Dean Spade Quotes About Violence
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I argue that legal equality has failed resistance movements aimed at transforming material conditions of violence, and that trans activists should take a decidedly different approach.
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Legal reform has significant dangers: changing only the window-dressing of harmful systems but leaving the violence of the systems in tact, failing to provide actual relief for those facing the worst conditions, and legitimizing or expanding systems of harm.
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Choosing an agenda that supports the apparatuses of racial violence always pays better.
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When we approach legal reform work, we can ask questions like: Will this provide actual relief to people facing violence or harm or will it primarily be a symbolic change? Will this divide our constituency by offering relief only to people with certain privileged statuses (such as people with lawful immigration status, people with jobs, married people, etc.)?
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Gender segregated shelters are inaccessible to many trans people, and trans women in particular are often forced to choose between going into a men's shelter where they face enormous danger, or remaining street homeless and facing the violence, harassment, arrest, and exposure risks of that.
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Critical Race Theory offers a critique of how law and certain law reform strategies misunderstand the actual operation of life-shortening state violence, and how that has produced a set of reforms that fail to actually transform material conditions of white supremacy. These critiques redirect our attention to the conditions we aim to transform.
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One of the concepts I was having trouble illustrating was the concept that administrative systems create narrow categories of gender and force people into them in order to get their basic needs met - what I call "administrative violence." I had images of forms with gender boxes and ID cards with gender markers, but I also wanted an image that would capture how basic services like shelters are gender segregated.
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We should understand that in the context of the US, where our legal system is based in settler colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy, changing laws will never sufficiently change the conditions of harm and violence our movements seek to transform.
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