I am working to address the impact of the criminal legal system on minorities, especially transgender people who are under attack both through the criminal legal system and through the political system. As a transgender man, I have seen my fair share of transphobia from not only people within my social circles, but through online means as well. Harassment of transgender people by police and by other law enforcement agents continues to be an issue across the United States. Laws are being introduced and put into place in right-wing states to restrict transgender people, especially children, from existing within American society. With the implementation of these laws, it is likely that trans people will be placed in prisons/jails that do not match with their identity. Transgender people are already marginalized, especially Black trans people, and the incarceration rate for my community and those who are inter-sectionally marginalized will find themselves incarcerated and discriminated against by law enforcement at a higher rate than they already are. I hope to make a difference within the criminal legal system by possibly reversing or mitigating the effects of anti-transgender laws and bills being introduced and put into the laws of states across the country, especially for transgender people of color who live in Minnesota where I live. I want to provide transgender people with the respect and dignity they deserve as someone who will be a member of the criminal legal system once I gain my paralegal certificate. I hope to assist transgender people with whatever legal assistance they may need to make sure they are thriving, living freely, and without any harm or discrimination coming to them. Whether that means doing legal research for a hate crime case, or helping with name and sex marker changes through filing paperwork, anything I am able to do to uplift my community in the legal system, especially the criminal legal system, is my goal. I also hope to advocate for transgender people in my position as a paralegal in the future to gain better access to healthcare for transgender people within prison, as gender affirming care is life saving and life changing for everyone who needs it. I am lucky enough to be able to access gender-affirming care as a college student living on a limited income, and that need for life saving care is immensely increased for incarcerated transgender people. Transgender people, no matter their criminal status and if they are incarcerated or not, deserve dignity and respect.

My Barbie Dream House is located in Seattle Washington, in the most beautiful forest you can imagine, surrounded by trees, wildflowers, and a creek running around the perimeter (similar to a moat). A cobblestone bridge stretches over the creek. It looks like a large A-frame cottage, painted in shades of sage and dark green. A stone path leads to a dark oak front door with a silver door knocker shaped like a heart. Inside is similar, a color palette of greens, browns, and other fall colors are major themes with the furniture, paint, cabinets, and other appliances. Mushroom decor is a common theme, as well as strawberries and other nature-themed decor. Plants sprawl from hanging planters, a large monstera plant as a showstopper piece near a green suede couch. The kitchen is equipped with enough culinary tools to make a sous chef amazed, and up a set of dark oak stairs is a large bedroom and a connected bathroom. The bedroom is neutral and green tones, dark green, sage, mocha, and other natural colors to reflect the colors of the forest. A California king-sized bed is against one wall, with a canopy on top of the four spindly posts of the bed. Plants are throughout the bedroom as well, with vines wrapped around hooks on the wall. The bathroom is huge, with a spa tub (the kind with the jets), a separate shower, and double sinks. This Barbie Dream House is exactly what I would want to live in if I was in the Barbie universe.

My mental health is important because it guides how I think, act, and behave. When my mental health is bad, I am not myself. I become tired, sluggish, irritable, and unable to do anything more than get out of bed to eat and go to the bathroom. I dismiss my relationships and isolate myself, and my grades begin to tank as I do not have the energy to go to class or study for exams. My mental health is the core of my motivation to succeed, and I have to continue to maintain my mental wellness so I can be my normal, active, and energetic self. My mental health is important because it makes it easier to form relationships when I am mentally well, and maintaining relationships is smoother and less tumultuous than when I am unwell. Being able to succeed means I must maintain my mental health well so I do not crumple under the pressure of exams, essays, and assignments. I maintain my mental health and wellness in a multitude of ways. The main coping mechanism I use is by crocheting or doing other hobbies that require the use of my hands. Being able to distract myself from stress by focusing on my hands and creating things takes the thoughts of stress away, and fills it with focus for crafts, gaming, writing, and other actions that require a focus and use of my hands. Other ways I cope with stress and maintain my mental wellness are through exercise and breathing patterns. Increasing my heart rate and breathing using patterns such as box breathing helps my body physically move through stress and other triggers that will trigger a mental health decline, and also increases my mental wellness through the results of exercise and the steadiness of my breathing. The third way I keep my mental health in a good place is by reaching out to my support system, including my boyfriend and my two cats, Midnight and Grant. Being able to ask for help or get love from my family helps me to gain comfort and have a place to talk out what is going on in my head, and in return, I can talk though solutions or get physical comfort from the cats when I need it most, especially when I am in a rough spot. My mental health is important because I get to feel like me when I am well, and using coping mechanisms as well as having a support system helps me keep my mental wellness high.

