Care without Coercion

Contemporary discourse surrounding American politics frequently returns to an idea that Trump’s rise and the sweeping wave of authoritarian politics is unique and shocking. Yet, this perspective is divorced from American history and the theoretical framework upon which the country is based – liberalism. Liberalism in itself is a theory of rights, not one of needs. The liberal actor is anonymous, they are not discussed in the law. They are not legislated about. That subject is typically cisgender, heterosexual, abled, socio-economically stable, and male. All other subjects are rendered visible through the law. For example, attempts to ban drag performances in Texas and Tennessee utilize broad language listing “topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male or female impersonators” all within the same category.1placeholder This would make events such as Drag Queer Story House, a popular program in which drag queens read children’s books in public spaces such as libraries, schools, and bookstores akin to public performances of go-go dancers. These laws make queer bodies hyper-visible, even as book bans such as Florida’s infamous HB1557 “Don’t Say Gay” Bill sweep the United States, attempting to eliminate LGBTQ+ content from classrooms. A materially known body is to have a body legislated about, and that legislation is not always liberatory.
The law has often been a site of recourse for marginalized populations to secure rights, so as to become akin to their materially anonymous peers. Yet, rights only exist insofar as they are recognized, upheld, or acted upon. The Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that transgender people are protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. However, in United States v. Skrmetti, the Court found the denial of gender-affirming care to minors to not be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. As the Court prepares to hear as to whether bans on transgender conversion therapy are violations of the First Amendment, transgender people occupy a precarious site in American law. At once, they are a protected class in some capacities; however, in others, their rights are superseded by concerns over whether the Founding Fathers believed that the right to medical care is a core right.

Justice Brennan famously called originalism “arrogance cloaked in humility.” Originalism, emerging as a response to the progressive Marshall Court, is a sophisticated ideological response to the usage of the law as a way to protect marginalized populations within the United States. Rather than interrogating whether transgender people deserve protections in terms of medical access, the question is what the Founding Fathers would have thought. These legal assaults on transgender people frequently return to Dobbs v. Jackson, a Supreme Court hearing which repealed Roe v. Wade, returning abortion access to the States. The Court argued that the Founding Fathers never intended abortion as a right, undermining fifty years of legal precedent with a historical appeal. Originalism acts as a way to reinforce normative stances and to protect the anonymous liberal actor, while making those non-normative figures highly visible.

These questions are the subject of my book, The Coercive Power of the Law. My relationship with the law has always been fraught. Throughout my early twenties my life centered around whether I was disabled enough to receive State aid in the form of SSDI. Then, with SSDI, to find ways to live on a little over $700 a month, while limiting my employment income so as to retain medical care, and legally unable to have more than $2000 in my bank account at any point. Later, in becoming eligible for loan forgiveness due to my disability, I had to live under the poverty limits for three years, routinely having my income and savings monitored by the same program promising forgiveness. These experiences were deeply conflicting. At once, I was receiving significant aid from the government due to legislation passed to assist people with disabilities. Yet, at the same time, I was asked to recount experiences and focus upon all of the ways in which my disability negatively impacted my life, even as diversity initiatives focused on my disability as something positive. The body I constructed legally was very different from the body I experienced.

Like most people with epilepsy, I frequently think of my mind and my brain as separate entities. During seizures, my brain becomes the locus of action, and my mind drifts away. Once I “return” I frequently find myself curled around my own body, protecting myself. My body cares for itself, in some primordial way. I am frequently injured after seizures, and yet my body’s reaction is protection. My disability is not an inherently negative experience, one that makes life painful. Sometimes it causes significant pain, but other times, it is a stark reminder of the need for care. I seize when I am physically, mentally, or emotionally stressed. Epilepsy requires me to be not only attentive to my own needs, but responsive and compassionate to them. My disability is neither negative nor positive; however, it demands that I be aware of my own vulnerability. Being disabled brings me great comfort. I am not the liberal political actor. I am dependent upon others, and this dependency has made my body visible within the law. Yet the law, even as it has assisted me, has never been liberatory. Rather, the process of accessing legislation and assistance programs has been actively deleterious to my own wellbeing. Even if I were to be assimilated into the liberal political actor, as many rights-based movements advocate for, my wellbeing would also suffer.

The liberal aim to make marginalized minorities invisible before the law is an argument of assimilation. It deconstructs what is essential to a caring world, a curiosity in difference. Difference is neither bad nor good. Elizabeth Barnes argues in terms of disability, that a disabled body is a minority body, neither universally good nor universally bad.2placeholder If we make our differences invisible, that erases the ways in which my disability, as well as my other identities, shape my life and experience both positively and negatively. For this reason, I argue that the law is not liberatory and can never be so. What is liberatory is other people.

Simone Weil, in the essay “Human Personality” writes movingly about human nature:

“…at the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being…a political party busily seeking, or maintaining itself in power can discern nothing in these cries except a noise…it can never be capable of the tender and sensitive attention which is needed to understand its meaning.”3placeholder

Weil begins the essay by asking what prevents us from harming a person walking down the street. Is it their eyes? Is it their clothes? Is it their individuality? Her response, that what makes human beings unique is our innate belief in one another, was revolutionary. Weil’s conception of humanity asks us to turn away from the State as a means of protection, and to rather look towards one another. Rather than focusing on the law as a sufficient means of protection, we instead ought to look to one another. Liberalism cannot save us. It is an individualistic theory in which we center ourselves. We cannot find our liberation through its mechanism. We find our liberation in our radical lack of freedom; in our obligations to one another which exist before and beyond us.

The Coercive Power of Law places this theory of liberation in the domain of care ethics. Care ethics is distinctly illiberal. It contends that our actions and our dispositions are the site of morality. We can therefore empirically assess a society and ourselves as to whether we are fulfilling our duty of care. Care is a duty. It is something that we are born into, both as recipients and as providers of care. Our care for one another may include the utilization of the law, but the law is not the final domain of our ethical duties, that domain is the everyday. My last public seizure was November 21, 2025. I had been running downhill, and I was confused about the blood dripping on my shirt. As I came back to myself, a stranger stopped and asked me what I needed. Ultimately, I needed a stranger.