1/22 - Dean Spade Talk
Consolidating the Gendered Citizen: Trans Survival, Bureaucratic Power, and the War on Terror
Dean Spade, University of California – Los Angeles Law School
Monday, January 22, 2007
B10 Ford Hall
3:15-3:30pm Refreshments
3:30-5:00pm Talk
For more information, call Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at (612) 624-6006.
As an increasingly institutionalized transgender rights movement has emerged in the last 15 years, legal interventions regarding transgender equality have been framed in ways that mirror the equality paradigm used in the lesbian and gay legal struggles. The favored interventions have been anti-discrimination laws that primarily focus on employment, and hate crimes laws aimed at increasing awareness or punishment of non-state violence against transgender people. Are the interventions actually the most significant for transgender survival and increased political participation? This colloquium will examine the fate of transgender people at the hands of the administrative state, suggesting that the most significant barriers to survival actually take place in the realms untouched by the traditional gay rights movement interventions, such as identity documentation, sex segregation, and trans health care coverage.
Dean Spade is currently a law teaching fellow at the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School. In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a collective non-profit providing free legal assistance to transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming people facing poverty and racism. Dean's writing has appeared in the Berkeley Women's Law Journal, the Georgetown Journal of Gender and Law, the Widener Law Review and several anthologies, including the recently released "Nobody Passes" (ed. Sycamore) and "Transgender Rights" (ed. Currah).