I am a paralegal at a non-profit organization helping LGBTQIA+ people get the assistance they require within the criminal and civil legal systems.

I believe that this text speaks a truth a lot prefer to keep silent: that our generation is experiencing a lot of the same trouble that previous generations went through, but with different contexts. Especially within the context of how Gen Z, my generation, is becoming more open with our gender and sexuality: other generations before us have gone through this entire thing as well with things like Stonewall, the Gay Rights Movement, and the legalization of gay marriage in 2015 after fighting for it for decades upon decades. Our fight is the same as those before us: acceptance and normalization. Our debts are the debts of those before us: student loans, inflation, and greed. Capitalism has been developing over generations, and it all has impacted us in the same ways as before. High gas prices, low wages, unionization, fights for fair wages and better working conditions have repeated themselves generation after generation, but older people refuse to admit that they are the same as we are at our age. We all struggle in the same ways with war, sickness, debt, and every other struggle we have faced. Our generation, however, tends to have more light in us to fight back against the stiffness of the generations before us. We are breaking the mold. We want to be better than this history that keeps repeating.

As a transgender person, I hope to use my career in law to represent those who have historically been underrepresented in professional fields, especially LGBTQIA+ people. I hope to become a paralegal once I am done with my undergraduate degree, and I want to be able to use that position to reach out to my community and provide help in the legal field to those who need it. Whether it be for name and sex marker changes, representation in discrimination cases against employers, or any other topics within the field I hope to work in, I hope to provide the community with the helping hand they may need in their situation. As someone who has gone through the name/sex marker change progress, the help my attorney, who was also in the LGBTQIA+ community, provided to me could not be understated. Being able to be that helping hand for someone else, carrying that care and passion forward, is the main goal I hope to achieve within my career in law. Being a transgender person within a professional field such as law or medicine can be extremely overwhelming, especially for those who are marginalized in other areas as well such as race, class, and disability. I am an autistic trans person, and I hope to be the representation that others look to and say "Wow, that looks like me! I can do that too." Disabled people have been historically targeted in workplaces for asking for accommodations, and being unable to process tasks in the same way as neurotypical or abled-bodied people, and we deserve role models in the medical and law fields who can show us that we can do anything. My role model in the field of policy analysis, for example, is Leigh Finke, Minnesota's first transgender representative in the State House. Her story inspires me to move forward with my career in law, and I want to be that person for my family, peers, and my community as well. In short, being able to provide representation for the underdog, as well as hopefully working in a sector where I can help my community most through legal advocacy, is what I strive for in my future law career. I want to be the role model I did not have as a little kid, still learning who I was and how I fit in my body. I want to be the person people turn to when they need legal help, so I can give them a hand. I want to represent and be an asset to my communities where we need it most.

