Trans-Formative Change
Meaghan Winter interviews Dean Spade, March 2011
America's first openly transgendered law professor on the power of zines, the sacrifice social movements require, and the limits of legal reform.
http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/2405/spade_3_1_11/In 2002, Spade founded Sylvia Rivera Law Project, the first center of its kind, which provides free legal services to low-income transgender and gender non-conforming people and advocates for policy reform that would eliminate gender expression-based discrimination and violence. The center is a collective. It works from the assumption that economic, racial, and gender issues are inseparable.
Spade asks that we rethink equality. As the Assistant Professor of Law at Seattle University, he's the first openly trans tenure-track law professor in the U.S. (or at least the first that he knows of), but he envisions a movement that de-emphasizes lawsuits, the go-to weapon of American political struggles. Legislation, Spade says, can bring change, but it usually just invites more people into the privileged circle within an unjust system. Violence continues for those, like gender nonconformists, not fully accepted as citizens.
