Many people who are drawn to work about racism and transphobia may be new to thinking deeply about colonialism and indigenous resistance in their North America.

There are sharply different, competing models of what trans advocacy looks like - those that seek to follow the path laid out by the most visible and well-funded lesbian and gay rights organizations in the US and those that seek to use grassroots strategies, center issues of race and poverty, and aim to dismantle harmful institutions and conditions to redistribute life chances.

We should interact with legal reform tactically, knowing that it will not meet our ultimate goals but asking whether there are ways that engaging with particular reforms might benefit our work and help reduce certain harms or dangers.

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

Because my graduate academic training at law school was not one that included most of the intellectual traditions I find useful for understanding the conditions and problems that most concern me - anti-colonial theories, Foucault, critical disability studies, prison studies and the like are rarely seen in standard US Law School curricula, where students are still fighting on many campuses to get a single class on race or poverty offered - I developed most of my thinking about these topics through activist reading groups and collaborative writing projects with other activist scholars.

Let’s be gentle with ourselves and each other and fierce as we fight oppression.

Over the past decade I have watched many friends go through graduate school and write dissertations. Through that process, I have seen how they are guided by mentors to understand particular norms within their disciplines and to learn about what they can and cannot, should and should not say, and which ideas can go together and which cannot. I never went through this process.