When I was 25 and living in London, I went to A&E four times in two months. Each time, I was experiencing pain in my side that was so excruciating I couldn’t sit still or move without wanting to scream.

The first three times, I was told by male A&E doctors that I probably had acid reflux and should take some antacids and go home.

However, the final time I went in, I had started throwing up every ten minutes in addition to being in such excruciating pain that I screamed at the poor NHS nurse that I would have been offered morphine in America when she suggested paracetamol in a drip. Not my finest moment, but the pain was so bad. This time, they took me seriously and discovered that I had gallstones that were blocking my bile duct and that caused me to develop pancreatitis. I’ve subsequently been told that this was really bad, and I could have died.

Instead of dying, I stayed in the hospital for three days, puking every ten minutes for over 24 hours (a feat I did not think possible before) and got my gallbladder removed a month later. I have not experienced the terrible side pain since (seeming to suggest that I don’t actually have acid reflux).

Who doesn’t hate going to the doctor?

I think everyone has had an experience at the doctor where they’ve felt like their pain was abruptly dismissed. Unless you’re a lucky white man who has never experienced a health issue in his life… to dream the impossible dream.

It’s not necessarily individual doctors’ fault. They’ve been trained in a system that values reinforces structural biases against women, racialized minorities, fat, queer, and disabled people. They are also given very little time with patients, in part, because of the increased administrative burdens of justifying every treatment decision to insurance companies. They’ve also been taught to dismiss problems that do not manifest themselves within the dominant epidemiological paradigm of a specific diagnosis.

But it’s because of these kinds of attitudes that trust in physicians is at an all-time low. Skepticism of medical professionals and scientific expertise are on the rise, with pundits, politicians, and the public routinely questioning the knowledge of public health professionals and medical doctors.^[1] Medical distrust tends to fall along partisan lines and disproportionately harms racialized and ethnically diverse communities, as well as LGBTQ+ and disabled people. As mis- and dis-information spread , vocal minority voices in the medical and public health professions have been elevated and platformed, with politicians and even SCOTUS justices like Clarence Thomas, arguing that science is indeterminate to suggest that the “medical establishment” receives too much deference.

Partly because people don’t trust the “medical establishment,” US measles cases by July had already surpassed the sum total of last year, when measles cases were already higher than they’d been since the 1990s. People are also skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccine, which has been heavily politicized.

The lack of trust in doctors is, in part, systemic. The data seems to confirm that people really do not trust their medical providers and that these disparities increase for marginalized and multiply-marginalized groups. I do frequently wonder how much distrust is fomented by the simple fact that people do not feel heard when they go to the doctor.

Just “believe the science”

A common refrain I hear from people who are liberal and left-of-center is that we need to simply “believe in science.” And while I know that these signs are quippy and well-intended, there is a fundamental truth underlying MAHA/conservative critiques of medicine— science is inherently political.

Does this mean we don’t listen to scientists? No. Does this mean that we cannot consider evidence that is presented to us? No. Does this mean that science isn’t useful? No. Does this mean we all turn into anti-vaxxers? Also, no.

What it does mean is that science, as a field, is by its nature, “value-laden,” meaning that scientists always have theoretical and normative commitments that inform their inquiries. For example, Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argues that even decisions as banal as whether an experimental result is the result of a mistake or whether it challenges established scientific evidence is informed by theoretical commitments, which he refers to as paradigms.

And there are kernels of truth to critiques made by MAHA and conservatives. Science has been used to promote overtly political ends, often in ways that harm people. For example, progressive-Era scientists were the progenitors of the eugenics movement, which led to the forcible sterilization of over 60,000 people. The eugenics movement was political, but it was also studied and legitimized by universities and propagated by the intellectual elite. Its legacy is inseparable from science during this time period (and arguably today).

As my essay a few weeks ago argued, political institutions like SCOTUS are relying heavily on legitimate critiques about the indeterminacy and value-ladenness of science to suggest that we shouldn’t defer to scientific authority, especially in the civil rights context. As I also suggested, the Court is abusing the existence of scientific disagreements to fuel their moral outrage against reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights.

But just because science or medicine can be used toward political ends (and even bad ones), I still think there’s room for carefully-considered deference to medical science in society and the courtroom alike. It just needs to be tempered with an anti-elitism that interrogates medicalization, the doctor-patient relationship, and ultimately promotes civil rights. My argument, though, is that this anti-elitism does not have to be anti-intellectual or anti-science at its core. Rather, anti-elitism makes science and medical practice better.

Anti-elitist science

Science & Technology Studies Scholar Sheila Jasanoff suggests that we view scientific findings not as absolute or objective representations of the world, but rather as a set of “serviceable truths.” We rely on scientific findings because they’re useful, and someone else has done the work of exploring what works and doesn’t work, and we can evaluate that work to decide how useful findings are to our everyday lives.

The idea that good medical science is objective or authoritatively true relies on a form of “innocent positivism,” according to Jasanoff. Yet scientific results can’t and don’t speak for themselves.

Because of this tendency, Jasanoff suggests democratizing science— subjecting it to the same kind of social debate to which we expose our political, religious, or philosophical leanings. The implications of research should not be viewed as self-evident and should always be subject to scrutiny.

In part, this is because too much trust in scientific and medical authority can undermine people’s civil rights. Medicalization, or the idea that all problems are medical problems that require diagnosis and treatment, can be really harmful. For example, Joanna Wuest has written extensively about how the “born this way movement” has ultimately led to long-term, negative consequences for LGBTQ+ rights. What once was a simple claim to “believe the science” has turned LGBTQ+ rights into a health-based battlefield, where the most effective scientific expert rules the day.

Moreover, too much faith in medical authority leads to an imbalanced and unequal power dynamic between patients and their providers. Providers have all of the same social biases as anyone else and therefore often subject their patients to “epistemic” or “testimonial” injustices by selectively refusing to believe that certain patients’ claims are valid.

Finally, as I have argued elsewhere, trusting scientific authority too much can be bad for people’s civil rights. Even if the scientific consensus tells us something, we still have to ask what we do as a result of that consensus. The results do not speak for themselves, and to a large extent, democratizing scientific findings and scientific debate allows people to respond to science in a way that fits their values.

Anti-elitism doesn’t have to be anti-intellectual

Democratizing science doesn’t have to be an intellectual free-for-all. Nor does it mean giving up the fact that science can give us useful information that should inform our policy choices.

I think this is my current, working solution to the paradox created by giving too much authority to medical doctors and scientists.

There are things that are well-established in medical literature, meaning that they are highly likely to be useful or true. For example, very few people question whether vaccinations prevent disease. What people do dispute is what to do with that knowledge— do we force people to vaccinate their children because of this scientific consensus?

In this case, I think things are more complicated because there are more rights at stake than the individual parent and child. For example, disabled people and immunocompromised people are frequently kept from living public lives because they cannot trust that people around them will not spread easily-communicable yet preventable diseases. Their rights are just as important as a parent’s alleged right not to vaccinate their child. (Conversely, a common misconception is that vaccines cause autism, which is a claim that most scientists dispute. But also, it’s fear mongering that is mostly propagated by bad faith actors, and I don’t think anyone can say with a straight face that they’d rather their child die from the measles than be autistic. What and whose rights are most important here is a relevant inquiry too.)

Furthermore, we don’t have to agree with “agents of uncertainty,” or bad faith actors— including scientists, clinicians, politicians and advocacy organizations— who strategically mobilize, exaggerate or distort scientific and medical uncertainty to restrict access to, e.g., gender-affirming care. Abandoning elitism does not mean abandoning scrutiny and discernment. In fact, we can and should scrutinize people who approach scientific debates in bad faith. We should point out where a particular scientific view is widely agreed upon and where more evidence is needed. We can rely on well-done studies that dispute these agents of uncertainty while still acknowledging that science doesn’t speak for itself.

In fact, abandoning elitism could do a lot of good— we could encourage a more informed populace. We could actually debate the role of scientific uncertainty in society. We could push back against medical professionals who engage in epistemic injustice.

But we can do so in a smart and informed way. I don’t think we should cede ground to bad faith actors simply because there may be a kernel of truth to something they’re arguing. Saying that science should be democratized does not automatically mean everyone is correct about their opinion or that everyone is equally qualified to contribute to medical or scientific literature. Expertise does matter; however, we need to acknowledge that expertise comes in multiple forms (including lived experience) and that expertise is not all that matters. Scientists and public health authorities are fallible too.

Holding space to critique medical and scientific authority ultimately means that society can use those scientific findings that are most useful to inform policies. But people can also debate the role of scientific findings— would eugenics be okay even if it wasn’t scientifically inaccurate? I don’t think it would be.

We don’t have to abandon scientific principles or standards in these debates, and making medical authority more accountable to people is arguably beneficial. Anti-elitism does not have to be anti-intellectual. Just like we can and should ask for more from our government, we can ask for more from both scientists and medical practitioners.

Maybe then, everyone wouldn’t have a shitty medical experience to share with the class. That’s my main hope for people like little London me (pictured below).

(1) enabling the minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex, or (2) treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s biological sex and asserted identity.

While this sounds an awful lot like a sex classification to me, the Court was unconvinced. Crucial to the Court’s reasoning was that hormonal therapy and sex reassignment surgery can have “extensive and sometimes irreversible consequences” that people later regret. Therefore, there were purported non-sex-based reasons for the state’s decision.

The Majority Opinion, written by Justice Roberts suggested that the bill was okay because it was limited to minors and did not stop administration of the drug for other purposes… also, he wrote that it teaches kids to “appreciate” their “biological sex.”

Skrmetti is part of a broader trend being adopted by the Court— an almost MAHA-esque view of scientific authority that maligns scientific authority and advocates returning “controversial” medical decisions to state legislatures to decide, civil rights consequences be damned. This essay attempts to unpack some of the idiosyncratic and alarming features of this shift, as well as how it came about.

Wait… why is SCOTUS making factual findings?

Early in law school, students learn that lower-level courts, like U.S. District Courts, are responsible for fact-finding, meaning that they develop the legal record and decide what happened. Conversely, appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, decide matters of law. Simple enough, right?

Unfortunately, delineating between fact-finding and deciding questions of law can be hard. For example, when the Supreme Court is asked to decide whether there is an “important state interest” justifying an otherwise impermissible sex classification, facts can be important. Are there public health reasons to make that classification? If so, what are those public health interests and how compelling are they? Even in cases like Roe v. Wade, the Court considered the potential medical and health consequences of permitting abortion, albeit to a much more limited degree than our current esteemed jurists.

The Court’s need to weigh in on factual matters to decide questions of law is the reason scholars such as Angelo N. Ancheta argue that the Supreme Court engages in a form of “constitutional fact-finding.” Scholar Bertrall Ross finds that SCOTUS is increasingly engaging in this form (and other forms) of fact-finding across multiple areas, including gay rights, voting, and more.

But upon closer examination, the past few terms’ “constitutional fact-finding” has been inconsistent at best and an utter clusterf*** at worst.

The Court’s record on “science” is inconsistent at best

When provided evidence of redistricting’s harms, Justice Roberts infamously called statistical analyses of voter suppression “sociological gobbledygook.” Yet Justice Roberts evidently has no qualms with siding with fringe scientific theories when it comes to the civil rights of pregnant or trans people.

