This is a photo of me from the Texas Capitol from October 2021 after listening for 8 hours to lawmakers defend an anti-trans law that they ultimately passed. In the 6 months that have followed things have gotten progressively worse and more terrifying. Texas and Alabama have since criminalized health care for trans adolescents. We have no meaningful, long-term pathway to stop these actions in court. We are facing 5 alarm fires all the time and as has always been true, the courts will simply not save or liberate us. Roe will fall and many more erosions will follow AND these so-called “rights” have already been constrained and eroded for decades. The entire framework of law is one that distributes harm and the more we rely on it for our liberation the more caught we are in an ever-shifting discourse of compromise and constraint. As lawyers we can and will continue to do our part to hold back these violent intrusions of the state but there is no more room to look to these interventions as liberation. They are limited and compromised and this moment demands creative, robust and transformative disruption. The brazenness with which the state is defending our eradication in court is staggering and a sign that we are on the verge of truly terrifying expansions of state power. But we are not powerless. Together we care for each other, we build, we become, as Mariame Kaba has instructed, ungovernable. Let us fuck shit up together and care for each other like our lives depend on it - because they do.