With respect to recent anti-discrimination law reform for trans people, Dean Spade identifies several reasons why anti-discrimination laws are ineffective in actually improving the quality of trans lives. Working off of Alan Freeman’s critique of the perpetrator perspective, Spade notes how the imposed view of discrimination as something which occurs between a perpetrator and a victim completely ignores larger structures of discrimination which have existed in the past and will continue to exist without more powerful reform. Spade argues that anti-discrimination laws cannot address disparities in life conditions “that we know stem from and reflect long term patterns of exclusion and exploitation cannot be understood as ‘violations’ under the discrimination principle, and thus remedies cannot be won” (Spade 43).
With regard to hate crime laws, Spades primary critique is that ultimately these laws do more to reinforce and expand the prison system which so often falsely holds and abuses trans people. Simply put: “Criminal punishment cannot be the method we use to stop transphobia when the criminal punishment system is the most significant perpetrator of violence against trans people” (Spade 47). Spade notes, “Could [the veterans of Stonewall] have imagined that the police would be claimed protectors of queer and trans people against violence, while imprisonment and police brutality were skyrocketing?” (Spade 46). Prison abolitionists argue that prison reform, rather than addressing unfairness and injustice in prisons, more often lead to prison expansion than anything else.
Citations:
Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Durham & London: Duke University Press. 2015.