Critical Trans Solidarity

Abstract

Dean Spade's Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, Brooklyn, NY: South End Press, 2011Dean Spade's Normal Life questions the utility for activism of the legal reform strategies espoused by lesbian and rights organizations (68). But Normal Life does not simply divide trans* from lesbian and gay activism. Spade's trans is notable for its indebtedness (160) to woman of color feminist demands for multiple-axis (Crenshaw 1989), intersectional politics in response to systemic oppression. In keeping with this tradition, Spade's trans are composed of a set of ground-up (222-24), process-oriented (161) political strategies for building self-reflexive queer and antiracist social movements. As such, we think Normal Life has much to say about the promises and perils of solidarity.As a staff organizer and a volunteer activist in higher education unions, we have an affinity for the term solidarity. Solidarity! is a rallying cry, a performative declaration of collective power in response to oppression. Ideally, this declaration is predicated on an inspirational voluntary acceptance of communal risk. But in our experience, the cry solidarity! is also an effective tool of secondary marginalization (Cohen 1999; Phelan 2001). Here solidarity! is an homogenizing demand, often directed at women and queer people of color, to wait one's turn as a necessary sacrifice for the goals of a broader movement (Chavez 2009; Reddy 2008). Such demands constitute a continuous burden on already more marginalized members to sacrifice their particular goals as the only hope for achieving any kind of collective victory, as in We need to focus on wages; if we win this contract, then in four years we can try for a stronger grievance procedure.Normal Life offers compelling examples of this kind of solidarity, including LGB rights movement advocacy for the decriminalization of sodomy and the passage of sexual-orientation inclusive hate crime laws (124). The problem with these political teloi is not only that they fail to effectively support those people (including LGBT people) who are most negatively affected by the U.S. criminal justice system. Rather, these particular efforts at legal reform affirmatively strengthen institutions that work disproportionate violence on the lives and bodies of trans* people in the United States (125). By demonstrating that accepting complicity with institutions of systemic oppression can never be a neutral decision along the way to a universal rights politics, Spade helps differentiate among just and unjust solidarities, performed on and at the relative margins of contemporary movements for racial, gender, economic, and sexual justice. To act justly in solidarity, movements should maintain suspicion of the seductive call of reform that may improve the lives of an elite majority or minority, while further strengthening the oppression of those who might stand to benefit the most from more difficult, dangerous, long-term efforts at systemic change.Past reviews of Normal Life have characterized Spades critical trans politics more and less favorably as uncompromising (Quinones 2012), an all-or-nothing approach that rejects LGB legal reform tactics entirely and so fails to acknowledge the ways in which movements for rights and equality have helped to advance critical trans (Levi and Shay 2012). …