My name is Ash, and I want to be the role model I did not have as a child. I am a transgender/non-binary and queer, I am a triplet, a cat parent, a crochet enthusiast, a music buff, and the world's worst math learner. I currently study Sociology of Law, Criminology and Justice, but plan to get a Paralegal certificate and hopefully attend law school in the far future. I first knew I was different from other assigned female at-birth kids when I was in elementary school. I was a "tomboy," I surrounded myself with hobbies that were considered abnormal for a little girl, I hung out with my brother's friends more than my sister's, and overall I was just...different. When I was in middle school I discovered what being transgender and queer meant, and everything clicked. I had finally found the words that matched what had been in my heart all along. I found my name and started testing different pronoun sets, and my friends were supportive of this change. But, my parents were less so, especially my mom. I never grew up watching or listening to queer or transgender adults in specialized fields or even on social media. Not being able to see people who identified with my struggle and with my own identity made me feel like I could not be someone who went into a field like engineering, law, or science. Especially as an assigned female at-birth person, that extra layer of marginality makes planning to go into an assigned male at-birth-dominated field that much more intimidating. But, I want to be the role model I did not have. I want to earn my Bachelor's degree, go on to gain my post-graduate certificate, and work with transgender-affirming attorneys to help transgender and queer people fight for their rights and to have their identities confirmed. As someone who went through the legal system and had their name changed, the process can be scary and confusing for someone who is attempting to navigate it on their own. My attorney was the inspiration for me to go into law and do the job she does: help transgender people and queer people validate themselves via name changes, gender markers, and policy changes on a city and state level. My experiences being invalidated as a child, being outed, harassed and bullied, any kid who identifies with me should not have to go through the hate and the harm of not being accepted socially or on a personal level. I want to fulfill my dream so that kids who identify with the LGBTQ+ community have the chance to see someone like them in the law field, so they can think, "Oh! I can do that too!"

If I had to choose only one, I would choose "Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration" by Reuben Johnathan Miller. This book was one I had to read for class, but it deeply impacted my thoughts on how mass incarceration affects the daily lives of not only the people who have been incarcerated and released but their community and family members as well. This book is laid out like multiple short stories of people who Miller has interviewed and interacted with, including his brother. These interviews and stories that Miller illustrates in his book range from heart-wrenching to hopeful, but tend to focus on the effects that formerly incarcerated people, especially Black formerly incarcerated people, face once they are released from jail or prison. Housing rejections, employment rejections, social benefits limited, and no community support all lead to what is called the "afterlife of incarceration" that former inmates ace as a direct result of mass incarceration and punishment. This book truly opened my eyes to see a different perspective on how race, mass incarceration, and the current political, social, and legal climates all interact to form this monster that is the afterlife of mass incarceration. Families are separated, children are unable to be supported by their parents, formerly incarcerated people are left with no support system when they leave jail or prison, and a lot of people who are unaffected by this afterlife (myself included) need to read this book and open their eyes to acknowledge that the mass incarceration system is not built for rehabilitation and reentry. It is only built for punishment before, during, and after release.

As a kid growing up, I spent a lot of time with my extended family. Cabin trips, Christmas, holidays, you name it, I was there with my cousins and extended family. My cousin Samantha, affectionately known as Sam, was my role model. Every time we were together I was her mini, following her around and spending as much time with her as I could. After Sam graduated high school, none of my family heard from her super often. The only news I got of her was through my dad, who got his information through the trickle-down of my aunts, cousins, and other relatives. I still remember when my dad first mentioned she was hanging around people who used meth. The first time he mentioned it was due to my asking about her well-being, as I had not heard from her in years at the time. Then, in July 2017, my parents sat me down and told me about her first arrest. She had started using, and that had led to her and other meth users holding a pregnant woman at gunpoint due to a deal gone wrong. My whole world felt like it had flipped upside down. This woman who I had grown up with and looked up to was willing to hurt a vulnerable person over a substance, and that shocked me. She did not spend long in jail from what I heard, and over the years since, has been arrested several times. The last time I saw Sam was in 2018 when our grandmother died. She had been clean for a couple of months, but not more than a year later, she had been caught using again. Constantly hearing about how she had tried to get clean but fell back into the habit and stayed with the people who enabled her, hurt deep. A year ago, I had tried to friend her on Facebook, but I immediately received backlash from both of my parents, telling me she was going to ask me for money or grift me in some way, as she had done to other family members. The way her drug use changed my view on relationships is that I learned to be wary of my cousin and those around her. Even if she had reached out to me for help, I would have been criticized by my family, immediate and extended, for helping. My relationship with her is nonexistent now, and comparing it to the relationship we used to have is black and white. Her struggles changed how I view people who are addicted to drugs. I feel sympathy but also hurt. What those with addiction may not know is how it is affecting people outside of their immediate family. I do not blame those who are addicted to substances for being addicted, but I have learned that accountability does not shy away solely because of a struggle. Her addiction along with my own experiences has pushed me to become involved in law, so I can try to get help on a policy and legal level for those who are addicted to substances so they do not commit or re-commit violent crimes like my cousin did. I want to help and reduce harm with the career I take, not exacerbate it.