In Carhart II, Roberts signed onto the opinion that officially made fringe medical beliefs cool again… or at least used fringe medical beliefs to justify depriving pregnant people of the right to quality health care. Carhart II involved a late-term abortion bans, but it dealt specifically with one type of late-term abortion, intact D&Es. While most practitioners and scientists agreed that intact D&Es were often safer the forms of late-term abortions permitted by the bill, Kennedy maintained that “serious medical disagreement” precluded the Court from striking down the ban. Yet for some reason, most legitimate scientific organizations argued that intact D&E could be safer because there was less risk for perforation, etc.

Scholar Aziza Ahmed argues, the Court in Carhart II “ma[de] room for the conservative argument” against health exceptions for D&C care in Carhart by invoking supposed medical disagreement. Presenting medical expertise as “divided” about how and when to regulate abortion, the Court created an opportunity to supplant its own opinions for those of the medical establishment.

But Carhart II’s consequences did not end there. Carhart II was revived in both Dobbs and Skrmetti to undermine civil rights by invoking manufactured scientific uncertainty.

The Court can’t decide what it thinks about science

This year, the Court heard arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case about a therapist in Colorado who wanted to continue providing “conversion therapy” but was precluded from doing so by Colorado law. The science on this one is clear— the medical consensus is that conversion therapy doesn’t help LGBTQ+ kids and is highly traumatic.

However, despite clear scientific consensus, the Court ruled in favor of the therapist. Why? Because her medical advice was protected speech under the First Amendment— speech that Colorado could not discriminate against based upon her “viewpoint” that it is okay to “help” someone accept heterosexuality or their sex-assigned-at-birth.

In the majority opinion, authored by one Neil Gorsuch, medical unreliability once again played a central role: “Not long ago, many experts and organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association, considered homosexuality a mental disorder.” Now, the unreliability of the scientific evidence means that it can be used to undermine civil rights.

The Court did not consider the documented psychological harms of conversion therapy. Nor did Gorsuch consider survivor amicus briefs (friend of the Court briefs) regarding the lasting psychological harms of conversion therapy. He invoked scientific uncertainty, once again, as a reason to deprive people of important civil rights protections afforded by law.

This leads me to ask: what is it? When science “course-corrects” by admitting its past mistakes, it’s “unreliable.” Therefore, we must yield to the civil liberties of physicians to subject children to abusive practices. Unsurprisingly, conservatives like Gorsuch and Thomas ostensibly want scientists to course correct, especially given the number of times various opinions invoke eugenics. What exactly do conservative justices want, other than to undermine civil rights by invoking science as a cudgel?

Moreover, when science is “uncertain,” deference is given to a vocal minority within the scientific community who oppose civil rights. In Carhart II, a few doctors who opposed intact D&Es got to decide the question for pregnant people across the country. In Dobbs, a small minority of physicians got to decide that abortion was an unsafe procedure, therefore requiring deference to state legislators. In Skrmetti, trans youths’ ability to receive gender-affirming care received the same treatment.

What exactly is the Court’s view on science? It’s highly inconsistent at best.

Science will always be uncertain

I don’t pretend to have grand answers here to what the Court should be doing with scientific evidence. In fact, I’ve generally been a skeptic of “scientific consensus” on the basis that science is paradigmatic and value-laden in and of itself. In other words, science is a political and normative enterprise. Moreover, “scientism” or the idea that people are “born this way” has, in many ways, set back the LGBTQ+ movement, among others, as my former colleague Joanna Wuest powerfully argues.

But at the same time, I think that when a group can prove that, e.g., a certain procedure is safe and that the scientific evidence agrees, the Court should consider that in its constitutional fact-finding. It certainly should not be platforming what Wuest calls “agents of scientific uncertainty.”

I think that generally, deferring to civil rights is important, and if the science is on the side of civil rights, that makes the civil rights claims more compelling. Generally, constitutional questions are decided based on how compelling the governmental interest in regulating an activity or curtailing a right is (hence, the levels of “scrutiny”). When the government uses a public health claim (e.g. gender-affirming care harms children) as a basis for regulating people’s civil rights away, the Court should be able to use constitutional factfinding to scrutinize the government’s stated interest. Courts should be more likely to defer to civil rights in instances where the science is clear, not less as this Court is.

More to read

If you’re interested in uncertainty, the role of science in law, and the issues I raise in this article, you might be interested in some of the following books:

1. Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement by Joanna Wuest considers the ways that scientific arguments such as “LGBTQ+ people are ‘born this way’” have undermined civil rights appeals for queer communities.

2. “Serviceable Truths: Science for Action in Law & Policy” by Sheila Jasanoff is an open-access law review article that grapples with some of the above questions, concluding that science should be viewed in terms of its use value, rather than as the absolute authority on an issue.

3. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn discusses scientific paradigm shifts and the value-ladenness of science. 10/10 recommend as introductory reading to make you think about these issues some more!

Frankly, I always regarded as pseudoscience at best. However, in teaching and researching the history of eugenics, I’ve discovered a slightly more insidious past lurking behind the MBTI and similar tests. This article takes a journey through the history of eugenics, measurement, and personality typing to give a primer on how eugenics ruined personality tests for me.

What is eugenics?

Eugenics, put simply, is the science of “better breeding.” British statistician Francis Galton was the progenitor of the term. Galton believed that social and behavioral traits were biologically heritable, meaning that traits passed down from parents to their children. Galton also believed in aggressive social policies to implement “better breeding” and spurred a political movement to control the reproduction of deviant bodyminds.

Eugenic reformers advocated for a range of programs seeking to breed undesirable traits out of the human race. Among these was the forcible sterilization of “unfit” individuals who threatened the health and vitality of society. Because of the eugenics movement, 60-70,000 people were forcibly sterilized. Most of these people were racialized minorities, disabled people, poor people, or people who failed to conform to rigid gender norms.

Beyond sterilization, eugenicists argued for calculated social initiatives to control deviant bodyminds. As Jess Whatcott argues, the detention of individuals deemed “unfit” is itself a form of reproductive control. Institutionalization in state hospitals and asylums was common at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the legacy of incarcerating people who deviate from social norms or who have historically been targeted by eugenics continues to this day in the form of prisons. Even the most traditional form of eugenics, forcible sterilization, has been recently documented in carceral settings.

Eugenics did not “end” post-WWII

It morphed. And it has a much more enduring legacy in U.S. social policy.

A common myth about eugenics is that it “ended” or fell out of favor post-WWII after the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler’s fascist Nazi regime. However, this oversimplifies the narrative.

The American Eugenics Society (AES) did not feel the need to change its name until the 1970s. Moreover, the 1970s saw a marked uptick in forcible sterilizations, particularly among Native American, Black, and Latinx communities. In Fit to be Tied, Rebecca M. Klutchin documents the forcible sterilizations of Black women from 1950-1980, often via what were referred to as “Mississippi appendectomies,” wherein a woman went under anesthesia for a separate issue and the doctor also performed a hysterectomy. In 1971, Choctaw-Cherokee physician Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, conducted an independent study indicating that 1 in 4 Native American women had been sterilized without their consent.

That said, it is true that some eugenicists felt the need to shift their methodology post-WWII. Noting that eliminating “unfit” individuals from the gene pool would take a significant period of time, a large subset of eugenicists shifted their rhetoric toward “positive eugenics” or trying to convince “desirable” individuals (read: white, upper-class people) to breed more. Alexandra Minna Stern found that marital counseling was a site of eugenic intervention. Using the case study of the American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR), Stern explores the ways in which the AIFR’s marital counseling regimes turned the focus of eugenicists from race science toward enforcing rigid gender conformity during the Cold War period. (Though, as Stern notes, Paul Popenoe, the founder of AIFR very much believed in forcible sterlization and only shifted his rhetoric during the 1940s. Also, the AIFR was the predecessor for genetic counseling programs!)

Measurement as a tool of eugenics

Measurement of genetic and personal traits has always been at the heart of eugenic ideology. To understand my problems with personality tests , we need to situate personality tests within a broader framework of eugenic ideology regarding the measurement of human traits.

IQ Tests

The idea of an “intelligence quotient” (IQ) gained popularity during the early twentieth century. Eugenicists thought IQ was a quantifiable, immutable, innate characteristic of an individual, meaning it would endure despite environmental or educational interventions.

Lewis Terman, a prominent eugenicist, developed the IQ test. In his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence, Terman created a quantitative scale that categorized people as “idiots, imbeciles, morons, borderline deficients, feebleminded, dull normal, normal, superior, very superior, or geniuses” (Stern 2005, 93). For example, if someone scored between 50 and 70 on the IQ test, they were considered a “moron.”

The IQ test was inextricably linked with race science and used as a justification for racial segregation. Due to cultural and linguistic biases baked into the IQ test, Black, Mexican, and Native American people were more likely to score below Terman’s “Normal curve,” resulting in them being considered less innately intelligent. Several court cases, including Larry P. v. Riles, Hobert v. Hansen, and Diana v. Board of Education, challenged the use of IQ tests in schools on the basis of this culturally bias, arguing that IQ tests disproportionately placed Black or Mexican-American students in segregated “special education” classes.

Importantly, the IQ test debuted shortly before the advent of “biotypology” after WWII, which sought to categorize people using other features, such as Roschach inkblots and personality and temperament tests to measure human variation. These tests extended the legacy of the IQ test into other areas of people’s lives.

The JTA

The Taylor Johnson Temperament Analysis (T-JTA) is an early personality test that was developed by eugenicists and is still widely used in family and marital counseling. It was used by the AIFR to "bring all the resources of modern science to the promotion of successful family life” (Stern 2005, 161). Per the T-JTA website:

The T-JTA measures 18 dimensions of personality (9 bipolar traits) that are important in individual adjustment and interpersonal relationships. For over 50 years, the T-JTA has been used by hundreds of thousands of counseling professionals in a wide array of settings in the U.S. and around the world to help people understand themselves and others in their lives.

The T-JTA measures “temperament,” which, like IQ, was considered to be innate and immutable by eugenicists. Like later personality tests, it is based on oppositional pairs. The specific oppositional pairs measured were: “Nervous-Composed, Depressive-Gay Hearted, Active-Quiet, Cordial-Cold, Sympathetic-“Hard Boiled”, Subjective-Objective, Aggressive-Submissive, Critical-Appreciative, and Self-Mastery-Impulsive” (Stern 2005, 151).

The “normal ranges” for the T-JTA varied by gender. Paul Popenoe thought that the male-female difference was the “greatest that can exist between two normal human beings” and advocated for adherence to strict gender roles. Even though it could be a nuisance, aggressiveness among males was considered necessary for species survival. To the contrary, “aggressive” women hurt the egos of their husbands and harmed the family unit. One popular AIFR refrain was that the least happy marriages were dominated by wives.

One woman who scored above the 95th percentile in nervousness and subjectivity on the T-JTA (indicating urgent improvement needed) and below the fifteenth percentile in cold and impulsive (improvement desirable) was diagnosed with a case of “masculine protest.” Her heart, the counselor wrote, was not in her housework.

