The Professional

There is something so intimate about letters, isn’t there? Perhaps especially for those of us who have been groomed into academic writing styles that gesture toward the very standards of neutrality and objectivity that our work critiques, the letter provides an escape from styles of argumentation that prevent certain things from ever being said. So I am responding to you in that form, in large part because the space that your letters created, the risky opening your exchange provides, is an invitation that feels so dangerous to accept that I am not sure whether I could do so in a more formalized form. Why are your letters so relieving to read from my location? Let me clarify that location. I am at the beginning of my second year in a tenuretrack law teaching job, and I am a white trans person who grew up poor and who was some kind of relatively radical activist (anti-capitalist, prison abolitionist—these things seem quite radical in legal academia) before entering law or teaching. I am perhaps the first transgender person to get a tenuretrack law professor job, or at least no one seems to know of any others, though our perpetual erasure makes me hesitant to claim this label. I started reading your piece during the first months of my first year in this new role after I had spent a year “on the market” being socialized into the role of law professor. Your piece challenges that socialization, especially three particular messages from that socialization. One, people with marginalized identities should point out marginalization only to the extent that it does not implicate the people to whom we are talking. Two, we should be sure to flatter them that they are enlightened and inoffensive and unoppressive in order to encourage them to tolerate and include us and to avoid the dangerous power they wield when defensive. Three, we should avoid making them uncomfortable or drawing too much attention to our difference. Reading