We should understand that in the context of the US, where our legal system is based in settler colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy, changing laws will never sufficiently change the conditions of harm and violence our movements seek to transform.

Instead of focusing on what the law says about trans people, which is really what the law is saying about itself as a protector of trans people, we should be focused on what systems of law and administration do to trans people and our interventions should aim to dismantle harmful, violent systems such as criminal punishment and immigration enforcement.

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

Trans activism in the US has most frequently been grassroots, centered on poverty and criminalization, and often oppositional to the exclusionary "mainstreaming" threads in gay and lesbian politics and feminist politics.

Intellectual traditions emerging from populations that have always been the constitutive other in the development of the properly free citizen - indigenous people, populations labeled physically or mentally unfit, black people, migrants, women, prisoners - have always produced robust critiques of the what Dylan Rodriguez calls "white bourgeois freedom."

As trans advocacy has institutionalized and developed, the context of the undemocratic nature of US non-profits and the ways that white, wealthy individuals can intensely influence the directions of advocacy have increasingly come to the surface for trans activists.

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.