The characteristic I value most in myself is my conviction. I have not always been firm in my personal and professional beliefs, many to please other people, but I have grown into a person who is able to stick up for what they believe in and will not abandon those beliefs even if it means losing friends, partners, or other opportunities in my life. Especially when it comes to acceptance of others, I do not want to surround myself with people who are bigoted and do not respect others for who they are. I will gladly argue and debate with people who wish to push back against my conviction, and I will present the best argument I can to support my beliefs. As a queer and transgender individual, I refuse to allow people to walk over me to support a bigoted or hateful agenda. I want to solely be a person that people come to so they know they have a strong person in their corner who will fight to the bitter end to support them and provide a shoulder to lean on. Having this quality in my life and within my personality will help me in my life's journey because I want to become a lawyer and advocate for people who are underrepresented within today's society. Specifically, I want to be an advocate for queer people in Minnesota, especially my BIPOC siblings. I can use my conviction to argue for policies that put protections into place against discrimination and hate crimes towards the queer and trans community. I can use my conviction to argue in a court of law or a political floor for the need of gender affirming healthcare. I will use my voice and the confidence I have in my beliefs and opinions to help those who do not have a voice in our legal system. I love my conviction because it makes me unique. I have the fire in me to stick up for others even when I do not feel represented. I have the conviction to wake up every morning, decide I want to do good, and hopefully one day I will be able to use that conviction to provide queer and trans people the care, healthcare, love, support and protection we deserve. I believe with all my heart that I can use my conviction to help people and to also boost myself up as a lawyer through my actions, words, and strength. I have conviction and I value that immensely in my life, and hopefully it will carry with me into my career and future life events as well.

As a queer person in this ever tumultuous social and political climate, I wish to see change in the form of advocacy. Whether it be social, political, or legal advocacy, I wish to see more people step up to the plate to be the voice of those whoa re underrepresented, taken advantage of, and harmed by the legislations being drafted and put into place by people who want to get rid of everyone who is an "other." I know that the end of any forms of bigotry and discrimination is an almost impossible task in the short term, but I wish to see change in the way queer and trans people are treated in both a casual and a legal sense, especially BIPOC and other majorly underrepresented groups of queer and trans people. As I go through my education, I hope to be a person who is majorly involved in advocacy for queer people on a legislative scale, pushing policies that protect the community and also keep policies and laws in place that keep protection for my community and keep anti-discriminatory actions in place. I want to make hate crimes a felony in every single state, and create programs for queer people to find a community locally, as well as those who have an interest in criminal justice and law to find peers who are motivated for the same career goals and social causes. I hope to see a change in the way people treat people who are different than them in any way, whether that be race, sexuality, religion, gender, or any other identity. I hope to see more learning and understanding from the majority (white people, cis people, straight people, etc.) of the hardships that minority groups have endured in history and work hard to decolonize, mature, and treat others with respect. I hope to see the Indigenous people in the U.S. gain land back and I hope to see more antiracist beliefs and literature and teachings be spread, especially to teens. I want to see underrepresented communities thrive and celebrate themselves without fear of harassment, injury, or even a fear of death due to celebrating a "difference" to the majority. I want queer people to be able to celebrate Pride without fear of Christian fundamentalist radicals causing fear and division in their celebration. I want Black communities to be able to exist peacefully without threat of micro-aggressions, blatant racism, bigotry, and hate. I want Muslim and Jewish communities to be able to pray and celebrate in peace without fear of being shot or their place of worship being vandalized. I want queer kids to be able to go to school and be accepted for who they are instead of being bullied and devalued by students and teachers alike. I want to see change in the way people treat each other, and that starts with advocacy and allyship. Standing up for each other and learning from each other, while understanding we may not always be correct. Being able to be proud of who we are without fear. That is the change I wish to see in the world.

