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.

When social movements engage in legal reform, they often mobilize images of people from their constituent population who most match national norms about what "deserving citizens" are like, and use those people as spokespeople and as lead plaintiffs in legal cases. This strategy requires that people who are experiencing intersectional harm - who are vulnerable through multiple vectors of demonization and marginalization - be further marginalized and disappeared by the advocacy.

Legal reform has significant dangers: changing only the window-dressing of harmful systems but leaving the violence of the systems in tact, failing to provide actual relief for those facing the worst conditions, and legitimizing or expanding systems of harm.

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.

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.

We must experiment, fail, and try again, but beginning with a critique of legal reform and a commitment to center the most vulnerable moves us away from some of the most common, obvious pitfalls of neoliberal social movement strategies.

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.