Dean Spade | |
---|---|
Born | 1977 (age 46–47) |
Education | Columbia University (BA) University of California, Los Angeles (JD) |
Occupation(s) | Lawyer, activist, author |
Employer | Seattle University School of Law |
Known for | Transgender activism |
Website | Official website |
Dean Spade (born 1977) is an American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law.
Spade grew up in rural Virginia, the child of a single mother who was sometimes on welfare. [1] At the age of 9, he joined his mother and sister in cleaning houses and offices to make money. Two years later, he started cleaning by himself and moved on to painting summer rentals for additional income. [2] When he was 14 his mother died of lung cancer. Following her death, he lived with two sets of foster parents. [3]
Spade graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and women's studies, [3] and then graduated from the UCLA School of Law in 2001. He has written about seeking a mastectomy for gender-affirming 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. [4]
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. [5] Spade was a staff attorney at SRLP from 2002 to 2006, during which time he presented testimony to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission [6] and helped achieve a major victory for transgender youth in foster care in the Jean Doe v. Bell case. [7] Spade was also involved with the campaign in 2009 to stop Seattle from building a new jail. [8] [9]
The Advocate named Spade one of their "Forty Under 40" in May 2010. [10] Utne Reader named Spade and Tyrone Boucher on their list of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World" in 2009, [11] for their collaborative project Enough: The Personal Politics of Resisting Capitalism. [12]
Spade was the 2009-2010 Haywood Burns Chair at CUNY School of Law, 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 [13] [14] for the article "Documenting Gender". [15] Spade has written extensively about his personal experience as a trans law professor and student. This includes writings on transphobia in higher education as well as the class privilege of being a professor. [16] [17] [18] He has also written about the limitations of the law's ability to address issues of inequity and injustice. [19] [20] His research interests have included 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. [21] 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. [22] [23]
Spade has collaborated extensively in the past, including editing two special issues of Sexuality Research and Social Policy with Paisley Currah [24] and coauthoring a guide to Medical Therapy and Health Maintenance for Transgender Men with Dr. Nick Gorton. [25] Spade has collaborated particularly frequently with sociologist Craig Willse. Their collaborative projects include I Still Think Marriage is the Wrong Goal, [26] 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). [27] 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 . [28]
Spade is Jewish, [29] and has worked closely with the Seattle chapter of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA). [30]
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Paisley Currah is political scientist and author, known for his work on the transgender rights movement. His book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity examines the politics of sex classification in the United States. He is a professor of political science and women's and gender studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was born in Ontario, Canada, received a B.A. from Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario and an M.A and Ph.D. in government from Cornell University. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Bali White is a researcher and writer interested in African, environmental, and gender studies. She is currently a Research Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A trans woman, she is also a community organizer and advocate addressing transgender identity, legal, health care and social concerns at the national, state and local levels. Her research and activist work around transgender advocacy and ballroom community youth has been influential in the field of public health. She previously served on the National Advisory Board for the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health and managed the CDC-funded initiatives for young trans women and MSM in the ballroom community at the Hetrick-Martin Institute.
Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.
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As a Jewish trans activist...
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