I live boldly and practice bravery through the way I live with pride in myself and my identity as a queer non-binary student. Living my daily life, knowing that if I were to correct someone on my pronouns or try to explain my identity to someone who is being less than understanding, is how I show bravery. I am brave because I am proudly who I am, without letting others disrespect and show harm towards me for that fact. I cannot change who I am and what my identity is, even if someone who is transphobic or homophobic tries their best to give me a reason to. I am who I am, and I am proud of that fact. I am proud of the person I am behind that identity, how I grow and learn as a person. That is how I am brave and bold. I live, and I live every day without apology.

A passion that has made the biggest impact on me and my life is music, more specifically singing. My mom had told me that even since I was a tiny baby I had singer's lungs. I would scream like a siren until I got her attention, and as I grew up, that screaming turned to singing. There are multiple recordings of me as a little kid, before I can even remember, running around the house and singing the songs that used to be played during children's shows on TV. In the car, I'd have my parents play the same CDs on repeat so I could sing along over and over again. As I grew up, I would participate in school musicals, always trying my hardest to get the main role. In high school, I became a member of my high school's honor choir, the Spartan Choir. We had performances every trimester, showcasing out talents to family and friends. I would always try my hardest to show my talent and my passion for singing through the effort I put in. I would try for solos and teach people how to sing the separate parts if they needed help. I would use my voice as a guide for others, and I would try my best to sing as much as I could outside of school to make sure my voice stayed in shape. Then the pandemic hit. I did not sing much since choir was cancelled and I did not have the motivation to continue to sing anymore. That was, until I rediscovered the joy and the release that came with singing along to songs in the car on the way to and from work. Discovering new artists and challenging myself to learn the lyrics, harmonize with the music, and begin to sing for fun again instead of for assignments or school, re-sparked my passion for singing. I am not in choir anymore, and I do not sing for others much, but being able to have a passion I can use to both feel and release emotions is something I should have never taken for granted. If I don't have music playing and if I'm not singing along, it feels like I'm missing something. Singing has given me an outlet to prove to myself that I can improve on something even when I feel like I can not, and a way for me to healthily use my voice to show the emotions I do not normally show to myself and others.

Being a non-binary household with one parent who grew up strict Catholic, and another who grew up in a Christian religious cult, is a difficulty that is hard to put into words. My parents try their best to understand, but my mother in specific always has trouble with it. "I'm mourning the loss of my daughter," she said to me when I legally changed my name, along with, "I just think you're confused. This is confusing." Not being supported by the two people I truly need support from is an awful feeling. My family does not put in much effort to fully accept me for who I am, still using my old name, the wrong gender descriptors and pronouns when they are talking to me or referencing me when I am not in the conversation. That feeling of hopelessness every time I hear my old name from my parents, even if they correct themselves or apologize, hurts, especially since I know they will continue to make that same "mistake" every time. I am majoring in Sociology of Law and Criminal Justice. I hope to graduate and go on to law school at some point after my undergraduate education is finished and become an attorney. I want to become an advocate for people like me, who are gender non-conforming or any other subset of the LGBTQ+ spectrum, and make sure that my people are being protected from discrimination, harmful workplace practices, medical care blockage, and other issues that affect our communities on a local and state level. I would love to work with Minnesota's legislature to work on making sure protections for LGBTQ+ individuals are always in place, and that our human rights are not being neglected on a widespread level. I hope to make an impact on the LGBTQ+ community by becoming an advocate for change and protection of our rights through the legal system that has historically been against people like us, especially our BIPOC siblings. I want to be the person that helps spark the changes in government on a local and state level, because the impact state and local legislatures have on a community is underestimated. I also hope to, at some point, help fund a scholarship like this one where I can help LGBTQ+ youth who want to go into law, criminal justice, or some type of political field where we are immensely underrepresented, to thrive and not have to worry as much about the financial burden of undergraduate education.