On Dean Spade
by Skylar P.Â
Dean Spade is a 42 year old transgender author, lawyer, professor and activist. He is Jewish, and he grew up in rural Virginia and had a difficult childhood before eventually graduating from Barnard college. He has a website about himself- http://www.deanspade.net/about/Â
Spade is an Associate Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law. His work includes founding the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and writing his book titled Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law.Â
Normal Life is his takes and critiques on more popular brands of activism and common civil rights demands. Spade talks about addressing actual root issues for the justice of his communities.Â
The Sylvia Rivera Law Project is an important project of his that works to help transgender, gender non-conforming (GNC) and intersex people, as well as people of color. The project offers legal help with immigration, and trans issues like legal name and gender changes on IDs. They also have a Prisoner Advisory Committee to help represent trans people and POC who are over-criminalized, underrepresented and treated unfairly in the criminal justice system.
Dean Spade’s Work
Spade’s work is important because support for and education about transgender people is incredibly lacking in today’s world and in the USA. We are not talked about, despite the fact that we have always been here, and despite how often we are hurt and killed for being who we are. In higher education, in news and media, in historical studies and records we are nowhere to be found. Transgender people are everywhere. At pride parades, in gay clubs, at Rocky Horror showings, yes, but also on the street, in cafes, in churches. We are your passerby, employees, students and professors.Â
It is important work for those of us who are willing and able to make ourselves heard so that we can be treated as human beings because societies all over the world still have a long way to go. When you talk about trans rights people think bathrooms and drivers licenses. They don’t think medical discrimination. They don’t have any idea how trans history is tied intrinsically into colonialism, they don’t know we were erased by the Nazis in WWII, they have no idea how far we have left to go.
 That’s why it’s amazing that a transgender man is a professor and a well-known activist. That’s why it’s amazing to have him brought up in our class.
Spade’s Argument
Spade’s work is a little bit controversial at times. His book Normal Life claims that common ways of civil rights activism are flawed, and will not work for the battle for trans rights. He explores how legal reformations could help, but goes into how the issues aren’t so simple. The oppression of trans people has roots and to pull them up will take more than just the law.Â
Spade claims that gaining legal recognition will ultimately not help trans people, which is a new idea among a group who is fighting to be recognized. He also goes into the problems with the Obama administration, as well as military and prisons being the “battlefields” of trans rights reforms.
His concept in the book revolves around not just fixing surface problems, but dismantling the systems that put trans people in danger in the first place.
(Image description: The image is of Dean Spade in a dark blue high-collar jacket and light blue striped button-down shirt. He is wearing round tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses and his black hair is slicked back on top and shaved on the sides. The photo looks professionally-taken. Source.)
Bibliography and further readingÂ
Spade, Dean. “Resisting Medicine, Re/Modeling Gender” The Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice (formerly Berkeley Women’s Law Journal), 2003
Spade, Dean. “Dean Spade.” www.deanspade.net (accessed 6 Nov. 2019)
Hunger Strikers Handbook http://www.hungerstrikershandbook.org/
Sylvia Rivera Law Project, “SRLP’s Prison Organizing and Advocacy.” 24 Apr. 2018, srlp.org/about/prisoner-advisory-committee
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