In a graduate seminar on power and privilege, every graduate student was assigned one week to teach a piece of the class. My week, I chose a bill most people have never heard of — and built a 25-minute case for why it matters. This is the presentation, and the honest audit of how I ran the room.
Everyone has been in a room where they had to calculate how much of themselves it was safe to show. This presentation was about what happens when that calculation fails — and the law punishes you for having been visible at all.
The setting was a graduate seminar on how power and privilege operate inside systems: courts, hospitals, schools, workplaces. Graduate students carried an extra requirement — each of us was assigned a date to prepare a portion of the class ourselves. The instructions were specific:
You will choose a current piece of policy/legislation that is either recently in effect or under consideration… The policy/law/ruling must relate to the readings/topic for the week during which you are assigned to present.
You will give a 10- to 15-minute presentation, including… a succinct description of the policy, law, or ruling… an assessment of the policy’s effectiveness… [and] potential DEIB implications of the policy.
Following your presentation, you will facilitate a 10- to 15-minute interactive discussion about the presentation and the readings. The total presentation and discussion should total 25 minutes.
Prior to your discussion date, you must write TWO thoughtful discussion questions to accompany your presentation… Submit your presentation materials and discussion questions via Canvas by noon on the day before your presentation.
Acceptance criteria first, work second. That part I understood well.
The policy I chose
I presented the LGBTQ+ Panic Defense Prohibition Act of 2023 — a bill introduced by Senator Markey in the U.S. Senate and Congressman Pappas in the House. It would amend federal criminal law to prohibit so-called “panic” defenses: a courtroom tactic in which a defendant charged with a violent crime argues that the victim’s real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity explains and excuses the violence.
The tactic is not a freestanding defense. It piggybacks on three legitimate ones — insanity, provocation, and self-defense — and asks a jury to accept that discovering someone’s identity is provocation enough.
The bill itself is short: three sections, one of which is simply Congress’s findings, including the American Bar Association’s call to end the practice and the plain statement that these defenses reinforce “the antiquated notion that LGBTQ lives are worth less than others.”
I opened the deck with a line from the advocate Alok V. that framed everything after it: “Functionally it is criminalized existence. Practically, in frenzy, the dominant group creates specialized laws to penalize minorities.”
The framework: six moves in 25 minutes
- Name the law precisely. Sponsor, chamber, three sections — enough that the room could explain the bill to someone else.
- Show the mechanism. Not “this defense is bad” but how it works: which host defenses it attaches to, and what it asks a jury to believe.
- Test effectiveness — and admit the limits of the data. The defense’s success is genuinely hard to track, because a hung jury and a mitigated sentence do the same quiet damage as an acquittal.
- Warn before harm. One slide carried real cases — people killed, and the defenses their killers raised. I put a visible caution about dehumanizing content on the slide before anyone had to read it.
- Trace the DEIB implications. A theory-of-change diagram: if legislatures pass this, courts get educated, stereotypes lose legal cover, and more people can exist openly without pricing in violence.
- Hand the room the microphone. The syllabus required two discussion questions. I wrote three.
What the data could and couldn’t say
From a public tracker of cases where the defense was raised, I charted 35 outcomes: 5 acquittals, 16 found guilty of the original charge, 12 who pled guilty to a reduced charge, and 2 found guilty of a reduced charge and pardoned.
I was careful to say out loud what the chart could not: 46% “found guilty of the original charge” does not mean the defense fails half the time and is therefore tolerable. The defense does not need to win to do harm. Every time it is raised, it re-argues in public that a victim’s identity was a reasonable trigger for violence. That message lands whether or not the jury buys it.
The week’s assigned reading — research on employee resource groups and allies as voice mechanisms for LGBT employees — gave me the workplace bridge the assignment demanded: the same stereotype threat that suppresses voice in an office is what this defense weaponizes in a courtroom, at the highest possible stakes.
The setback, honestly
Two things I would fix, one small and one not.
The small one is almost funny for someone whose job title contains the word quality: on my own title slide, I swapped two letters in the course’s four-letter prefix. Slide one. The slide I looked at longest. I have run defect triage for years, and I shipped a typo in the largest font of the deck. Root cause: I proofread the content slides five times and the “easy” slide zero times. Familiarity is where review discipline goes to die.
The bigger one is my second discussion question. I asked the room to judge this statement as true or false:
“If you do not support this act, you cannot call yourself an Ally.”
It worked, in the sense that it produced energy. But sitting with it later, I recognized the shape of the question: it is an ultimatum wearing a question mark. In a course about how dominant groups write rules that sort people into worthy and unworthy, I had written a small rule of my own — a loyalty test with two boxes. The reading I had just presented defines allies as people “willing to take action… and move beyond self-regulation of prejudice.” Willingness is invited, not demanded. My third question — does the world have a problem with femininity? — trusted the room to think. The second one told the room what to conclude. If I gave this presentation again, that is the question I would rewrite.
What this had to do with my voice
I am a non-native English speaker. When I present, I correct myself mid-sentence — I have learned to call that negotiating for clarity rather than failing at fluency. It costs something, every time, to keep talking while the room watches you rebuild the sentence.
That is a very small tax compared to the one this bill addresses. But it is the same species of calculation: how much of my real self can be visible here, and what will it cost me? One of the quotes I put on my DEIB slide answers the courtroom version of that question better than I can: “It is not my responsibility to minimize myself to evade violence and scrutiny.”
A law cannot make a room safe. But it can stop a courtroom from formally agreeing that your visibility was the problem. That is the floor, not the ceiling — and we are still legislating the floor.
I’m grateful to the professor who structured this assignment so that graduate students had to facilitate, not just present — the 10 minutes of discussion taught me more about the room than the 15 minutes of slides taught the room about the bill. And to my classmates, who took a true-or-false question and gave back nuance it didn’t deserve.
So let me end with the question I should have asked in the first place, with the ultimatum removed: what does support actually require of an ally — and what have you done lately that went beyond self-regulation?
I’d love to hear your answer.
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