Day: March 26, 2018

In the essay What’s Wrong With Rights?, Dean Spade articulates systematic failures that prevent trans-identifying individuals from receiving equal treatment under the law and equal rights. In law reform, this takes the lack of representation and care with regards to trans bodies within the legal system making any potential reforms ineffective. This is because that, while the intent of LGBTQ-inclusive laws is to bring awareness to discriminatory crimes that regularly occur, there are too many societal and racial intersections that involve society’s awareness of trans bodies for it to be considered effective. Law reform must come hand-in-hand with an understanding society with an accompanying inclusiveness outside of legal matters.

With regards to hate crime laws, Spade argues that one of the issues with dealing with hate crimes is the oversimplification of how to process said crimes through our current legal system. He says that this results in thinking that “the criminal punishment system is the proper way to solve [hate crimes]” (44). Because there are many systematic flaws that disadvantage marginalized groups through the justice system (an example being the War on Drugs, which intersects with racial discrimination), strengthening hate crime laws to fit around the legal system reinforces the systematic shortcomings.

REFERENCE

“What’s Wrong with Rights?”, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, Dean Spade

 

Law reform projects, while often well intentioned, are unable to protect the ‘more vulnerable’ people in the trans community, or even the majority of trans folks. While it can be true that the more privileged (read middle-upper class white trans folks) many see some level of benefit from the inclusion of nondiscrimination laws, these laws fail to account for systemic oppression and multiple factors of oppression such as race, sex, class, etc. Furthermore, these laws only add to the arsenal of those systems which perpetuate systemic oppression and that are the largest perpetrators themselves of discriminatory violence. As Dean Spade wrote in Chapter 2 of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, “Since the criminal punishment system itself is a significant source of racialized-gendered violence, increasing its resources and punishment capacity will not reduce violence against trans people.” [1] If real change were to happen, expanding the power of the police and of the criminal justice system is not the place to start.

[1] Spade, D. (2015). Normal life administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

In Dean Spade’s essay, he identifies several shortcomings of current anti-discrimination and hate crime law reforms. There is hope that these laws will benefit people within marginalized groups, but there are many limitations to current law reforms. Errors of anti-discrimination laws include the false notions of equality or fairness with the new law reforms because oppression and discrimination of numerous identities (Spade, 2015, p.43). Spade claims that “the perpetrator perspective” obscures the historical framework of systemic prejudice against people of color. For example, these anti-discrimination law reforms theoretically end racism, but in reality enhance color-blindness. Additionally, Spade (2015) claims that hate crime law reforms oversimplify hate crimes and discount transphobia in prison systems. For example, Spade asserts that the prison system targets people these hate crime law reforms are supposed to protect and reinforces transphobia even though it claims to be more inclusive (Spade, 2015, p. 47).

Spade, D. (2015). Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. London, England: Duke University Press.

When reflecting on the flaws of the legal protection of transgender people, Spade uses Alan Freeman’s term, “perpetrator perspective,” which seeks to address the lack of consideration for systems of oppression when the perpetrator is identified as an individual. While discrimination law bans inequality on the basis of identity, it prevents the factor of acknowledging if that identity has been subject to historical exclusion. Spade gives the example of the dismantling of affirmative action and desegregation programs, which were gutted because of the threat of “inequality” they posed to white people despite their goal of providing equal access to those who are marginalized.

As a result of its singular focus on the perpetrator as an individual, hate crime law possesses similar weaknesses. Spade notes that hate crime laws neither deter perpetrators from committing crimes of hate nor ensure the safety of the people they are intended to protect. Hate crime law has no actual effect on whether or not someone will commit a crime of this nature because it does not attempt to confront the perpetrator’s bias. Spade also asks the question “what does it mean to use criminal punishment—enhancing laws to purportedly address violence against these groups?” (Spade 45-46). The nature of hate crime law is solely punitive and targets groups of people who these laws are supposed to protect.

Spade, Dean.  Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law.  Durham & London: Duke University Press. 2015.

Dean Spade singles out many shortcomings of the anti-discrimination law reform for trans people.  One of these shortcomings is the anti-discrimination laws inability to make an effective change to the exclusion of marginalized groups.  He argues that in the efforts for inclusion in discrimination regime, the campaigns rely heavily on “rhetoric that affirms the legitimacy and fairness of the status quo” (Spade 44). He allows goes on to explain how it is hard to prove discrimination for people who have more complicated relationships to marginality.  For example,  immigrants are particularly difficult to protect against discrimination if they are facing issues of being undocumented, as well as facing discrimination based on race, disability, and gender identity.

One shortcoming in hate crime laws that Dean Spade expresses, is the use of the criminal punishment system as a method to stop transphobia since the “criminal punishment system is the most significant perpetrator of violence against trans people” (Spade 47).  To use the criminal punishment system would thus be backwards and ineffective in battling transphobia.

Citations:

Spade, Dean.  Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law.  Durham & London: Duke University Press. 2015.