Impossible People, Queer Futures: Dean Spade and Critical Trans Politics

Roughly ten years ago, the government changed my name to Charles. Ironically, this closely followed the moment when I'd decided to go by C.J. in an effort to avoid the gender-marker of my unmistakably female birth name. After filing my tax returns, what was presumably a clerical error altered the personal data on file with the IRS. When I attempted to have the mistake corrected and my information regularized, I discovered that the new data had spread to a number of government agencies, including the Social Security Administration. Newly christened in some, but not all contexts, I confronted the acute difficulties of navigating the administrative apparatuses of the state that govern daily life while equipped with an illegible gender and mismatched identity documents. The lethal consequences of these administrative systems for trans people, especially those suffering from multiple vectors of discrimination, is the subject of Dean Spade's Normal Life. As trans activism becomes institutionalized and mainstreamed, channeled into the paths taken by lesbian and gay organizations, Spade asks us to reconsider the costs and benefits of centering social justice work in demands for legal recognition which take the form of inclusion in anti-discrimination acts, hate crimes legislation, marriage recognition, and military service rights. A series of questions surrounding the place of legal work in the context of activism motivate Normal Life, a text that is fundamentally suspicious of the promises made by the law to rectify inequality and remediate damages through its power to punish. In the historical moment in which the dominant institutions of the neoliberal state are offering some degree of legitimation and recognition to trans people, who benefits from incorporation into protected categories and full citizenship, and who is excluded? Does power operate in such a way that modifications to the law actually change the conditions of life faced by those suffering from poverty, employment discrimination, and criminalization? What roles should lawyers play within grassroots organizations, and what risks attend prioritizing the goals of professionals within these groups? As a lawyer, a law professor, and the founder of an important legal aid nonprofit that serves trans people and gender-nonconforming people enduring poverty, Spade's text is marked by a continuous reconsideration of the possibilities and dangers of appeals to the law. Perhaps because the law is slippery, offering the pretense of change while co-opting the language of oppressed groups, processing is the dominant mode of Normal Life's argumentation about legal strategies every step of the way, such that the text embodies a practice that "questions its own effectiveness, engaging in constant reflection and self-evaluation" (19).

Drawing on important work in critical race theory and women of color feminism, Spade argues that claims for legal inclusion do little to impact the actual life chances of most trans people, either by reducing levels of violence towards gender nonconforming subjects or by alleviating the structural conditions that disproportionately consign trans people to lives of poverty, criminalization, and medical neglect. Indeed, such demands take the teeth out of the transformative potential of activism, benefiting only the most privileged trans people at the expense of the most vulnerable members of the community, those whose marginalization is compounded by their immigration status, disability, race, class, and indigeneity. Worse yet, by soliciting the law's recognition, such activism stands to aggravate already terrible conditions by legitimizing institutions that perpetuate racist, heterosexist, xenophobic, and transphobic violence, amplifying their power to punish and control. In equal parts critical and constructive, Normal Life links a manifesto for a transformative politics firmly focused on the needs of the most vulnerable members of the queer and trans communities with a blistering appraisal of the assimilationist strategies of gay and lesbian rights organizations in the context of neoliberalism.

While Spade explicitly intervenes in critical prison studies and critical legal studies, I want to tap Normal Life as a significant contribution to queer theory's turn to futurity, texts that seek out alternate political and social formations that...