The Wake

A basement room in Ford Hall was filled with a crowd of people who looked like they would be attending a talk about transgender rights. By this, of course, I mean people like me had gathered to hear Consolidating the Gendered Citizen: Trans Survival, Bureaucratic Power, and the War on Terror, a lecture put on by the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Department. The tattooed and pierced and poorly dressed bleeding hearts of the University of Minnesota had shown up full force, and it made me sad that the wrong people were going to hear the right message. It had looked as though there were a few stragglers lured in by the promise of free Diet Coke and Oreos, but other than that we all would’ve heard this a thousand times before and no one’s mind would be changed because we’d already had them changed. But I was wrong.

Dean Spade, in addition to having a haircut I’m jealous of, has views on activism and the fight for GLBT rights (well, specifically, the underrepresented T’s - transgender) that most people don’t consider. Dean doesn’t think of equality the way the rest of modern America, or the gay and lesbian movement, does. Instead of trying to change the law, Dean wants to challenge the bureaucracy that holds transgender people down.

In California, the legal defense of “trans-panic” is now illegal. This means that no defendant can say he or she panicked when discovering someone is a transgender and manically killed that person. This is good, but Dean asks the question “Should we be stopping the killing instead?” That is the difference.

His lecture remained interesting somehow, though much of it was discussing the boring minutia of laws and how they vary state to state, such as how remarkably different states handle changing a person’s legal gender. Say that in your state, you have to undergo a surgical operation and have proof from your doctor to change the gender just on your driver’s license. If you went to Oregon, where each case is evaluated by a judge and then a court order is put out to change your listed gender, your gender would legally change as you crossed state lines. You can probably see how this could be a problem.

The War on Terror even managed to get its sticky little moronic hands on the lives of transgender New Yorkers. When lobbying for new legislation on legally changing a person’s gender in New York City, where “once you send them your uterus on a platter, they’ll change your birth certificate,” Dean and his fellow lobbyists presented evidence on the matter and were finally making leeway after two years of work, then were shot down on the basis of risks of terrorism. I suppose the thinking is that we couldn’t track the terrorists if they went around switching genitalia all willy nilly on us. Or worse yet, surgically implanted exploding penises. Just think about it.

What needs to be done, at least in Dean’s opinion, is to make living as a transgender person well, livable. Instead of focusing on, say, punishing prisoners who’ve committed violent crimes, maybe we should try and make it possible for transgender people to get a job, or find government help, or even have access to shelters.