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."

It feels like every person is using their whole brain and heart to figure out these nearly impossible dilemmas about how we do our work, with our principles, in the current conditions. And it feels like the thing we know to be true about working collectively - that we have better ideas together than we do individually.

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.

'Normal Life' looks at the current moment in trans politics, understanding that it is often assumed that trans resistance strategies should mimic the lesbian and gay legal rights frameworks that have become so visible in recent decades.

In recent years I have become more interested in making the critical ideas that I love teaching and talking about available in more forms, because many people prefer to engage with ideas in films, infographics, comics and other forms that are not traditional books or articles.

Trans rights formation that mimics the models and strategies of the lesbian and gay rights framework is growing, and there are many significant strategy disagreements between those building that work and those doing racial and economic justice centered trans work.

I am not arguing that we should never use legal reform as a tactic. Instead, I argue that it should not be a goal.