When the woman complained that she wanted her husband to pay more attention to her, the counselor recommended that the woman readjust and recommit herself to wifehood and deliberately embrace her femininity. One recommendation was that she take up a hobby such as volunteering at a local church as an “ego outlet.”

The form of eugenics espoused by the T-JTA was not as much about preventing undesirable people from reproducing as it was encouraging “desirable” people to reproduce while controlling deviance. For example, white, middle-class families were encouraged to breed more than the replacement level of two children per couple. Wives were considered pathological if they refused to bear a child.

Popenoe was also an early adopter of the extroversion-introversion dyad, arguing that introverted men were pathological— the resistance of their natural synapses were allegedly low, meaning that they tended to manifest nervous impulses. Extroverts were more likely to be “men of action” (like Huey P. Long, Will Rogers, or Dwight Eisenhower). Women were also more likely to be introverts, which made them complicated, problematic, and unhappy in their marriages. Conversely, extroverted women were problematic because they had too much of an “ego drive” and were encouraged to become more submissive.

The T-JTA was administered to thousands of people at the AIFR starting in 1941. It was one of many tests that were developed to measure psychometrics “beyond intelligence” into fields like aptidude, personality, and vocation. As Stern writes: “[i]ts underlying logic reflected and fostered the postwar revision of eugenics, as the door of strict hereditarianism had opened up enough to let in various psychogenic and psychoanalytic explanations of human development and deviance” (Stern 2005, 152).

The MBTI

What of our favorite personality test, the MBTI? While not as overtly problematic as the, e.g., T-JTA, it has its roots in the kind of fixed personality typing that dominated eugenic spheres, developed at the same time, and ultimately reflects biases rooted in race science and misogyny.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test places people, once again, into binaristic personality types that are not intended to change across the course of someone’s life. It was developed by a mother-daughter duo, Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers in the 1920s. For her part, Katherine Briggs treated Isabel like a plant, studying whether changes to her environment would change her. (Okay, weird, but not entirely problematic?)

The mother-daughter pair were amateurs who built on the work of Carl Jung, who, was not an express proponent of eugenics (though there is evidence in his writings that he believed in race science, and he was alleged to have ties to Hitler). Katherine and Isabel sought to quantify Jung’s work and bring his archetypes to the masses and enable people to analyze others’ personality types in the workplace. It was brought into boardrooms and governmental agencies during the early 1950s and proceeded to creep into every aspect of corporate life to the point that it is now ubiquitous.

Yet none of this expressly ties the MBTI to race science. Why am I still concerned about the MBTI?

First, the idea that personality types are fixed and innate is an idea that was championed by the father of eugenics himself, Francis Galton. Galton’s statistics also may have informed some of the word-trait associations used on the test, according to several sources I’ve reviewed. While intelligence was Galton’s primary concern, we can see through the T-JTA that eugenic ideas of psychosocial measurement seeped into everyday American life at the same time the MBTI was taking hold of the workplace, underpinned by the same basic assumptions.

The MBTI is fundamentally based on the idea that people are “innate, stable, and easily classifiable” and therefore advocates for professional and personal specialization based on these fixed traits (Emre 2018, 33). Katherine herself argued that “[e]very one of us is born either an extravert or introvert, and remains extravert and introvert to the end of his days.” Accepting one’s personality type was key to happily accepting one’s life.

Yet human beings are malleable, and our “personalities” change over time. This is one of the greatest insights of modern psychology and the strongest arguments that the MBTI is “pseudoscientific” at best. Studies have shown that the same people taking the same assessment a mere 5 weeks later may be typed into a different personality category. Yet both eugenics and tests like the MBTI assert that people’s destinies are determined at birth, by fixed personality traits, and without regard to structural questions of racism or misogyny.

This may not sound immediately insidious— indeed, the MBTI now emphasizes that people’s unique traits are all equal and can make them great. However, the entire logic of the MBTI is to set people up for specialization based on their “unique, enduring identities.” Therefore, it is also very prone to abuse as a way of suggesting that certain people are predisposed to certain positions and behaviors, a predisposition they cannot (and should not) try to escape. Such a fixed idea of destiny, especially when abstracted from structural circumstances, is unsettling to me at its core.

Second, both Katherine and Isabel were heavily influenced by and supported Social Darwinism and a strict division of labor between the sexes. As Merve Emre suggests in her book The Personality Brokers, both women were concerned with “progressive” ideals and promoting “exceptional people” to rule from the boardroom to the government. Isabel argued that great men should be identified via scientific measures, even if it meant that women with college degrees would be relegated to homemaking.

The makers of the MBTI were not immune to their own personal biases and judgments, especially about race and womanhood. The test was initially developed for men, and Isabel thought women were less inclined to thinking than men. She evidently tinkered with answer sheets to reflect this bias.

In the 1930s, Katherine wrote that “[s]uccess for mankind in general demands an impersonal attitude toward the hard facts of external reality; while success for womankind in general demands personal influence over men.” She also stated that “[s]cience is dependent on the masculine mind, marriage upon the feminine mind.” Therefore, a marriage, a union between “man and woman",” represented a marriage of oppositional modes of thinking and “the inescapable division between the sexes” (Emre 2019, 66-67). In this sense, the MBTI and its associated traits, which were heavily gendered, represented a form of “complementarian” logic that is currently parroted in Evangelical circles.

The “types” identified by the MBTI had very different valences and meanings in the 1920s-1960s than they do now— and at the time served to reinforce race and gender-based hierarchies, regardless of their intent. For example, introversion was viewed as an extreme sense of subjectivity. An introvert believed that their singular orientation to the world was more important than the expectations and desires of those around them. To the contrary, extroverts do what is needed or expected of them due to their external orientation. These traits, as discussed in the section about the T-JTA, were themselves heavily gendered and were used to shame women and men for deviation from traditional gender norms in couple’s counseling.

The point of this section is not to shame people for enjoying the MBTI or thinking critically about their personalities. But it does cast some doubt on its utility and origins. Biological predetermination seems to underly many of the MBTI’s core claims about enduring personality attributes and accepting one’s role in society, rather than challenging the structural factors that contribute to someone’s personality development or their own agency over the issue.

Personally, I feel uncomfortable with any system that tells people their aptitude is fixed and measurable— from the IQ to the MBTI.

Helpful books and articles for studying this more

If you are interested in exploring these issues further, I would recommend the following:

1. Eugenic Nation by Alexandra Minna Stern is the main source for this article and my go-to text for people who want to really understand American eugenics. Chapter 6 is especially great on this topic!

2. Fit to be Tied by Rebecca M. Klutchin is a horrifying yet rigorous description of forcible sterilizations of Black women from 1950-1980 in the American South.

3. Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics by Jess Whatcott ties in the eugenic movement with contemporary politics of detention, especially with regard to immigration.

4. The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre provides a fascinating and nuanced history of the MBTI test and is an easy read.

But really, what brought joy to my classes was the very intellectual freedom to question basic assumptions about politics that is now under attack. In particular, I enjoyed watching students’ brains “light up” when we discussed questions like who actually “counts” as a “Founder.”

To President Trump, the answer to this question is simple. As he stated in his July 4 address: “In 1776, our Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia and changed the world forever and ever with a thing called the Declaration of Independence.” To Trump, the “Founding Fathers,” then, are the ones whose names were penned on the Declaration of Independence.

But as an American political development/legal history/constitutional law nerd, I’ve always found this answer unsatisfactory. Now that I am not formally in the academy, it seems more necessary than ever that I use the limited platform I have to ask these kinds of questions, especially because so many professors are precluded form doing so by draconian restrictions on academic freedom.

What if, stick with me here, the “Founding” is more complicated? What if “Founding” is an ongoing project? One in which we all participate?

Why does the “Founding” matter?

How we think about the “Founding” and its participants matters, from a legal perspective, a social science perspective, a historical perspective, and a practical one.

For those who have not noticed, the current Supreme Court is a little obsessed with the so-called “Founding Fathers.” Originalism, a legal movement that seeks to intuit the original intent of the “framers” of the Constitution as they would have understood it, is all the rage. (Unless we’re talking about the Reconstruction Amendments, which is where the practical import of discussing the “Founding” becomes even more important).

Consider Sam Alito’s diatribe in Wolford v. Lopez, which struck down a Hawaii law that banned people from carrying guns “on private property of another.” Alito’s reasoning harkened back to the “late 18th century,” when “the need for firearms for self-defense was acute." If people cannot bring guns to private establishments, how are they supposed to exercise their fundamental right to defend themselves as the framers intended? In Alito’s eyes, Hawaii had not offered a proper historical analog to its gun restriction that would have convinced an 18th Century founder.

Why is this important? Because of the precedent set by New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, states must now proffer an 18th Century analog to proposed regulations on the right to bear arms.

This fetishization of the Founding goes far beyond gun control. The “Founders’ intent” is used as an argument against abortion rights and other so-called “substantive due process” rights, like the right to marry and the right to procreate. Generally, “originalism” is used to deny the rights of anyone who wouldn’t have had rights in 1776— women, racialized minorities, disabled people, LGBTQ+ people, etc. (We’ll just ignore, for now, that the Reconstruction Amendments, in which these rights are rooted, followed a bloody Civil Wart that took place nearly a Century after the “Founding.”)

Other disciplines have questioned the “Canon” and its role in constituting taste or significance. I think the same rigor needs to be applied to the Founding, and I’m not alone among social scientists who think so.

What do historians and political scientists think about the “Founding”?

Sure, we can think of the date of the Founding as July 4, 1776 (even though in actuality, the “Founding Fathers” likely thought July 2 would be celebrated). But this is not accurate. It is more accurate to think about the “Founding” as a process that is ongoing— or at least something that has happened multiple times.

Reconstruction scholar Eric Foner has argued that the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction Amendments constituted a “Second Founding.” The country that followed the Civil War was fundamentally different than the one that came before it. The Reconstruction Amendments shifted the relationships between states and the federal government, as well as expanding what it means to be an American citizen.

The America I’m proud of was not founded in 1776. It was founded through the courage of ~200,000 Black men during the Civil War who fought for a different, more equitable nation than the one that preceded it. And that the Reconstruction Amendments were intended to radically change the Constitution as a whole.

When we forget that the Reconstruction Amendments were a moment that “re-founded” the United States, we risk forgetting the scourge of racism these men fought to erase. We risk forgetting, as Melissa Murray compellingly argues in “Race-ing Roe,” that an “originalist” interpretation of the “badges and incidents of slavery” would have accounted for the reproductive control faced by Black enslaved women. That the 15th Amendment, which was until recently enforced by the Voting Rights Act until SCOTUS’ recent Opinion in Louisiana v. Callais placed the final nail in its coffin, was necessary because Southern states sought (and still seek) to prevent the same people who had fought valiantly for their freedom from exercising suffrage.

We lose all of this history and context when we interpret the “Founding” narrowly.

The “Founding” as a Project

I propose that the “Founding” is a project that is never truly finished. The heroes of the Civil Rights Era expanded what it meant to be a U.S. citizen by placing their bodies and freedom on the line for their principles. Disabled protestors redefined the federal government’s obligations to disabled people through the Section 504 sit-ins. Labor organizers fought against draconian Lochner-Era labor laws. The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 brought nationwide attention to the continued suffering of Black citizens at the hands of police. Thinking about founding as an ongoing process reminds us of how far we’ve come, as well as the ground that we’ve lost.

