In the historical moment in which the dominant institutions of the neoliberal state are offering some degree of legitimation and recognition to trans people, who benefits from incorporation into protected categories and full citizenship, and who is excluded? Does power operate in such a way that modifications to the law actually change the conditions of life faced by those suffering from poverty, employment discrimination, and criminalization? What roles should lawyers play within grassroots organizations, and what risks attend prioritizing the goals of professionals within these groups? As a lawyer, a law professor, and the founder of an important legal aid nonprofit that serves trans people and gender-nonconforming people enduring poverty, Spade’s text is marked by a continuous reconsideration of the possibilities and dangers of appeals to the law. A series of questions surrounding the place of legal work in the context of activism motivate Normal Life, a text that is fundamentally suspicious of the promises made by the law to rectify inequality and remediate damages through its power to punish. As trans activism becomes institutionalized and mainstreamed, channeled into the paths taken by lesbian and gay organizations, Spade asks us to reconsider the costs and benefits of centering social justice work in demands for legal recognition which take the form of inclusion in anti-discrimination acts, hate crimes legislation, marriage recognition, and military service rights. The lethal consequences of these administrative systems for trans people, especially those suffering from multiple vectors of discrimination, is the subject of Dean Spade’s Normal Life. Newly christened in some, but not all contexts, I confronted the acute difficulties of navigating the administrative apparatuses of the state that govern daily life while equipped with an illegible gender and mismatched identity documents. When I attempted to have the mistake corrected and my information regularized, I discovered that the new data had spread to a number of government agencies, including the Social Security Administration. After filing my tax returns, what was presumably a clerical error altered the personal data on file with the IRS. in an effort to avoid the gender-marker of my unmistakably female birth name. Ironically, this closely followed the moment when I’d decided to go by C.J. Roughly ten years ago, the government changed my name to Charles. Review of Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Law.
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