I lost an argument the other day. It wasn’t one of those arguments that you lose because you didn’t care or because you didn’t try. It wasn’t an argument that you lose for a lack of articulation or for an inability to make others see what you see. It was the sort of argument that you lose simply because the law wasn’t on your side. That’s a difficult loss to take, and trying to sleep that night, exhausted and alert, as if shouting as loud as I could in an attempt to locate silence, I knew it was a problem for which I would find a solution only years after the opportunity had passed. Immediately after the argument, I stepped out and took a little walk with my client, a 14 year old girl, just to get her away from all the commotion of the courtroom. We talked about a lot of things, and anticipating conflict ahead, I told her of the principle of charity, to interpret every word spoken in the best possible light, to grant what good she could find, and to always argue tactics over intentions; she smiled and thanked me for helping her to get away from everyone.

Some time ago, a woman stared at me from a plastic chair across a table. We sat in a concrete room, her in an orange jumpsuit, and me in the usual suit and tie; the 4×4 table took up roughly 80% of our allotted space, with the rest adequate only for ingress and egress maneuvers. I tried what every other adult in her life has attempted, but was wholly unable to cut through the actual mental illness, the influence of her peers, whatever residual effects of drug use, and the ignorance of youth, to convince her that those people around her – the people she tells me she hates because they just want to control her and pretend like they know what’s best when she knows perfectly well what’s best – really do want to help her, and they really can help her, but only if she accepts that help. She got out of juvi and ran back to the gang whose insignia is tattooed across her back, where she trades sex for money and drugs, or is used herself as currency; but they also recognize mental illness, and where risperidone is replaced with beatings, eventually, the only solution is a permanent one.

Another solution would be forced medication with non-amphetamines, involuntary commitment, placement in a locked facility of the sort that got a bad name during a time when people seemed to acknowledge the existence of evil, and the occasional necessity for its ranking in order to settle upon the lesser of two. Today, I’m not sure what exactly we’re thinking. There are a few old mainstays when it comes to thoughts about insane asylums; the guy who thinks he’s Abraham Lincoln, the guy who thinks he’s Jesus, the guy who thinks he’s Caesar. They lived within padded walls for the very demonstrable reality that they were not, in fact, who they claimed to be. Today, we take a man who believes he’s a woman, and we give him hormones, silicone implants; we mutilate his body so that he will look like a bad caricature of the woman that he is not, has never been, and will never be. We don’t yet sew on beards, paste artificial moles, supply tophats, and house our country’s many Mr. Lincolns at the white house… but it isn’t entirely clear to me why we should change the word “delusion” to “personal reality” only in some cases and not others. And if we require that men’s bathrooms accept the short-haired, flannel-clad, woman with a chemically induced soul-patch and a silicone replica penis, why don’t we require Graceland to admit that guy down on 40th who sincerely believes himself to be Elvis? He’d certainly be more comfortable there.