I finished Dean Spade’s Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law.

I have been a longtime fan of Dean Spade. At the time when I was just discovering polyamory, his essay, For Lovers and Fighters, had a tremendous impact on my understanding of polyamory. (Highly recommended, by the way, if polyamory interests you at all.) His Barnard talk Trans Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape had a similarly profound effect on how I think about queer/trans politics, and when he spoke at Oberlin earlier this year, I was completely taken with him and he changed the way I think about law reform.

That all having been said, I’ll start off with my criticisms of the book, just to get them out of the way. This is not a long book–at only 230 pages, it weighs in just about half of the length of The Signal and the Noise, which I read in my first week of this project. For that reason I thought that I’d be able to easily finish this book in a single week, but instead it took me two. That’s because this book is surprisingly challenging to get through. Spade’s writing is both articulate and densely academic. Parts of the book feel redundant, which make it a slog to get through.

The book also is not firmly grounded in evidence–or at least not the text itself. It may well be that the endnotes contain papers and studies that explain the conclusions made by the book–I did not read them thoroughly–but the book itself does not make much reference to these studies. E.g,

The War on Drugs changed how drug use is perceived, flooding the culture with racist images of dangerous, violent drug users and dealers. Understandings of drug addiction as a health issue, to the extent that they existed, were replaced by the framing of drug abuse as a criminal issue, with punishments for drug possession increasing significantly. The War on Drugs resulted in massive prison expansion to accommodate a growing mass of drug offenders serving increasingly long sentences.

This is an analysis which rings true to me, but is not–in the text–backed up by studies, statistics, or examples. For this reason, I would not recommend this book to anyone who is not already anti-prison system, somewhat anti-capitalist, and interested in radical queer politics. I do not think that it will be persuasive.

On the other hand, if you are more like me–someone who is already interested in radical queer politics, readily accepts that there are fucked up dynamics of oppression throughout our society, especially in the arena of law and law enforcement–this book may well give you new and challenging perspectives on some issues.

His thesis of the book is very similar to the thesis he gave in his talk at Oberlin, which, were I to distill it to a single sentence would be this: the law reform most LGBT organizations are seeking and achieving is largely symbolic and doing nothing to save queer/trans lives, and is in fact often reinforcing the privilege of those who have it and fortifying institutions (like the prison system), which already disproportionately target queer/trans people.

It is a disheartening thesis and parts of this book are similarly disheartening, starting with the personal stories of trans people endangered by the administrative systems that govern the lives of people–particularly poor people of color–such as prisons, shelters, welfare, DMVs, & al., which systems rely heavily on a strictly binary notion of gender, enforced by one’s ability to procure a legal ID matching one’s own gender presentation. He goes on to deliver devastating indictments of contemporary queer law reform politics and the contemporary system of nonprofit activism.

Regarding law reforms such as hate-crime laws:

For those living in communities not targeted for policing and imprisonment, the criminal punishment system may appear to be a protector and its perceived flaws limited to narrow, explicit inclusions and exclusions. For those lesbian and gay people who live in fear of police harassment and violence, have faced the loss of family members to imprisonment, or are regularly targeted by the juvenile and adult punishment systems, more explicit homophobic inclusion or exclusion in certain aspects of the criminal law may be a small and possibly insignificant demand.

The little ways that gender is being policed and used as a weapon against trans people:

Purportedly banal and uncontroversial changes like the new requirement that gender be listed on plane tickets are emerging based on a cultural logic that gender is fixed and obvious and therefore an easy classification tool for verifying identity.

With respect to gay marriage:

The framing of marriage as the most essential legal need of queer people […] reduces the gay rights agenda to a project of restoring race, class, ability, and immigration status privilege to the most privileged gays and lesbians.

And w/r/t nonprofits:

Activists and scholars have observed a shift in movements from mass-based grassroots strategies of the 1960s and 70s to professionalized, funded, nonprofit formations that are dominant today. By “professionalized” I mean to point out that whereas resistance movements have previously been dominated by membership-based grassroots organizations with little staffing, the last few decades have seen an explosion of nonprofits that have changed movement work and expectations to look more like a career track for people with graduate degrees. These new formations are dominated by norms typical to other professions, including unequal pay scales, poor working conditions for people without race, class, and education privilege, and hierarchical decision-making structures.

and nonprofit funding:

Part of the reason that decision-making power in nonprofits becomes concentrated in the hands of elites is because of the way organizations secure funding. The foundation funding of nonprofits takes the direction of the work out of the hands of the people affected by it and concentrates it on the agendas and time lines of funders, discouraging long-term self-sustaining movements from emerging.

For a little optimism, he does conclude the book with examples of movements that are taking different approaches to trans politics and justice, but overall the book is fairly devastating w/r/t the state of activism today. It is certainly going to change the way I analyze things as positive or not. As I said above, if you’re not already interested in radical trans politics, this book will not persuade you–but if you are, it may give you new perspectives.