Another excerpt: “Normal Life” by Dean Spade
Trans resistance is emerging in a context of neoliberal politics where the choice to struggle for nothing more than incorporation into the neoliberal order is the most obvious option. We can translate the pain of having community members murdered every month into more punishing power for the criminal system that targets us. We can fight to have the state declare us equal through anti-discrimination laws, yet watch as the majority of trans people remain unemployed, incapable of getting ID, kept out of social services and health care, and consigned to prisons that guarantee sexual assault and medical neglect. Abandonment and imprisonment remain the offers of neoliberalism for all but a few trans people, yet law reform strategies beckon us to join the neoliberal order. The paths to equality laid out by the “successful” lesbian and gay rights model to which we are assumed to aspire have little to offer us in terms of concrete change to our life chances; what they offer instead is the legitimization and expansion of systems that are killing us.
—Dean Spade. “Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law”