Frankly, it’s time to reclaim the “Founding” from the fascists. To this end, I would recommend some “required reading” for anyone who wants to think more broadly about what it means to be an American and who else contributed to the project of America’s “Founding”:

• Frederick Douglass: What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

• Langston Hughes: Let America be America Again

• bell hooks: Feminism is for Everybody

• Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from a Birmingham Jail

• Richard Rothstein: The Color of Law

Olmstead and the birth of the “integration mandate”

In 1999, the Supreme Court decided in favor of Lois Curtis in Olmstead v. L.C., in a monumental win for the disability rights community as a whole. The Court, in an Opinion by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, held that placing someone in an institution unnecessarily when less restrictive options are available constitutes disability discrimination under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act and under its federal analog, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

There were several caveats, including that a state’s medical professional had to agree that a less restrictive setting was available and appropriate— but thousands of disabled people have been able to live free and independent lives in their communities as a result. And as my dissertation (that you absolutely should not read, because I hate it) argued, the benefits of the “integration mandate,” as it is called, have had ripple effects in education and employment.

For example, the settlement in Lane v. Brown (formerly Lane v. Kitzhaber) required the state of Oregon to divert funds from subminimum wage jobs (sometimes known as “sheltered workshops”) to fund supported employment in competitive, integrated settings. In Georgia, Olmstead’s integration mandate was leveraged to argue that GNETS, a segregated school system for disabled children, frequently committed disability discrimination. The use cases of Olmstead to fight abusive systems that segregate people from their communities are abundant.

DOJ’s infuriating (and deliberate) misinterpretation of Olmstead

For this reason, DOJ’s memorandum arguing that Olmstead did not impose an integration mandate has many disability advocacy groups afraid. An Office of Legal Counsel opinion issued yesterday stated that:

In prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability, neither section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act nor Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) imposed an integration mandate on states in their treatment of mentally disabled individuals. Nor does either statute authorize the responsible Executive Branch agencies to impose such a mandate.

A statutory mandate that states treat mentally disabled patients in maximally integrated settings would raise serious questions regarding the scope of Congress’s power under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Interstate Commerce Clause, and the Spending Clause.

In Olmstead v. L.C. ex rel. Zimring, 527 U.S. 581 (1999), the Supreme Court did not hold that section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act or Title II of the ADA require states to treat mentally disabled patients in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs.

Note, this is not a normal interpretation of Olmstead. Courts across the country have consistently held that Olmstead requires that people be served in the most integrated setting that is appropriate to their needs. But Trump’s DOJ thinks it can thwart the law and turn back the clock.

Until deinstitutionalization efforts and litigation shuttered most formal institutions, people with disabilities were warehoused in “state schools” and “asylums,” where they were maltreated and frequently abused unnecessarily. The Pennhurst Longitudinal Study, among others, confirmed that previously institutionalized people, when released from institutional settings, were generally able to live free and independent lives in their communities, provided they received appropriate resources and support.

The DOJ’s memorandum is a way of trying to claw back the substantial progress that has been made since Olmstead— and to undermine the rights of people in institutional settings to challenge their confinement. Trump has already released an Executive Order targeting people with mental health disabilities for forcible institutionalization and treatment (a practice a UN Special Rapporteur called “torture”).

It makes sense that disability groups are sounding the alarm, given that the Administration seems keen to return to these discriminatory and illegal practices. The DOJ memo calls for Olmstead to be narrowly interpreted in ways the Court pretty clearly did not intend (happy to provide a trip through Justice Stevens’ papers on Olmstead in a future post!). It also states that the conclusion was by the “narrowest margin” and is unsupported by the text of the ADA.

The memo even cites Georgia’s (FAILED) attempts to persuade the Court that unjustified segregation isn’t disability discrimination. So we have a DOJ that not only ignores precedent— it cites the losing side to make its case.

The memo itself is legal garbage, IMO, and going into its multiple lapses in reasoning would be giving it more airtime than it deserves. But please be aware of what is happening.

What can I do?

1. Combat mis- and dis-information. Contrary to the “opinion” of DOJ, Olmstead and the integration mandate are still good law across the country.

2. Stay informed via news outlets like Mother Jones and Disability Scoop. They provide resources to combat disinformation about Olmstead. (Also, please consider subscribing to my Substack for more analysis about deinstitutionalization and the Administration’s targeted attacks on disabled people.)

3. Consider donating to organizations like DREDF who are on the frontlines trying to protect Olmstead.

We all need to fight to preserve our hard-won rights. Please don’t leave the disability community behind when you do so.

It took about ten minutes to get my head out of my hands and dignify that “discourse” taking place on Threads. Then, I took a deep breath and reminded myself that the history and context of how we talk about disability has changed over time, and lots of folks are missing some vital context.

Here’s some of the historical and community-based context that the debate about reclaiming the “R” word misses— and why you should think critically about the ways that people around you talk about disability.

The R word has become increasingly normalized

Evidently, I have buried my head in the sand hoping this wasn’t happening. However, the “R” word is back.

Joe Rogan called the word’s comeback “one of the great culture victories” in an April 10 episode of his podcast.

He’s not wrong that the word is back in vogue. Use of the slur has more than tripled on X since Elon Musk used it to critique a Finnish researcher. The popular show Euphoria used the word several times during its third season, with significant condemnation from organizations like the Special Olympics and the Arc (not an acronym anymore, for the record).

The Right tends to use the word as an example of speech suppression. One explanation is that it feels transgressive to use language that has been disavowed in mainstream culture. However, even people who are not on the far right are starting to use the word too. On Reddit, r/autism contains several threads of people asking whether the term can be reclaimed. According to one user, “it’s a term that has been used against me and honestly I think it would be pretty liberating to say, ‘well I am.’” Notably, however, the user claims not to have an intellectual disability.

Reclamation of words has worked in many communities. For example, the LGBTQ+ community uses the term “queer” and finds it liberating. Why would I take issue, then, with the “R” word?

The argument for reclamation

Dominant groups use slurs as weapons to achieve “power over” target groups, but as Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, a scholar who writes about slurs as speech acts argues: “[i]n-group members can disarm this weapon by using the slur term to self-refer. By self-labelling in a non-derogatory way, they create a new speech act (the reclaimed speech act) that is accessible to in-group members.”

Reclaiming a slur can be empowering because it adds a positive valence to a word that has been associated with a negative one. Positive self-labelling decreases the stigma attached to a word and therefore flips the power dynamics associated with words. The word can then be transformed into an expression of pride.

This is the way, for example, that terms like “queer” have been reclaimed by LGBTQ+ communities. People within the community have used the term in a positive way to decrease its stigmatic appeal and power.

However, for reclamation to work in a given context, there has to be in-group buy-in, that is, the group in question has to want to reclaim the slur. People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) tend to actively oppose reclaiming the “R” word, raising serious moral and ethical issues surrounding the word’s use.

Why the IDD community generally opposes the “R” word

People with IDD, as a community, have actively fought for decades to end the use of the “R”-word. In 2010, Rosa’s Law replaced the term with “intellectual disability” in federal language in response to advocacy by people with IDD.

First, the word signals a departure from normalcy and therefore presumes that there is some norm from which people with IDD deviate. It also implies that it would be better if people conformed to this hypothetical norm. As Ricky Broussard, Texas stated to the Arc: “[b]ack in the day, people referred to people like me as the R-word. We are not that word. We may all communicate differently and have different needs— that is normal. We all have strengths and values… Using this word goes backwards.”

Some people argue that the word is simply a diagnostic category, that it replaced less neutral descriptors such as “imbecile” or “moron,” that were popularized by eugenicists. Yet even if the term was intended to be a neutral descriptor, it was one that entailed significant consequences for people who fell into the diagnostic category. People with IDD who were diagnosed as the “R”-word were placed in separate classrooms; they were institutionalized; in many cases, they were involuntarily sterilized. People with disabilities have fought for decades to overcome this.

Furthermore, what might have started as a neutral descriptor warped into a slur that has been incredibly harmful for people in the IDD community. Reclamation requires that group members feel a sense of empowerment from a word’s use, but this has not been the case for most people with disabilities. As the Arc states in its commentary on the word: “When someone tells us a word hurts, we change. It’s that simple, and that important.”

That said, language preferences are not monolithic across the disability community

It is important to note that some subsets of the disability community, especially autistic people, have different linguistic norms when it comes to claiming disability categories. Generally, autistic people are more comfortable with using identity-first language to demonstrate that disability is a form of difference that should be normalized and celebrated. As a disabled person and scholar, I typically use identity-first language to describe myself. I tend to think of this as a complicated matter of personal preference. However, I also recognize that person-first language (i.e. person with a disability) originated from self-advocates with intellectual and developmental disabilities and honor that community’s general language preferences when I write.

This is not to say that subsets of the disability community are monoliths— indeed, there may be some non-autistic people with IDD prefer identity-first language and some autistic people who prefer person-first language. However, as disability scholar Erica Bigelow writes, the choice to reclaim the “R”-word is problematic because “some members of the slurred community are (by virtue of the slurred characteristic(s)) unable to participate in its reclamation.”

There tends to be an informal, intra-group hierarchy based on perceived “functioning” that develops within communities of people who are targeted by the “R”-word. The word may be used against autistic people, for example. It can also refer to a host of people with IDD who have differing support needs and characteristics. The problem with the “R”-word is that only some people with IDD can engage in reclamation. People who face more substantial barriers to verbal and written communication often cannot engage in the reclamation of the “R” word because of characteristics associated with the slur.

People who face fewer barriers to verbal and written communication benefit from the privileges afforded by intra-group elitism. As such, they are not necessarily the people for whom reclamation has the most adverse consequences. There is some tendency for slippage between reclamation and normalizing the word more generally. For instance, reclaiming the word “queer” has normalized it in non-queer communities to a certain extent. The problem with reclaiming the “R”-word in this context is that the people who are most likely to have the term weaponized against them are the least likely to be able to participate in discourse about its reclamation.

Why the “R”-word shouldn’t be “reclaimed”

There are too many inter-impairment hierarchies at play that make it problematic for, e.g., an autistic person who communicates verbally to dismiss the negative experiences of other people with IDD who have been subjected to the slur. The intra-group dynamics are why reclamation seems so fraught to me in this context.

The “R”-word has been genuinely harmful for people with IDD and weaponized against them. To ignore decades of organizing and self-advocacy by people with IDD in favor of an intellectualistic argument in favor of the “R”-word contributes to the further erasure of people whose perceived levels of functioning are lower. And I’m not comfortable with that.

And there are real consequences for people with IDD when the slur is more normalized. “Reclaiming” the word undoes decades of advocacy and makes it more socially-acceptable for Joe Rogan or Elon Musk to use the term as an insult. Personally, this is too much of a risk for too little potential payoff.

What are your thoughts on this? I am aware that I tend to defer to community preferences but also that community preferences are not monolithic. And how could “neurospicy” (which, at most, reeks of Tumblr-era cringe to me) possibly be a worse descriptor? Please comment your thoughts, because this was genuinely more complicated to write than I thought at the outset.

