holding their stuffies—along with copies of our book and others like it, to the steps of the National Library Building. They sat down and read to their kids. Their quietly powerful protest made international news, and the Singapore government backed down. As we await decisions in our case and others like it across the country, we would do well to remember the value of putting our own voices to use, even or especially when the government would speak over us.
