Dean Spade

Dean Spade (born 1977) is a lawyer, writer, and Associate Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law. In 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective in New York City that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. Spade was a staff attorney at SRLP from 2002 to 2006, during which time he presented testimony to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission^[1] and helped achieve a major victory for transgender youth in foster care in the Jean Doe v. Bell case.^[2] More recently, Spade was involved with the campaign to stop Seattle from building a new jail.^[3][4]

The Advocate named Spade one of their "Forty Under 40" in May 2010.^[5] Utne Reader named Spade and Tyrone Boucher on their list of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World" in 2009,^[6] for their collaborative project Enough: The Personal Politics of Resisting Capitalism.^[7]

Spade was the 2009-2010 Haywood Burns Chair at CUNY Law School, the Williams Institute Law Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law School and Harvard Law School, and was selected to give the 2009-2010 James A. Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School. He received a Jesse Dukeminier Award^[8] for the article "Documenting Gender".^[9] Spade's current research interests include the impact of the War on Terror on transgender rights, the bureaucratization of trans identities, models of non-profit governance in social movements, and the limits of enhanced hate crime penalties.^[10] His first book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, was released in January 2012 from South End Press and nominated for a 2011 Lambda Literary Award in the category of Transgender Nonfiction.^[11][12]

Spade has collaborated extensively in the past, including editing two special issues of Sexuality Research and Social Policy with Paisley Currah ^[13] and coauthoring a guide to Medical Therapy and Health Maintenance for Transgender Men with Dr. Nick Gorton.^[14] Spade has collaborated particularly frequently with sociologist Craig Willse. Their collaborative projects include I Still Think Marriage is the Wrong Goal,^[15] a manifesto and Facebook group. Willse and Spade were also the co-creators of MAKE, "propaganda for activist agitation", a paper zine (1999–2001) and website (2001–2007).^[16] In the past, Spade has written other zines including Piss and Vinegar (2002), telling the story of his transphobic arrest during the 2002 World Economic Forum protests in New York City. Mimi Nguyen interviewed Spade and Willse about the experience in Maximumrocknroll.^[17]

Works

Books

• Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. New York: South End Press. 2011. ISBN 9780896087965. OCLC 601132754. 

Anthologies

• "Out of time: from gay liberation to prison abolition : Building an abolitionist trans & queer movement with everything we've got" (with Morgan Bassichis & Alexander Lee), in Captive Genders : Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, eds Nat Smith & Eric A. Stanley (Oakland, CA : AK Press, 2011.). ISBN 9781849350709. OCLC 669754832.  Missing or empty |title= (help)
• "Fighting to win", in That's Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, ed. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Brooklyn : Soft Skull Press : Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2008.). ISBN 9781593761950. OCLC 182552895.  Missing or empty |title= (help)
• "Compliance is gendered : struggling for gender self-determination in a hostile economy", in Transgender Rights, ed. Paisley Currah (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2006.). ISBN 0-816-64311-3. OCLC 68221085.  Missing or empty |title= (help)
• "Undermining gender regulation", in Nobody Passes : Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, ed. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Emeryville, CA : Seal Press, 2006.). ISBN 9781580051842. OCLC 71285289.  Missing or empty |title= (help)
• Afterword in Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare (1999)

Personal life

Spade grew up in rural Virginia, the child of a single mother who was sometimes on welfare.^[18]

I started cleaning other people's houses around age nine and cleaned offices and houses throughout my childhood with my mom and sister. I got my first cleaning job without my mom when I was eleven and worked cleaning and painting vacant low-quality rental apartments during the summer between sixth and seventh grade.^[19]

At the age of 14, Spade's mother died of lung cancer, and Spade went to live with two sets of foster parents. Spade graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College with a B.A. in political science and women's studies,^[20] and then graduated from the UCLA School of Law in 2001. Spade has written about seeking a mastectomy for sex-reassignment surgery in Los Angeles during this time period, and how the reliance on a mental-health/disability model to gain access to such surgery did not fit a person with a non-binary gender expression.^[21]

Spade identifies as Jewish,^[22] and is a leader of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA).^[23] Spade has written about how a "commitment to wealth redistribution plays out" when receiving a law professor's salary.^[24]

References

External links

• Dean Spade: Seattle University School of Law
• Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights - CUNY School of Law
• Yale Law School - James A. Thomas Lecture - Dean Spade - VIDEO