The piece was based on a press release entitled: Fighting oral cancer with bioengineered chewing gum, which is, admittedly, intriguing research to someone with a public health background. However, from the way the headline is written, one would think that we will soon have a product on shelves that prophylactically prevents a highly-deadly disease.

But as a health policy researcher who cares how science is communicated to the public, several alarm bells went off from the headline alone. What kind of cancer could chewing gum help fight? Should we really be referring to cancer as one illness when different strains and mutations affect different areas of the body differently? Why chewing gum? And, most importantly, why are we still producing science journalism that asks a question in the headline that we cannot possibly answer from the findings of a single study?

This headline is exemplary of a consistent problem with science reporting— science needs to be translated in order to be legible to laypeople (myself included). However, in their good faith efforts to translate scientific findings to the public, scientists and science journalists regularly hyperbolize the findings, certainty, or significance of their results. Let’s unpack why.

Incentives to publish “novel” or “groundbreaking” results

The problem doesn’t always originate with science journalists or university press rooms. Sometimes, the call is coming from inside the house— scientists have significant incentives to make their research sound novel and groundbreaking so that they can secure funding and place their research in top journals. The level to which someone’s results are legible to the public (or funding bodies) can make or break an academic. Getting tenure is tough. Having access to graduate students means that professors need money to pay them. Sometimes, professors’ salaries are entirely contingent on them reaching certain funding thresholds.

And funding is becoming even harder to secure. The Trump administration's cuts and freezing of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants terminated or disrupted 383 active clinical trials. The Trump administration has also paused grants or denied grant applications that contain “DEI”-adjacent phrases, such as race, woman, LGBTQ+, or disability, a move which researchers predict will have ripple effects on how health research is conducted for decades. 90% of the grants cancelled by the National Science Foundation (NSF) included a DEI-adjacent phrase.

Even when science funding is not scarce, the stakes are high for researchers, creating incentives to hyperbolize findings. University press offices, seeking to generate positive press for projects, are often relying on scientists’ own assessments of their work. One study suggested that “hype” words in scientific papers have doubled over the past fifty years.

Looking at the original chewing gum paper, the study itself states that chewing a certain type of bioengineered gum showed early clinical promise in killing certain microbes that can cause some oral cancers. The very preliminary study only looked at 26 people. Yet from reading the above headline, a consumer could be led to believe that the study could help them develop habits that prevent oral cancer in the near-term.

Promoting “normal” science

The gum story barely stood a chance. The scientists had incentives to show their research in the most positive light. The university press office did its job by promoting the research, which is admittedly a really cool concept. Then, the results were diluted further by a poor choice in headlines. No no one had to act in bad faith for the study, which was in early stages, small, and indeterminate, to be interpreted by the general public in ways that are simply not supported by the study itself.

The problem here? I wanted to read the article to find out more. But I have to wonder if everyone else who comes across this piece would. In the article’s defense, it does say that this is early lab research and notes “the findings are preliminary and based on a small sample size. More research and clinical trials are needed to determine whether the gum could help prevent or support the treatment of these cancers.” But getting to that point requires a consumer to read the article, not just the headline.

This is not to minimize the importance of this particular study. Like I said, the study is important. It shows a promising way to prevent a form of cancer that is particularly aggressive. That itself merits funding and attention. Yet in an environment where funding is as scarce as it is, there is too much pressure on scientists to overhype results.

The reality is that science is hard, and science that considers human behavior in relation to health outcomes is even harder. Most studies cannot control for all of the factors that might influence the results. Therefore, developing prescriptive health advice from scientific findings should almost always be taken with a heaping spoon of salt. (Thanks, Maintenance Phase for doing science communication that I think is really great!)

Another reality is that science moves slowly and incrementally. It is difficult to tell from early trials which studies are likely to produce groundbreaking results in the future. Sometimes, science that seems rudimentary, silly, or “basic” will pay dividends in decades, rather than a grant cycle. Funding and incentive mechanisms should be adjusted accordingly.

This is fundamentally a policy problem.

What can I do?

In the interim, people might be wondering what they can do to prevent the devaluation of scientific research and to align science and science journalism’s incentives more toward accurate reporting. To you, I would suggest the following:

• Contact your elected officials about cuts to National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. Trump recently fired the NSF’s entire oversight board , and there are bills currently in Congress to cut NSF, NIH, and NASA spending, among others. It’s not too late to stop these bills from getting through the Senate, and science spending should be a bipartisan issue.

• When you consume science reporting, think about who wrote it, what incentives that person had to write from that particular perspective, and whether the study itself supports the types of claims being made in the discussion/conclusion sections.

Oh, and if a headline starts with a question, you can be pretty sure that there’s not enough research to answer it.

However, because I still want to subject my own views to critical takes, I decided I’d go straight to the source. I asked Claude: “Can including more scholarship by disabled people to train LLMs reduce biased outputs?” According to Claude, the answer is complicated. But basically, it doesn’t reduce bias in any way that’s practicable or easy to implement.

At a basic level, Claude concedes that including more text authored by disabled people could shift the statistical analyses underlying the training data. Specifically, text-based generative AI is designed to predict words or word-pieces based on patterns it learns from large datasets of text. When it generates an answer to something, the model outputs a probability distribution, or a statistical likelihood that predicts relationships between words or word-pieces (“word tokens”) in the dataset. Yet it’s a little bit more complicated because the same input can generate different outputs, mimicking human creativity in a limited capacity.

TL;DR: The more bias there is in the training data, the more bias there’s going to be in text-based generative AI outputs.

Statistically-speaking, existing training data (i.e. the corpus of words put together on the internet), is biased against disabled people, there is some small amount of truth to the claim that adding more disability scholarship or disabled voices to this training data could make AI less biased against disabled people and more likely to generate less ableist text.

But it’s not that simple. While inclusion can produce less biased results, there’s a scaling problem. As Claude told me: “[t]he volume of disability scholarship… is microscopically small relative to the total training corpus of a large language model… The statistical weight of this inclusion would be negligible against the sheer mass of medical, legal, institutional, media, and social media text that reproduces ableist framings.” Claude concludes that: “[i]t’s like adding a cup of clean water to a polluted lake— it changes the composition in a technically measurable but practically insignificant way.”

There’s a chance that fine-tuning the model on a curated disability scholarship corpus could have a stronger effect, but also fine-tuning is complicated, can be overridden by fine-tuning for other variables, and would need to actively be implemented time and time again as models are retrained. AI companies have shown no interest in making that commitment (according to Claude).

There are also fundamental problems with the ways that AI gets data about disability justice. Disabled authors’ work is appropriated for LLMs without adequate attribution or compensation. Also, per Claude, it is likely that disability scholars’ work (which emphasizes emancipation) may be feeding a corpus that is antithetical to its liberatory goals. “Feeding work into a training corpus that will also be used to build systems for fraud detection, benefits adjudication, and welfare surveillance is a form of epistemic extractivism.” (Good job, Claude? But really, lots of states are using generative AI to implement Medicaid work requirements, so this is a real concern.) A less-biased fraud detection system used by an agency with the incentive to reduce costs isn’t going to produce less ableism. It’s still going to perpetuate fear of the “disability con.”

Finally, disability justice is fundamentally grounded in “relational knowledge,” which is something I agree with too. Disability justice focuses on relationships between people and systems, seeking to understand people’s lived experiences. Disabled people are both the authors of and primary authority on their own lives, and it’s hard to see how AI furthers the goals of improving systems.

This is because of how AI is designed. As Claude aptly notes: “No amount of disability scholarship in the training data changes the fact that the model processes a disability claim by matching it against the statistical patterns rather than by attending to the person making the claim. The model can produce texts that sounds like it understands crip time, but it cannot actually attend to the temporal rhythms of a specific person’s chronic illness.”

While Claude did generate these concerns, prompted by me, many of these concerns are things I’ve wondered about or asked about. I’ve wondered what it means to take the human and relational element out of disability scholarship. I’ve wondered if there’s any amount of fiddling with a model that will make AI more inclusive. And I’m skeptical about it still.

I’m not saying there’s no role for AI in any vector of scholarship. I mean, I used Claude to refine my thinking on this issue precisely because it knows more about itself than I ever will. But also, I don’t think that Claude will produce the emancipatory scholarship that the article I cited last week thinks it can. And it certainly can’t be unbiased when making decisions about people’s lives and livelihoods.

We need to focus on AI governance. Where should we absolutely draw a line and say AI shouldn’t be used? For example, I absolutely do not think there is any legitimate reason to use generative AI to cut people’s benefits. Full stop. That needs to be regulated. And I’m skeptical about its use in many other contexts.

That’s all for me this week, folks. But I’d love to hear what your concerns about generative AI are.

I’ve been reading and writing a lot about AI over the past few weeks (gotta love a special interest). I thought I was firmly in the anti-AI camp (for environmental reasons, because I think that too many people are using it to substitute for their own thinking instead of assisting in it, etc.). But this article made me think about an alternative future, one in which AI is embraced as a tool for helping disabled people generate emancipatory research.

Harvey Cowe’s “Using AI to help generate disability scholarship,” published this year in Disability & Society is the piece in question. I’ve heard a lot of AI apologists parrot that AI can be an access tool, but I’ve taken those claims with a heaping dose of skepticism.

I’m skeptical of these claims for what I think are valid reasons. Environmental concerns notwithstanding, the data inputs for large language models (LLMs) are imbued with ableist bias. The datasets they are trained on are unfiltered and unstructured, meaning that generative AI can rely on basically any opinion expressed on the internet, and generative AI platforms aren’t transparent about why they’ve chosen certain sources over others.

As such, it is unsurprising that, as the New York Bar Association argues: “[r]esearch studies and focus groups have found that AI-generated text and images often misrepresent the experiences of people with disabilities and reinforce harmful stereotypes, and AI-generated responses have been found to provide inaccurate information to user prompts, which misleads people with disabilities who rely on the responses to summarize inaccessible content and other resources.”

Also, for a “promising access tool,” AI is remarkably inaccessible. Most of the major AI platforms lack accessible mobile applications. Some generative AI platforms interfere with screen readers by barring their use and/or use inaccessible levels of contrast in their user interfaces. Moreover, because AI can only predict how likely certain arrangements of words are, we can never know if AI’s telling the truth. (And it gets things wrong… a lot.).

With all that said, how could AI use be emancipatory in any way?

Well, as Cowe argues, academic knowledge production is itself inaccessible. It relies on the physical ability to type one’s thoughts, which, for Cowe, is painful and exhausting. It also requires the cognitive capabilities to express oneself in a way that is cognizable and persuasive to others, as well as a myriad of other skills that make producing scholarship a difficult enterprise. As Cowe argues: “generative AI can act as a bridge between the principles of emancipatory research and the practical realities of producing scholarly content.”

Cowe also notes that disabled people’s lived experiences are regularly erased from scholarship. When that happens, their voices are supplanted by medicalized narratives that come from charities or clinical institutions, which only serves to further medicalize the outputs of generative AI. Using AI to create emancipatory disability scholarship could, in some sense, improve the inputs that AI works with.

What, though, of authorship? Of having “original” ideas? Of having intellectual credibility? Cowe argues that lived experience itself constitutes expertise. The priority for emancipatory research should be ensuring that people are able to express their ideas in ways that challenge barriers, promote understanding, and improve the lives of disabled people. AI assistance can enhance the “depth, clarity, and reach” of disabled people’s lived experiences. The point, as Cowe views it, is not to “bypass[] effort— it’s about creating equity.”

