Dean Spade Quotes

In recent years I have become more interested in making the critical ideas that I love teaching and talking about available in more forms, because many people prefer to engage with ideas in films, infographics, comics and other forms that are not traditional books or articles.

One particular debate that I have seen play out again and again is whether trans people who have more traditional gender expressions or who "pass" more should be the ones who are represented. A recent advocacy guide focused on advocating around trans health care access produced by the largest trans advocacy organization in the US instructs readers that advocacy will be more successful if the message is delivered by people who pass as non-trans men and women.

There are sharply different, competing models of what trans advocacy looks like - those that seek to follow the path laid out by the most visible and well-funded lesbian and gay rights organizations in the US and those that seek to use grassroots strategies, center issues of race and poverty, and aim to dismantle harmful institutions and conditions to redistribute life chances.

I am thoughtful about introducing terms that tend to be in circulation primarily in academic circles. "Homonormativity" and "homonationalism" are by no means solely academic terms, and in fact circulate in important ways in many activist circles, but in general I find them to be terms that most people I meet are not familiar with.

Choosing an agenda that supports the apparatuses of racial violence always pays better.

Gender segregated shelters are inaccessible to many trans people, and trans women in particular are often forced to choose between going into a men's shelter where they face enormous danger, or remaining street homeless and facing the violence, harassment, arrest, and exposure risks of that.

We must experiment, fail, and try again, but beginning with a critique of legal reform and a commitment to center the most vulnerable moves us away from some of the most common, obvious pitfalls of neoliberal social movement strategies.

It feels like every person is using their whole brain and heart to figure out these nearly impossible dilemmas about how we do our work, with our principles, in the current conditions. And it feels like the thing we know to be true about working collectively - that we have better ideas together than we do individually.

More conservative advocacy work often encourages portrayals of trans people as people who deserve rights. Deservingness, of course, corresponds to national racial, gender and ability norms.

I often notice how students can gain the capacity to use certain critical methodologies through engaging with very different texts - how a graphic novel about gentrification and an anthology about Hurricane Katrina and a journalistic account of war profiteering might all lead to very similar classroom conversations and critical engagement. I'm particularly interested in this when teaching law students who often resist reading interdisciplinary materials or materials they interpret as too theoretical.

Let's be gentle with ourselves and each other and fierce as we fight oppression.

Military inclusion has never been a central demand from trans populations, who consistently name criminalization, immigration enforcement, poverty and joblessness as top priorities.

The point for me is to create relationships based on deeper and more real notions of trust. So that love becomes defined not by sexual exclusivity, but by actual respect, concern, commitment to act with kind intentions, accountability for our actions, and a desire for mutual growth.

I argue that legal equality has failed resistance movements aimed at transforming material conditions of violence, and that trans activists should take a decidedly different approach.

I wrote Normal Life using concepts that have been helpful to me, and hoping to offer those as accessible tools for thinking differently about the pitfalls trans resistance faces, in particular the temptation to focus on legal equality and the limitations of that approach, and the alternative approaches being taken by racial and economic justice focused trans activists.

I see the concepts spatially in my mind. I see the boxes and corrals and grids into which administrative systems require people, things and information to be fit in order to be legible, made to live, or in order to facilitate death and abandonment.

I strive to find materials that will engage students, expand their capacities as critical readers and thinkers, and feel immediately relevant to their daily lives and future work in court and social service systems.

I am often talking about the ideas collected in Normal Life in contexts that are not academic, or that are full of people who are not primarily engaging as theorists or theory-readers. Being able to make ideas visual, especially critical ideas about movements that can be difficult to hear because of attachments we have to certain national narratives, or because of ways that we see ourselves, is especially useful.

Trans activism in the US has most frequently been grassroots, centered on poverty and criminalization, and often oppositional to the exclusionary "mainstreaming" threads in gay and lesbian politics and feminist politics.