One particular debate that I have seen play out again and again is whether trans people who have more traditional gender expressions or who "pass" more should be the ones who are represented. A recent advocacy guide focused on advocating around trans health care access produced by the largest trans advocacy organization in the US instructs readers that advocacy will be more successful if the message is delivered by people who pass as non-trans men and women.

I often notice how students can gain the capacity to use certain critical methodologies through engaging with very different texts - how a graphic novel about gentrification and an anthology about Hurricane Katrina and a journalistic account of war profiteering might all lead to very similar classroom conversations and critical engagement. I'm particularly interested in this when teaching law students who often resist reading interdisciplinary materials or materials they interpret as too theoretical.

We have seen the most well-funded gay and lesbian rights organizations valorize the US military in their work seeking inclusion in military service.

Critical Race Theory offers a critique of how law and certain law reform strategies misunderstand the actual operation of life-shortening state violence, and how that has produced a set of reforms that fail to actually transform material conditions of white supremacy. These critiques redirect our attention to the conditions we aim to transform.

I argue that legal equality has failed resistance movements aimed at transforming material conditions of violence, and that trans activists should take a decidedly different approach.

My work is heavily influenced by critiques that many critical intellectual traditions, especially Critical Race Theory, have made of reform projects focused on legal equality.

Law reforms in the US, ostensibly enacted to prohibit racism, have proven ineffective because they focus on bad intentions of individuals and fail to comprehend population-level conditions.