dean spade's normal life: administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law discusses the contemporary state of trans politics. it argues that trans politics is stifled by its attachment to neoliberal notions of equality, and seeks to articulate an alternative liberation movement that avoids the pitfalls of contemporary queer organizing.
while i enjoyed the book, it unfortunately did feel as though it was treading on overly paved ground. spade wears his inspirations (angela davis, kimberle crenshaw, michel foucault, michael warner) on his sleeve, but doesn't add much to their analyses aside from applying it specifically to trans politics. the value of the intersectional theorists that spade draws from is that they used intersectionality to complicate existing frameworks for racism and sexism by analyzing the specific circumstances produced by their intersection and how understandings of racism and sexism alone could not sufficiently theorize the experiences of Black women. spade clearly wants to make a similar intervention (as noted by the subtitle and organizing principle of "critical trans politics"), but his writing risks straightforwardly extrapolating existing frameworks rather than examining how trans liberation can inform critical theory.
summary
the primary goal of the book is twofold: first, to analyze and critique the goals of mainstream trans advocacy organizations, and second, to suggest an alternative mode of organizing politics based on those shortcomings.
spade argues that contemporary trans liberation movements have focused too heavily on legal reform as a mode of addressing systemic inequality. he argues specifically that trans liberation is increasingly focused on the passage of anti-discrimination and hate crime legislation as a remedy to the discrimination and violence directed at trans people. drawing on the work of alan freeman, spade argues that this focus on legal reform theorizes anti-trans violence as primarily conducted by individual perpetrators and targeting individual victims. this approach is ineffective because it fails to analyze systemic inequality. empirically, the passage of anti-discrimination and hate crime legislation has not meaningfully reduced the rates of violence directed at other populations (e.g., Black and brown or disabled communities). it is similarly unlikely to meaningfully address the structural violence that trans people face.
instead, trans liberation movements should begin with an understanding of power not merely as an act of violence from one individual to another, but also (as foucault argues) as disciplinary and population-management power. disciplinary power is the operation of norms that produce ideas about types of people and proper ways to be, and population-management power describes the arrangement and distribution of life chances across populations.
therefore, any movement that seeks to materially improve the lives of trans people must be sensitive to how disciplinary and population-management power operate to produce trans oppression. spade specifically points to three realms in which gender classifications reproduce structural violence against trans people: identity documentation, sex-segregated facilities, and access to health care.
spade is particularly strong in chapter four, where he discusses the real-world implications of identity documentation, sex-segregated facilities, and health care access, and their relevance to trans organizing. he concretizes anti-trans violence and argues that legal reform is necessary but insufficient. as a lawyer, spade is particularly well-positioned to discuss how to productively engage with legal structures in ways that do not reinforce state violence or rely on simplistic perpetrator/victim dyads.
finally, spade discusses the practical implications for what trans organizing should look like in the status quo. he argues that the advent of neoliberalism produced a strong dependence on charitable organizations to fill in for social services previously provided by the state, accompanied by a dependence by charitable organizations on donations from private corporations and foundations. practically, this has led to the interests of the wealthy dominating the landscape of social services, manifesting in the prioritization of charitable giving over social transformation as the main focus of alleviating transphobic violence, and the running of charitable organizations as businesses over charity.
spade's corrective for this is centered around the "four pillars" described by the miami worker's center:
The Four Pillars that MWC describe are the Pillar of Policy, the Pillar of Consciousness, the Pillar of Service, and the Pillar of Power. The Pillar of Policy includes work that changes policies and institutions using legislative and institutional strategies, with concrete gains and benchmarks for progress. The Pillar of Consciousness includes work that aims to shift political paradigms and alter public opinion and consciousness, including media advocacy work, the creation of independent media, and public education work. The Pillar of Service encompasses work that directly serves vulnerable people and helps stabilize their lives and promote their survival, including work that provides critical services like food, legal help, medical care, and mental health support. Finally, the Pillar of Power is about achieving autonomous community power by building a base and developing leadership: building membership organizations of a large scale and influence (quantity) and developing the depth and capacity of grassroots leadership (quality).
— Dean Spade, Normal Life, p. 180
as an example, spade considers the role of legal work in trans organizing. while he has been critical of the sole focus on legal reform, he does not advocate total withdrawal from legal structures (in fact, he works as a lawyer himself). rather, he argues that legal reform is one part of a larger strategy, and must center vulnerable populations. spade applauds a variety of grassroots organizations for their ability to mobilize the four pillars to focus on social transformation rather than assimilation and ability to illuminate what social justice might look like beyond simple reform.
critique
when reading the book, i continually found myself coming back to the same question: what is this book trying to do? it sits in an awkward middle spot where it struggles to find its own identity beyond being a straightforward application of existing critical theory frameworks to trans politics, but simultaneously is no more accessible than the original works it draws from.
