Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law
Dean Spade is an Assistant Professor at the Seattle University School of Law. In 2002, Spade founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a nonprofit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. For more writing by Dean Spade, see http://www.deanspade.net.
Conclusion: “This Is a Protest, Not a Parade”
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Published:July 2015
This chapter describes some of the emergent grassroots projects working for trans justice, examining how these projects’ demands and strategies differ from the more visible legal recognition projects and why these local, often unfunded initiatives can achieve more to alleviate transphobia than the heavily lauded civil rights “victories” emerging from courts and legislatures. The conclusion provides a view of what a trans politics whose demands—such as prison and border abolition, an end to poverty, and meaningful collective self-determination—far exceed what can be achieved through lawsuits and corporate media coverage looks like in practice on the ground.
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