Ultimately, I’m of two minds about Cowe’s argument. AI adoption seems inevitable and likely to pervade everything from people’s understandings of basic concepts to welfare determinations. (Yes, several states are already thinking about how to use generative AI to determine whether someone is “really” disabled for welfare/Medicaid work requirement purposes, and yes, I have many feelings about this!) In a world where AI is inevitable, it seems like it could do more harm than good to leave disabled people out of the data that trains LLMs.

However, I’m not sure AI is the emancipatory answer that Cowe is looking for. AI can jeopardize disabled people’s privacy (as datasets can be easily re-identified and AI can infer disability) and well-being (because of the environmental impacts). And these implications may be felt further by multiply-marginalized populations.

Furthermore, AI isn’t unique in its ability to amplify disabled people’s voices in scholarship. Participatory scholarship might more effectively remedy the problems Cowe identifies. For example, legal scholar Rachel López champions the idea of “participatory legal scholarship” and regularly co-authors with people who have lived experience of carceral systems. By co-authoring with people who have expertise and lived experience with how programs and services work, participatory legal scholars are able to translate the expertise of people who are not formally trained in legal academia into mediums cognizable to academics.

Frankly, participatory scholarship seems to accomplish the same purposes Cowe argues that generative AI performs while also having added benefits such as increasing solidarity between academics and authors who do not have formal training in specialized fields. If adopted more broadly, participatory co-authorship could increase the availability of emancipatory disability scholarship. Participatory scholarship also enhances human connection by reminding academics of the “humanity behind the law,” which I do not think algorithms can do.

That said, I do worry about scale. I do worry about disabled academics opting out of AI, precisely because it means that they will continue to be underrepresented in the training data that is becoming more and more influential to government actors, businesses, and even academia itself. I’m not writing this because I have a perfect answer. I write this because I am myself conflicted. What do disability justice advocates do in a world where AI adoption seems pretty inevitable?

I’m really asking.

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The cruelty, the manufacturing of academic discourse to serve brazenly partisan ends, and the willingness of so many people I know to stick their heads in the sand and refuse to think critically about the world right now is maddening, frankly.

But this is exactly why I’m forcing myself to write right now.

The Supreme Court chose to hear arguments against birthright citizenship yesterday. Despite the plain text of the 14th Amendment and despite Congress passing multiple statutes enshrining the plain meaning of the statute, at least four members of the Court thought it was worth their time (and the country’s) to hold oral arguments, as opposed to dismissing the Trump administration’s baseless claims last year in

As I write this, SCOTUSBlog writes that the Court “appears likely to side against Trump on birthright citizenship.” But the debate shouldn’t have gotten this far. The argument “against” the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship is fundamentally a bad faith set of hot takes concocted in a FedSoc lab. There’s nothing new here, nothing that would caution ruling against more than a hundred years of practice, precedent, and reliance interests.

And yet, here we are, hoping that the Court doesn’t gut birthright citizenship. And I’m tired.

I’m so tired of engaging in bad faith arguments. I don’t think we should be forced to engage with the law professor equivalent of 4chan trolls to keep our basic civil rights and liberties intact. It’s infuriating. But that’s what this administration has forced us to do. Liberal and left-leaning academics and attorneys are stuck putting out ridiculous bad faith fires instead of collectively working toward a better society or “more perfect union.”

The birthright citizenship case is not an academic exercise. It is not an abstract classroom or a Fed Soc debate. Anti-birthright citizenship apologists are gambling with people’s well-established rights in front of a Court that has found the scent of Trump’s power and authoritarianism both alluring— all in the name of sounding like a wannabe “free thinker” I would have trounced in high school debate.

I’m stuck between feeling as though this is such a brazenly bad faith take that I shouldn’t engage but feeling forced to engage. And it’s exhausting.

I’ve always loved having discussions about policy. They’ve allowed me to think about multiple ways we can change society for the better. They’ve helped me understand how to critically engage with the world around me. I’m also an academic and love to understand and make sense of things. But right now, there just isn’t room for much intelligent debate. And I don’t think we should cede that the “other side” is making arguments in good faith— we might cede a lot more ground than that by doing so.

So, no, I don’t have anything smart to say right now, but I also don’t think that should stop me from stating the obvious. And yet in a time when politics is so utterly impossible to fathom, I would suggest that saying things and attempting to fathom the unfathomable is the least productive thing we can do.

When I can’t fathom how awful everything is, I don’t try as much anymore. I try to act instead. That’s why I’m committing myself to using my law license for good by enrolling in federal habeas petition training. As this Bloomberg article aptly notes: “The second Trump administration is for lawyers what the Covid-19 pandemic was to the medical profession.”

Whether it’s getting involved in local politics, volunteering for non-profits, becoming knowledgeable about what to do if ICE invades your area, we all have a role to play.

**** While I don’t have smart stuff to say about this right now, that’s partially because of the intellectual heavy lifting done by other academics like Kate Masur and Anna Law. If you want incisive, informed takes about the stakes and history of this debate, I highly suggest that you look into their work.

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In a past life, I was an insurance attorney who worked on coverage litigation cases. Sometimes, I enjoyed the rapid conversational shift away from what I did for work as soon as I said I was an insurance lawyer, especially in DC where your job can subsume your whole identity. Yet I was perpetually intrigued and flummoxed by how far-reaching and significant the insurance industry is. I used to joke that insurers made the litigation world go around.

I now think about the insurance consequences of nearly every piece of legal news I consume (and am still profoundly jealous of whomever got to write the coverage letter for Ticketmaster after the Taylor Swift debacle). Yet I never thought that insurance would invade… my research? Which was, frankly, my mistake, given that I have read and written extensively about Social Security Disability Insurance. (Of course, I know health insurance is vitally important to my research too, but I tend to think of that in a different bucket because I never dealt with it in practice!)

Imagine my surprise when I read Mara Mills and Dan Bouk’s fantastic piece on “The History of ‘Impairment’” in Disability and the History of Science. In this piece, Mills and Bouk argue that early definitions of impairment were not tied to medicine or care, as people often presume when delineating between the “medical” and “social” models of disability, Instead, they arose from life insurance eligibility determinations!

Specifically, life insurance companies employed actuarial methods and computational strategies to abstract from medical data and patient testimonies and calculate a numerical threshold of “risk” that a person posed. The goal of these methods was to separate people who would be “too risky” to insure while also maximizing the number of people paying premiums.

And the data architecture (designed by Melvil Dewey, yeah, the guy who made the Dewey Decimal System) exists to this day. Life insurance companies pool data resources about applicants, even across companies.

Moreover, because we’re talking about the American context, of course this is all steeped in the history of the slave trade and structural racism. An article by Michael Ralph in Disability Studies Quarterly documents the ways in which the U.S. life insurance industry grew out of slave insurance to help protect the profits of those who had previously profited from enslaving people in the antebellum South. While life insurance in Britain emerged in the latter eighteenth century, the U.S. life insurance did not develop in the United States until approximately the 1840s.

As Ralph writes, “slave insurance foreshadowed post-bellum genres of corporate insurance, as owners of capital sought to shield themselves against the risks associated with the loss of an individual’s capacity for labor.” And after abolition, life insurance companies continued to maintai separate systems of insurance for Black and white Americans.

In perverse ways, the legacy of viewing workers as property to be insured has endured into the present moment. For example, Rick Perry in 2003 sought to take out life insurance policies on retiring public school teachers because they might die in the next decade and profit the Texas government. Many Fortune 500 companies still use “corporate-owned life insurance” policies on their employees. Perversely, companies profit when their employees die more quickly.

Anyway, I’m still trying to make sense of how life insurance plays into my book project. In my book, I’m considering the ways in which disability legal categories, which have been historically informed by actuarial models, medical judgment, and even the eugenics movement, influence people’s “right to live in the world,” as Jacobus TenBroek so eloquently puts it.

As part of this analysis, I’m looking at the role that impairment categories played in constructing disabled people as the “deserving poor,” as well as differentiating between people who are “actually disabled” in the eyes of the law and those who may be “malingering.”

It may be that this connection between life insurance and social insurance is straightforward. Social insurance covers the “truly impaired” that e.g. cannot work and are risky prospects for life insurance. But it also may be more complicated.

One thing I know is that I’m evidently not escaping insurance law any time soon!

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Many people tell the story of the “Section 504 sit-in,” which is still the longest occupation of a government building on record, that was staged by disabled people in order to push the federal government to issue regulations for Section 504— which was the first disability rights bill and required federally-funded programs and activities to refrain from discriminating on the basis of disability. More than 100 disabled activists occupied for the Health, Education, & Welfare office in San Francisco, CA for 28 days.

What isn’t discussed as much by scholars and advocates is the 504 sit-ins’ aftermath. While there were, of course, lawsuits and traditional administrative action following the 504 regulations, the regulations contained something I thought was far more interesting as a politics scholar. The regulations both required that federally-funded programs and activities (that’s right, anything that receives federal funding) to consult disabled people when developing programs AND also funded a set of know-your-rights-style trainings, otherwise known as the “Section 504 trainings.”

The Section 504 trainings were a quieter form of advocacy, but nonetheless galvanized the disability rights movement in important ways. Disabled people around the country were given grant funding by the federal government to train other disabled people on what their rights were under the newly-issued Section 504 regulations.

The content of these trainings was, in some respects, radical. Disabled people were told that they and they alone knew their access needs and were encouraged to negotiate with covered programs to secure their rights. This meant anything from talking to the local library about bathroom access to challenging government agencies to take the voices of disabled people seriously.

The advocates running the 504 trainings were conscious that they were in an environment where litigation might yield unfriendly results because they thought courts didn’t understand disability rights or disability. And to some extent, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) subsequently proved that to be true—up to 98% of plaintiffs who brought ADA cases in the first 10 years of its passage lost their cases in federal courts, according to some studies.

The effects of the trainings are difficult to quantify, but up to 21,000 people were taught how to claim their rights, using government money, during the early 1980s. My co-author Karen Tani and I call this both an example of “participatory administrative law” and “delegated governance.” In a forthcoming paper, we identify both the liberatory potential and potential pitfalls of this approach to advocacy. For example, the trainings reproduced the aesthetic politics and racism already present in disability advocacy. But they also created an educated population of disabled citizens who fought for their rights, and indeed, fought for the ADA to be passed within 10 years of the trainings.

Why do I talk about the trainings so much? It’s because I think these “know-your-rights” style trainings are exceedingly relevant at this juncture in history. We’re living through a similar era. In the early 1980s, administrative agencies were being cut. The Supreme Court, which had once celebrated diversity through decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, had become increasingly hostile to civil rights. Indeed, Section 504, the same civil rights bill I spoke about, was and is itself under attack. Currently, multiple states are suing to invalidate Section 504 and weaken its regulatory provisions.

What I think is relevant about these trainings at this time are their message that we should take ownership over our rights, because we’re the only people who can truly understand and advocate for them.

Is this a perfect approach? No. Is it a risk-free approach? Also, no. But it’s one that I think we need to take.

