Noted trans activist, attorney, Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) founder and author Dean Spade was in Chicago presenting on his book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. The event took place Sept. 24 in the DePaul Student Center.
Speaking to a packed room, Spade began by contextualizing the very specific issues faced by many trans people, particularly those who lack economic resources and constitute the clients at SRLP. Spade founded the organization in 2002 (it became a collective in 2003), and specifically set up to work with and for trans people. Its primary aim is to address the issues of poverty and severe incarceration that affect low-income transgender communities and transgender communities of color.
Building upon his experiences as a poverty lawyer, Spade provided a historical and cultural context to explain why trans communities are so overwhelmingly faced with these issues. Much of his talk was based on a critique of the prison industrial complex ( PIC ). He explained the cyclical and even generational factors that played a role: “A lot of people who come to SRLP come to us out of youth services, where they’ve faced gender segregation, where they have to go into mandatory systems where that can be forced into the wrong group, leaving them unsafe. They’re also often from households where parents are also affected by systemic discrimination and poverty.”
Most trans people lack a safety net, he said, due to factors involving both their poverty and the discrimination that keeps them out of jobs. They also face harrowing conditions at social-service agencies where they’re constantly monitored for their gender presentation and on other factors like race.
Spade went on to discuss one of the central tenets of mainstream gay and trans organizing around poverty and incarceration, “the notion that you need to change the law” which, he said, has become “the central story the U.S. tells of itself.” The belief that changing laws can achieve parity ignores the fact that this is “essentially an anti-Black narrative [and fosters the illusion] that law redeems anti-black racism, which is now supposedly over.” But, Spade pointed out, anti-Black racism is still rampant.
Spade added that this logic that laws can take care of matters leads to the idea that a change in laws—whether in terms of race, disability or feminism ( as in Title IX ) is the end point, but allows us to ignore the systemic conditions of discrimination that still exist.
Explaining further, Spade went on to critique the notion that anti-discrimination laws solve problems, pointing out that discrimination is hard to prove. Such laws also ignore the fact that simply focusing on single individuals who might be proven to have been racist, for instance, “fails to understand white supremacy.” In other words, “legal equality reforms are window dressing” and they also serve to raise police and the incarceration and criminal legal systems as our protectors. In fact, he emphasized, the biggest danger trans people in particular face “is from our families and the police.”
However, Spade also pointed out that it was and is possible for groups like SRLP to do the work of dismantling oppressive systems without falling into the traps of law and order or legal reform. Key to this were organizations that prioritized members of affected communities as those who also made the decisions, and working in collective structures rather than top-down hierarchies.
In that vein, he said that it was important for movements to not seek validation in mainstream media, to deprofessionalize activism and to “measure our incremental steps.” He concluded by emphasizing that truly transformational work would take time and effort, and “thinking of our work as deep, complicated work. We don’t know what this world we want will look like. How will we be different? We’re consistently told that this is impossible [to build a world outside conventional systems], but globally people are involved in deep, long struggles like decolonization.”
Disclosure: This reporter is a friend and associate of Dean Spade.
Originally published in Windy City Times.