I wrote Normal Life using concepts that have been helpful to me, and hoping to offer those as accessible tools for thinking differently about the pitfalls trans resistance faces, in particular the temptation to focus on legal equality and the limitations of that approach, and the alternative approaches being taken by racial and economic justice focused trans activists.

I went to law school which is a 3-year program in the US that is focused primarily on memorizing certain doctrines and taking exams that test whether you can apply those doctrines to help prepare for the bar exam. If you are lucky, you get a few classes where you are encouraged to think more critically and read critical texts rather than just casebooks, and perhaps write a paper that is not a legal memo or brief.

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.

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.

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.

Military inclusion has never been a central demand from trans populations, who consistently name criminalization, immigration enforcement, poverty and joblessness as top priorities.

One of the concepts I was having trouble illustrating was the concept that administrative systems create narrow categories of gender and force people into them in order to get their basic needs met - what I call "administrative violence." I had images of forms with gender boxes and ID cards with gender markers, but I also wanted an image that would capture how basic services like shelters are gender segregated.