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."

In addition to encouraging us to participate in narratives of "deservingness" that cast large parts of our constituencies as "undeserving," legal reform strategies encourage us to valorize harmful systems that our movements should be seeking to dismantle.

I am interested in recent scholarly work examining the emergence of women's studies and ethnic studies departments and the development of the neoliberal university.

More conservative advocacy work often encourages portrayals of trans people as people who deserve rights. Deservingness, of course, corresponds to national racial, gender and ability norms.

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.

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.

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.