i do doubt that the book wants to simply be a summary of other works. spade specifically wants to articulate what the titular "critical trans politics" might look like (a term that, as far as i can tell, he coined himself). the book does not market itself as an introduction to critical race theory or queer theory, and (in my opinion) is about as accessible a text as works that tread similar ground, like the trouble with normal by michael warner or abolition. feminism. now by angela davis. while it may serve as a perfectly passable summary of those other works, it seems to me that the book is trying to go beyond that.
so what does the book bring to the conversation? what is uniquely "spadean", so to speak, about the book? unfortunately, i don't think it offers much beyond a straightforward application of existing critical theory frameworks. for example, chapter two draws very heavily on the work of alan freeman's critique of the "perpetrator perspective" in criminal law. freeman writes extensively of the failures of legal reform in addressing systemic racism, and spade reiterates the argument and concludes that freeman's analysis critiques legal reform as a solution to systemic inequality in general, and therefore extrapolates that critical trans politics cannot rely solely on legal reform.
there is nothing per se offensive about this, but it does feel overly derivative. a careful reader of freeman could easily notice that, while he discusses his critiques in the context of race, they do apply to legal reform writ large. the book therefore does not offer much to somebody already immersed in the field, as spade's extensions to existing theory are all relatively straightforward.
this left me with a lingering feeling that the "critical trans politics" that spade is trying to articulate feels more like "critical race theory" with "trans politics" substituted in. throughout the book, he continually reiterates arguments from other authors and simply extrapolates them to contemporary trans liberation movements. one is left with the impression that there is very little uniquely trans about critical trans politics. i would have welcomed a more in-depth discussion about the specificity of the trans experience, as well as a discussion of both how an extrapolation of existing frameworks may either succeed or fail when applied to trans liberation specifically. i'm not necessarily saying spade needs to write an in-depth critique of the afropessimist ruse of analogy, but some kind of discussion about whether one even can easily extend frameworks built for analyzing race to analyzing trans oppression would have gone a long way to making the book feel less derivative. one sentence in particular stood out to me as exemplary of this problem:
As Alan Freeman's description of the perpetrator perspective explains, the law's understanding of the function of racism (and, we can extrapolate, other forms of control and maldistribution) is extremely narrow: a violation can only be found when the formula of intentional, individual discrimination is met.
— Dean Spade, Normal Life, p. 122
it's precisely this "extrapolation" that i think is problematic in spade's work. spade seems to assume that the underlying mechanisms of oppression coincide. racism and trans oppression both operate through disciplinary and population-management power, and thus, critical frameworks that analyze the mechanisms of racism are parallel to and can easily be applied to analyze the mechanisms of transphobia.
my concern is that in the cross-application of a framework, historical specificity is lost. intersectionality was radical precisely because it argued that the mechanism for racism and the mechanism for sexism were distinct and the mechanism for their intersection was more distinct still. misogynoir is not simply the sum of misogyny and racism. the book would feel much more substantial if spade used transphobia to complicate critical race theory and extend on it, the way intersectionality complicated both antiracism and feminism. unfortunately, the book trends toward the idea that all oppressions share common technologies. this is not necessarily an indefensible position, but it does feel at conflict with spade's strong commitment to intersectionality because of its emphasis of the historical specificity of oppressions. intersectionality resists the idea that "racism is like sexism but for race instead of gender" (or vice versa), and i doubt spade would explicitly state so if asked, but normal life unfortunately tends to read like "transphobia is like racism but for trans people". the fundamental issue is that spade does reasonably discuss how critical race theory can inform trans politics, but never how trans politics can inform critical race theory.
this does appear to be something spade wants to do. for example, he writes:
We need to conceptualize the ways that population-level interventions — the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and the gutting of welfare and Medicaid programs — interact with regimes of gender classification and enforcement and utilize gender as a technology of control. We must examine how racism, sexism, capitalism, xenophobia, settler colonialism, and ableism combine to produce and sustain these violent systems of distribution while we simultaneously explore the specific vulnerabilities of trans populations in these systems.
— Dean Spade, Normal Life, p. 161
and yet the book dedicates very little time to this project. as previously mentioned, spade is strongest in chapter four. a substantial part of the chapter is dedicated to exploring the idea that many administrative systems rely on a coherent gender classification, and that trans people experience violence because of the difficulty in classifying them. many different systems will have different requirements for changing one's gender marker (or perhaps no provisions at all), not to mention non-binary people, for whom gender markers (when this book was released in 2011) were essentially unconsidered. spade argues convincingly that trans organizing must be careful not to reaffirm administrative systems or to unwittingly invest in oppressive legal structures, yet misses the opportunity to re-evaluate the frameworks he extrapolates from.
in the very last paragraph of normal life, spade writes that
We are invited to demand that trans people are "human" when "human" is still defined through norms of race, indigeneity, gender, ability, and immigration status that actually limit the invitation to a very small part of the trans population. We must build a critical trans politics that refuses these invitations and that boldly resists the regimes of abandonment and imprisonment that neoliberalism requires.
— Dean Spade, Normal Life, p. 223 - 224
this is a powerful call that i wish felt more earned.