I imagine that many of you will be taking your first (or second) steps into workplaces that were not built for you shortly. While I’m sure each and every one of you will do great things, I would also encourage you to know your rights and become your own zealous advocate.

We live in workplaces that aren’t built for us. And as scholar Katherine Macfarlane has documented, this prompts many people to “self-accommodate,” to design, pay for, and implement what the law requires others to provide them for free. It’s a massive civil rights failure. But it’s a common practice for two reasons.

First, disability law requires that you disclose your disability to receive accommodations from your employer. For some people, this is an easy decision, as your disability might have physical manifestations. But for other people, there is a cost to disclosing your disability and asking for accommodations. Your employer might view you differently. And lots of people are illegally put on Personal Improvement Plans or PIPs after asking for accommodations. Even though this is illegal, employers count on courts being hostile to your case or you not knowing your rights. This is despite the Job Accommodation Network (JAN) stating that the vast majority of accommodations don’t cost a single dollar.

And employers can sometimes get away with this because litigation is really hard. It can last for years, and in many cases, judges have interpreted the law to perpetuate what legal scholar Doron Dorfman calls “fear of the disability con,” or the fear that people are “faking” their disability to gain social advantage. So they hold that people are not disabled or not qualified for the jobs they have.

These are massive systemic failures. Unfortunately, I can’t sugarcoat that. But I can provide an alternative perspective. The failures of our system to enforce civil rights for disabled people emphasizes the need for people to “stand up” for themselves and their rights, just as we were taught to in the Section 504 trainings.

UC Berkeley student Steve McClelland, who ran the July 1980 Chicago Section 504 training, repeatedly emphasized the importance of a “rights-bearing attitude.” “Once you have [a rights-bearing attitude], you can just do anything,” While I’m not 100% sure that’s true, there is a sense of power and agency that comes from knowing that you do have rights, even if those rights are fragile and need to be fought for.

Part of the shift we need is cultural— knowledge is power. Employers need to know that their employees are empowered and understand what their rights are, that they will advocate for themselves, and that they won’t sit aback idly and countenance illegal behavior in the workplace.

You have a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of your disability; you have the right to seek reasonable accommodations on the basis of your disability. But under existing law, you have to ask for that—and you do have to disclose your disability if you want the protection of the law. This is known as the “disclosure dilemma” in the literature, and it’s definitely not fair.

Disabled people, especially people in relative positions of privilege in the disability community, need to stop accepting and apologizing for poor management practices and discrimination.

This doesn’t mean you have to regale your boss with every grievance you have with them, but it does mean that you should feel confident to professionally assert your legal rights. This may include asking for small modifications that do not rise to the level of formal accommodations if you need from your boss during meetings. Or asking during job interviews what people’s management styles are. Alternatively, it could mean affirmatively asking for the accommodations the law requires your employer to provide.

And know that, if something goes wrong, you do have the power to do something about it. (As an aside, my lawyer not your lawyer brain has to say— please document everything if you see something that you think might be illegal. And always talk to a lawyer if you think that you’re being discriminated against. I promise that despite our reputation, not all of us are terrible.)

There is an inherent cost and risk to advocating for yourself. You may get labeled as a problem anyway, and in this market, that can feel devastating. But I also think there’s a profound sense of agency and freedom you gain when you stop accepting the limitations imposed by people with narrow-minded ideas of how the workplace should work— and you’re more likely to find a space where you “fit” in the process. I haven’t fit into every workplace I’ve been in— much to the contrary. But I have found that refusing to accept the intolerable has made my life immeasurably richer and more authentic.

The last thing I’ll mention is that the “r

ights-bearing attitude” McClelland spoke of doesn’t have to mean that you go it alone—there’s strength in numbers. Organize affinity groups and within unions to fight for more equitable practices in your workplace. The Section 504 protesters and trainers all found significant solace in community. Gail Rinne, one of the Section 504 trainers, said that when she started working for the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, it was like she’d found her country.

Sometimes, we need to carve out our own spaces from the systems that exclude us. And while that’s disheartening and disempowering at times, I think there are also opportunities for things to grow and shift and change if we make it our goal to practice law and politics in ways that promote the well-being and rights of our communities.

A huge paradox and one of my deepest, darkest secrets is that I’m proud of my dissertation, but I absolutely hate it.

Genuinely, it was an extended subtweet of a book I hate read while proctoring an exam one day. I wrote it during COVID lockdown, while working ~35 hours at DoJ per week, taking a full slate of law school coursework, and serving as the Lead Articles Editor for my law review. (Can we say a collective “yikes” to past Heather’s schedule? And can I give the unsolicited advice that no one should do this the way I did it?)

Suffice it to say, it’s not the finest work I’ve ever produced, nor is it something I ever want anyone to read. I joked that I was going to burn it during my defense, much to the chagrin of my committee. But even so, I’m glad it exists (and not just because I can now call myself Dr. Heather Swadley).

My dissertation may not win any awards. I would need to do substantial work to be proud of anything I published from it. And it didn’t need to do any of that. It laid the groundwork for my thinking on issues that have become pivotal to my scholarship.

I imagine I’m not the only person in my boat by the end of their PhD, and I wanted to hop on here and say that you’re not alone. I thought about quitting my PhD because I thought my dissertation was so bad, but I’m so glad I didn’t. Here are three lessons I learned from my terrible (to me) dissertation.

1. I developed knowledge and expertise in the case studies I would explore throughout my academic career. My dissertation wasn’t narrowly tailored— it was broad, and I’m glad it was. I surveyed a massive amount of literature that a lot of political scientists ignore and began to synthesize it in interesting ways. While my argument is not in its final or finest form, it didn’t need to be. It just needed to set up an agenda for future scholarship. My case studies did just that. I considered employment, education, and housing/health care supports, which meant that I became somewhat of a generalist within my specialization. But I think that generalist mindset has enabled me to see connections between these areas and literatures that I might not have otherwise. Now, I’m working on a super ambitious book project using the same case studies (though making very different arguments).

2. I became comfortable with making mistakes and refining my thinking. I bit off more than I could chew and explored some huge ideas relating to disability policy, community integration, race, and social programs. However, by clarifying my general stances on these issues and making mistakes while writing, I learned that it’s okay to make mistakes and change your thinking throughout your academic career. Also, if you’re writing in an area that’s under-theorized in your discipline, you’re bound to make those mistakes— and your mistakes and mishaps can even advance your field by ruling out ideas that maybe don’t totally pass the smell test.

3. Even the best dissertation will need to be rewritten before it’s a book. Something I’ve learned during the process of revising my dissertation to become a book is that basically everyone’s dissertation will undergo heavy edits before it can become a book manuscript. When you’re writing a dissertation, you’re writing to your committee, but when you’re writing a book, you’re writing to acquisitions editors and scholars across (hopefully) a variety of fields and subfields. These are different skills, and your dissertation is never going to tick all of those boxes, no matter how perfect it is.

So, yes. I hate my dissertation. And I still stand by my comment about burning it (sorry to anyone on my committee who reads this)! But I’m writing a book that I’m really proud of, and I’m not sure I could have done that without it first being a somewhat mediocre dissertation.

I was once told by a speaker in graduate school to “save the interdisciplinary work for tenure,” because it is difficult to prove your place in a discipline otherwise.

This is one piece of advice I never took, and I’m glad I didn’t.

I scored a tenure-track job in a field that asked me constantly why what I was doing was “real political science” (whatever that is) and still published extensively outside of my discipline. I also maintain that my contributions as a “political scientist” are better for it.

That said, being interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, or “undisciplined” (my favorite descriptor), especially on the tenure track in a discipline that is obnoxiously hostile to your work wasn’t ever easy. And one of the reasons I ultimately left political science was its conservatism and difficulty to manage as a disability scholar (one of the many categories political science has been slow to consider).

Nonetheless, I think I could have and would have still gotten tenure as an interdisciplinary scholar, and I gleaned some important insights into how to do multidisciplinary work as a non-tenured scholar.

1. Make your contributions to your “home” discipline clear.

To be honest, I once thought that if I had to answer why what I was doing counted as political science one more time, I might abandon all principles and resort to physical violence. As a second-year graduate student, I was made to believe that it was a detriment that I “s[aw] disability everywhere.”

Was that demoralizing, annoying, and ultimately a really narrow way to see the world? Sure. But there was some use value to that criticism.

Because I was repeatedly asked why what I was doing was political science, I developed a clear way to articulate the value of my work. I learned to articulate that, indeed, disability is part and parcel to how political scientists have conceptualized power, and that understanding disability politics can help us understand concepts like citizenship, bureaucracy, the politics of medicine, and even civil litigation more effectively.

In essence, I was forced to convince people that they should care about my research, even if it wasn’t related to their own. Sometimes, this meant that I was forced to answer annoying questions during my job talks instead of engaging in the more nuanced, interesting parts of my research. But one piece of advice that unfortunately rings true is that when thinking about your tenure file, other scholars, for better or for worse, will be thinking of you as a “political scientist” or “historian,” and even as a member of a specific subfield—for me, an “American political development” scholar.

Positioning yourself within those disciplinary debates will save you a lot of headache if you’re doing multidisciplinary work, even if they’re not always the most interesting answers your research has to offer.

2. Build a network outside of your discipline to discuss the more nuanced questions.

If you can’t tell, political scientists weren’t always the biggest fans of my work. Frankly, I’m not the biggest fan of polling and electoral politics, so the feeling is mutual.

One of the ways I grew most as a multidisciplinary scholar and, frankly, stayed sane, was by building scholarly networks and communities outside of my home discipline. In my case, legal scholars thought about disability and the administrative state in nuanced and fascinating ways that my home discipline often did not. While there are wonderful political scientists who work on disability, most of those people were theory-oriented, so it was helpful to talk to legal historians and administrative law scholars who were thinking about the same problems I was thinking about, albeit in different ways.

These conversations were incredibly productive in advancing my own work, and some of these people remain my best academic friends and sounding boards—precisely because they are not beholden to the same disciplinary structures I’ve been socialized in.

If you don’t feel like you fit in your home discipline, I promise there are likely scholars thinking about the same issues as you from a different vantage point—and they might even be ahead of the curve when thinking about similar issues. Even if you are “at home” in your home discipline, talk to other scholars anyway—they’re probably thinking about the issues you’re considering in ways that can be mutually beneficial.

3. Make strategic choices about publishing.

This was a hard one for me. I wanted to publish in law reviews because I find them to be a better outlet for my research, but they’re not “peer-reviewed,” so political scientists often did not consider them “real” publications. This may be true to a lesser extent if you want to publish in multidisciplinary journals—they might not be considered as prestigious by your home discipline.

The way I navigated this was to be strategic about my publishing. I often took a paper that made similar arguments or was on the same subject and prepared it for multiple venues. I once received some advice that if you can’t get two articles and a book out of an idea, it’s not worth pursuing. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but publishing the same types of arguments in ways that will appeal to multiple audiences and different venues can be super helpful.

