# Dean Spade Born May 12, 1977 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. American trans activist, law professor, and writer who **founded the [[Sylvia Rivera Law Project]] in 2002** and has spent the subsequent two decades building organizational and theoretical infrastructure for what he terms **"abolitionist trans politics"** — an explicitly anti-carceral, anti-assimilationist, mutual-aid-focused alternative to the marriage-equality-and-hate-crimes-legislation framework that has dominated mainstream LGBTQ politics. ## Sylvia Rivera Law Project Spade founded **SRLP** in 2002 in New York City as a free-legal-services organization for low-income transgender, intersex, and gender-nonconforming New Yorkers — explicitly named for [[Sylvia Rivera]] and organized around her political commitments. SRLP was deliberately structured as a **non-hierarchical workers' collective** with no executive director, an organizational form Spade has continued to argue for as a model for movement-lawyering generally. ## Academic and Theoretical Work After several years at SRLP, Spade transitioned to law-school teaching: - **Williams Institute Fellow** (UCLA School of Law, 2009-2010) - **Visiting professor**, Harvard Law School (2011-2012) - **Professor of Law**, Seattle University School of Law (2012-present) **Major books:** - ***Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law*** (2011, revised 2015) — Spade's foundational theoretical work. Argues that the mainstream LGBTQ legal-rights strategy — focused on anti-discrimination law, hate-crimes legislation, and marriage equality — has systematically failed to address the structural systems (welfare, immigration, prisons, healthcare, child welfare) that produce the worst outcomes for low-income trans people, particularly trans people of color. The book is now one of the most-assigned texts in critical trans-studies and movement-lawyering curricula - ***Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next)*** (2020) — published during the COVID pandemic, expanded the mutual-aid framework beyond trans-specific contexts. Became a *New York Times* bestseller and one of the most-cited contemporary American books on the political theory of mutual-aid practice ## The Abolitionist Trans Politics Frame Spade's distinctive theoretical contribution is the **"administrative violence" frame** — that the most damaging contemporary anti-trans violence comes not from the criminal-law system the mainstream LGBTQ movement has prioritized addressing (e.g., through hate-crimes laws), but from administrative systems (welfare, housing, healthcare, immigration, child welfare) that produce slow attritional violence against trans people through bureaucratic exclusion. The frame has become one of the most-cited analyses in contemporary trans-political-organizing theory. ## Place in the Vault Spade is the **leading theoretical voice** of the contemporary abolitionist-mutual-aid-focused wing of the [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] — the trans-political tradition that operates in deliberate counterpoint to the marriage-equality-and-electoral-politics-focused wing represented by organizations like [[Human Rights Campaign]]. His work, alongside that of academic and movement collaborators, has shaped the post-2015 generation of trans-rights organizing in distinctive directions. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Sylvia Rivera Law Project]] - [[Sylvia Rivera]]