In my case, I worked on a project on the intersections between reproductive justice and disability justice. I knew that my piece needed an empirical component to be read widely by political scientists, so I developed a qualitative methodology for reporting disability advocacy organizations’ responses to Dobbs, paying attention to the issues organizations working on the ground were raising. I also authored a piece on reproductive federalism and disability in the wake of Dobbs that raised the variety of ways that “reproductive citizenship” was fragmented by place for disabled people. The first piece brought some of the legal issues concerning reproductive justice and disability to political science audiences, while the second piece brought questions about citizenship (frequently talked about by political scientists) to a legal audience.

By publishing both of these pieces, I was able to reach a broader audience. But I also gained publications that would earn my respect in both of my primary scholarly communities. I think that the same advice can be applied to a lot of interdisciplinary publishing—repackage and publish your results for multiple audiences.

These are just a few of the many ways I tried to navigate being an “undisciplined” scholar on the tenure track. If you’re interested in learning more or would like help repackaging your scholarly arguments for multiple audiences, I offer research and developmental editing services for early-career researchers. My services can be found on my website.

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(In case you haven’t seen Twitter, “look at the degree on that chick” is all I have to say)

One sunny day in April 2024, I sat at my desk crying after my neighbor threatened me with physical violence (it’s true)! It was shortly after the release of The Tortured Poets Department by Taylor Swift, and I was bopping along with “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.” I sat at my desk and sang at the top of my lungs:

I cry a lot, but I am so productive

It’s an art

You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart

I was in a tenure-track job, something I had worked for since at least 2009. I had “made it” according to academia. I had a 2-2 teaching load, and I appreciated many of my colleagues.

But I was so profoundly unhappy.

I was living apart from my husband. I was living in Allentown, PA in a genuinely dangerous neighborhood where I was scared to walk to my car, because my spouse and I didn’t really make enough to maintain two residences. (Pro-tip: If Billy Joel wrote a song 20+ years ago about how sh**ty it is to live where you’re going to live, you might want to listen in advance). My department chair micro-managed me more than a Wendy’s manager.

While I was screaming along with ICDIWABH, something inside me snapped. I decided I was going to quit.

I got a new job. My spouse and I bought a cute little condo near his work in the DMV. Sure, the turmoil in DC has created many hurdles and setbacks. I’m not going to downplay what a truly tumultuous time this has been.

But also, I’m happy. And that doesn’t say anything about me as an academic.

As academics, we’re taught that the tenure-track job is everything, and that it’s the pinnacle of academia— what we should all aspire to have. But that ignores the significant personal and familial sacrifices that are often involved in maintaining that position.

I may not have “wanted” to be a tenure-track academic “enough:— I didn’t want to cry all the time while being productive. As someone recently and wisely put it to me— formal academia was like a sweater that never quite fit.

But that doesn’t make me any less of an academic.

I’m still working on writing and publishing my book. I still stay active in disability scholarship spaces. I’m launching a developmental editing and research support service soon. All in all, I’m doing really cool things— but I am not a tenure-track professor.

I think in a world where good, tenure-track jobs are becoming increasingly rare, we shouldn’t treat deviations from that path as failures. I know I’m happier than I would be otherwise— and I’m still researching (possibly in more interesting ways than I was when I was confined to thinking about tenure).

We need to acknowledge and encourage alternative paths to scholarship. Given trending anti-intellectualism, especially in the U.S., the stakes are higher than ever. Scholars, tenure-track or not, need to share their expertise with the world and push for measures that increase media literacy more broadly. That doesn’t happen when people publish solely behind paywalls.

So, yeah, I might not be a tenure-track academic. But I’m still an academic, and I’m here to rethink what it means to be a scholar with all of you.

(Also, if you are interested in a community of people who are redefining scholarship, please check out Accepted Society! They are amazing and supportive and wonderful)

In the immortal words of Taylor Swift: “I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.”

The policy prescription marks a return to an era when disabled people, particularly Black, low-income, and otherwise “undesirable” disabled people were criminalized for their mere existence in public, a phenomenon known by disability scholars as “The Ugly Laws.” Passed in cities across the country, these laws sought to criminalize malingering and to prevent society from having to interact with the “unsightly poor.”

The Ugly Laws, like President Trump’s Executive Order, individualized broader structural problems, blaming individual behavior for broader structural issues like poverty, racism, and ableism. An individual problem warranted an individualized solution, which meant criminalizing people who needed social supports, instead of rethinking social institutions to provide adequate support for people to exist in their communities.

Criminalizing unhoused populations never went away— indeed, last year, the Supreme Court held that criminalizing unhoused people even in the absence of other alternatives did not violate the 8th Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishments. New York Mayor Eric Adams announced a plan to involuntarily commit people who appeared “mentally ill.” But the Trump administration’s dissolution of the Administration for Community Living, as well as other programs that allowed people to live independently in their communities reveals the bitter truth underlying reforms such as these.

These proposals are not about helping disabled and unhoused people. They are about making them less visible— about curing a perceived social “blight.” It’s about eugenics. Even the Supreme Court has acknowledged that needless institutionalization is disability discrimination.

Trump’s proposals harken back to an era of institutionalization and negative eugenics. Parents were encouraged to institutionalize their disabled children, told that their disabled children would destroy their families. The purpose of these measures was to control the reproduction and visibility of people deemed “undesirable”— disabled people, poor people, “sexual deviants,” and others. These children were abused, kept in appalling conditions that provided no hope of rehabilitation or recovery. The abuses of institutions like Pennhurst and Willowbrook are well-documented.

As someone who writes about disability history, a common trope I hear is that “deinstitutionalization caused mass homelessness and criminal activity" by formerly institutionalized persons. Let me be very clear— this is a myth. Scholar Anne Parsons finds that the populations who were institutionalized and those who were subsequently criminalized differed demographically. Moreover, the perceived link between deinstitutionalization and criminalization arose because states shifted money from institutions to prisons— the goal was mass incarceration. Studies such as the Pennhurst Longitudinal Study have also shown that previously institutionalized people thrived when given adequate social supports. Ample literature has shown that investment in these social supports decreases mental distress and poverty uniformly.

Also, let’s be perfectly clear— people often experience profound emotional distress and mental illness because they are unhoused and are not unhoused because they are mentally ill. Any person reading this is more likely to become unhoused than they are to become a billionaire.

When your answer to the mere existence of poor, unhoused, or disabled people in public is to lock them away instead of providing them with the tools they need to live in their communities, you don’t care about unhoused people. You just don’t want to interact with them.

Inconvenience is part of living in a community. When your answer is to deny people access to their community because you’d rather not be inconvenienced, you are the problem. You are perpetuating eugenics. And a return to an “ugly” past.

I am a self-professed Swiftie. I grew up with Taylor Swift. She’s my age. Fearless and Debut guided me through my first major breakup and her album through a series of others. When I listen to her more romantic songs, I think of the stability and happiness I have with my now-partner. I am an Eras Tour-ist— I went in Philadelphia N1 and Toronto N4. All of this to say, I was pumped for The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD). I still am— I think that it’s a beautiful exploration of a series of deep emotions, hurt, religious trauma, fame, and so much more.

Yet I also think that, in the words of Chelsea Fagan, fans do way too much unpaid PR for their favorite artists. If we can’t critique them when they use problematic themes and tropes, who is actually going to hold them accountable? No artist hits the mark 100% of the time, and as a disability scholar and a disabled/neurodivergent/Mad person committed to Mad liberation, I have some complicated feelings about the sometimes glib employment of madness, institutionalization, forcible treatment, and asylums as tropes and plot devices on TTPD.

TTPD opens with the line “I was supposed to be sent away, but they forgot to come and get me,” referencing the last line of “Hits Different,” a Midnights deluxe song, which asks: “or are they here to come and take me away?” Swift documents a journey with “functioning alcohol[ism]” throughout the song and provides commentary on “miracle move-on drug[s],” the hurt of having to run into an ex-lover and their new wife. She even provides some commentary on the American dream itself. All in one 3:48 minute song riddled with casual murder references in the name of her artful songcraft.

Themes of mental health and the asylum loom large over the album, and Swift was no-doubt experiencing profound mental distress when she wrote these songs. She describes the period of her life as one of “restricted humanity” and “temporary insanity” in her epilogue to the album, “In Summation.” She describes the love affair on which the album is based as:

It was a mutual manic phase.

It was self harm.

It was house and then cardiac arrest.

Her muses were “acquired by bruises” and the “tick, tick, tick of love bombs.” She makes it clear that this episode of her life was not the joyful time “in her glittering prime” that fans thought they were observing. In “I Can Do it with a Broken Heart,” she speaks glibly of performing at your peak even when “you wanna die.” “All the pieces of [her] shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘MORE!’” In “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”, while describing the music industry and celebrity environment in which she came of age, she snarls: “you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.”

Given the clear distress Swift must have been experiencing, I am hesitant to cast aspersions on any language she needed to describe this moment of “temporary insanity.” Yet the words and tropes artists use have consequences.

The “Fortnight” video and set on the Eras Tour both used imagery similar to a psychiatric ward— Swift is forcibly medicated and given what seems to be electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Nurses restrain her as she is running toward the one she loves. Taylor Swift refers to her upbringing as an “asylum.” Yet she does not grapple with the full implications of the imagery she invokes.

The asylum plays a pivotal role in the history of eugenics— which sought “better breeding,” therefore controlling the reproduction of those deemed “defective,” typically those deemed to be “sexually deviant,” racialized or gendered people, and those we would be considered disabled people in contemporary parlance. These people were subjected to horrific abuses, including: forcible sterilization, medication, or institutionalization/incarceration.

Although the deinstitutionalization movement brought many people back into the public sphere and allowed them to claim greater rights and independence, the reintroduction of people deemed “deviant” into society has also come with prominent psychiatrists advocating to “return to the asylum” and, even more insidiously, Health & Human Services Secretary RFK Jr.’s call for people with substance use disorders to be sent to “wellness farms.”

Being sensitive to eugenic histories requires attention to a eugenic present. . As Jess Whatcott powerfully argues: “all detention is eugenics,” because it seeks to control the reproduction and social lives of detained persons. Therefore, it’s also important to think about all of the ways in which detention takes place in our society, from forced hospitalization (which has been described as “torture” by some experts) to immigrant detention. All of these are examples of contemporary eugenics. Attacks on disabled people and other marginalized groups such as immigrants, racialized minorities, and trans people are far from over.

For these reasons, glibly harkening back to an era of the asylum, whether it romanticizes it or not, is insensitive at best and potentially harmful When I expressed this on Twitter, someone replied that people will always moan about something; however, silencing the voice of Mad and disabled people on this subject reinforces a dangerous precedent of ignoring the violence perpetrated against them on a daily basis.

I still enjoy TTPD despite its complicated relationship to mental illness and histories of asylums and forced medication. But I also think it’s important to engage critically with concepts and imagery invoked by even our favorite artists. To this end, I would call people to also read about eugenic histories and politics, starting with books like Alexandra Minna Stern’s Eugenic Nation and Jess Whatcott’s Menace to the Future. Read books by disabled people and people in detention. Then, take action— call and write your state and federal representatives about the rights and well-being of people detained in prisons, mental health institutions, immigrant detention centers, and other inhumane forms of confinement.

We can walk and chew gum here— we can enjoy the beautiful artistry behind TTPD, and still recognize that it doesn’t do enough to confront the institutionalization and detention that we must actively work to dismantle. This tortured poet hopes that on TTPD’s birthday, we can do both.