 So about Dean Spade who will be presenting a lecture entitled fight to win critical trans resistance in scary times. Dean Spade is an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law where he teaches administrative law, poverty law, and law of social movements. Prior to joining the faculty of Seattle University Dean was a Williams Institute law teaching fellow at UCLA Law School and Harvard Law School, teaching classes related to sexual orientation and gender identity law and law and social movements. In 2002 Dean founded the Silvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law project collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming people who are low income and or people of color. The Silvia Rivera Law Project also engages in litigation, policy reform, and public education on issues affecting these communities and operates in the collective governance model, prioritizing the governance and leadership of trans, intersex, and gender non-conforming people. From 1998 to 2006 Dean co-edited the paper and online magazine Make. Dean is currently the co-editor of the online journal Enough which focuses on the personal politics of wealth distribution. As you know Dean is very very busy person and we are so honored to have him here at Highline today so can y'all please give Dean Spada warm welcome. Thank you for that generous introduction. I'm super glad to be at Highline for the first time. I feel so lucky to be invited. Very grateful to Doris and Dominique and everybody who's been working on this week of events which sounds like it's been pretty fabulous. It sounds like good work happening on this campus. So yeah I want to just spend this time thinking a little bit with you all about I think a lot of the questions that we're all struggling with about kind of like these really intense times we're living in where the world really locally and all over feels like it's on fire and literally is on fire and underwater and where so many people we love are in danger and where we feel different kinds of danger really getting close to different communities in in old and new ways and there's a lot of questions that just about like kind of how do we think about what's going on what do we do how does how do we think about the connection between like what queer and trans politics often gets framed as and like the other urgent things going on in our lives and how does that politics get like lived and and done as resistant by our social movements so that's a kind of some of the themes I want to think about with you all super curious to hear what you think let's see what my slides say okay I wanted to start just with you know I know people come to thinking about trans politics in different ways and I don't know how big the trans community is on this campus so I just want to share a little bit like how I think about trans politics in the most basic level and what leads me to my work as Doris mentioned I you know I'm a poverty lawyer and my work has been a lot about supporting trans people who are living in poverty living with criminalization so some of the kinds of issues that make trans people's lives like really short and and and really embattled are some of these things I have listed up here like a lot of people have experienced family rejection and don't have like the kind of basic safety net that can sometimes exist for some people within family people experience a lot of exclusion and employment and educational situations people have poverty being born into poverty also becoming increasingly poor because of those kinds of conditions really high numbers of trans people are homeless and and vulnerable to police violence which of course we know is targeted towards people of color indigenous people and poor people people with disabilities huge numbers of trans people disproportionately end up in the criminal punishment system and facing immigration consequences right those things often go together and are really intertwined in our society so the the way when I think about trans politics I think about a politics that needs to respond to that that's what I wanted to kind of center that so for me trans politics is centrally about racial and economic justice and disability justice and migrant justice all of those pieces because it's about the kind of worst conditions facing trans populations which are all about structures of law policy and social relations that produce early death because of kind of this and a much more complex set of circumstances that we could trace so that's just like just to give you a basic understanding so that we're on the same page about what I mean trans politics is even supposed to be trying to work on in the United States we have a really wild mythology that we that is so powerful that we often aren't aware it's happening and the myth is that if you want to change people's lives you need to change the law we really love the fantasy that the legal system is what changes people's lives and the way we tell that story in the u.s. is often a story about anti-black racism we often tell a story about how there used to be anti-black racism in the United States and there was chattel slavery there was the Jim Crow system apartheid and that those things were resolved either by you know constitutional amendments or by civil rights laws and that now we're living in this new time where there's not anti-black racism and we haven't had a black president and so therefore all as well this is like a story we love to tell the United States and it's story this government of the United States I hope I'm not causing these noises but I might be it's a story the United States tells about itself right it's a story about how we are a place of freedom where our laws are just and if you just interpret the Constitution right you'll get justice will fall out of it even though it's a document written by slave owners and people who were here to commit genocide against indigenous people right that fantasy and that and especially I work in a law school so that fantasy is like huge rights like Constitution is like this hallowed you know glittery special thing from God when really it's just like a piece of you know law written by people that really captures its historical moment but this this fantasy is a big one and the reason I bring it up is because this fantasy has really been applied it's it's a story that is very centrally told about anti-black racism but it's often applied then to any vulnerable group seeking freedom so it's a story that we're then told is supposed to answer what trans people need or what career people need okay so this myth you know part of it is the myth that racism is over it was resolved by law that's centrally this myth but it's also a myth that sexism is over and was resolved by law right like the story that of course now everybody's fine because we have title seven and sexism is illegal therefore it's fine and people are equal but even though we know that in reality you know women still make less than men we live in a culture of systemic sexual violence that's highly gendered you know it's the the material conditions we live under make it very clear that this is not true but this mythology is very strong we hear the same story ableism is over we had the you know American Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act before that nobody's allowed to complain everything's fine I mean this is a story we hear a lot right in the bottom line of that story is that if you're doing poorly in these systems it's your fault right the story is telling us there is no systemic harm you it's you if you're doing for you made bad choices or you have your community has bad morals or you know you're not working hard all these stories even though of course we all know that the hardest working people in the in the society are those who make the least money right people who do childcare who clean things who deal with dangerous chemicals right like the people who literally work the jobs that break their bodies are not compensated right but whatever these myths are big and this myth also has a silence in it right this the myth never says material inequality will be resolved by law because we know that capitalism is the law so it's not illegal to discriminate against poor people you can just tell people you can't come in here because you can't pay right so the the myth also has like a silence about key forms of material inequality and it has a silence about indigenous people obviously because cellar colonialism and genocide is the law of this land right so this this mythology about law is a big one and I I pause on it just because I think it's one that people just operate it's like your community is having a hard time you guys need to go do some legislation or go bring a court case right and we can see that actually that that story that arc that those court cases not legislation has resolved things is is it is an mythological one that justifies an existing sexist racist colonial system right ableist system so what we do know is that in the period that we've lived in where supposedly all of these kinds of inequality have become illegal in this period when you know supposedly the law fixed everything and now it's racism is illegal and sexism is illegal and ableism is illegal during this period you know starting from civil rights era till now we've actually seen growing material inequality so the government told us all we were all equal but at the same time people work more than ever and have less pay right like wages stagnated I read something that said that people in the United States work a month more a year than they did in the 1950s and 60s like a month there's only 12 months in the year as I know you guys know it's like really intense to think about working an entire month more a year right so people are working more than ever I think a lot of us experience this jobs that kind of go around the clock intense demands on on people's labor there's a really drastic growing racialized wealth divide which you know people I think a lot of people became more aware of the wealth gap and income gap when the phrase was popularized the 99% during the Occupy era right the idea that there's that there's such a severe concentration of wealth in this country and 1% it's kind of holding almost everything and then most people have almost nothing or are deeply indebted so that's and that gap which I think is people talk less about how racialized and gendered that gap actually is extremely racialized and gendered we have you know this range of neoliberal economic policies whether we're talking about trade agreements free trade agreements like NAFTA or the proposed TPP or whether we're talking about extensive complicated debt relations between like rich countries and poor countries that produce all kinds of effects that are worsening this global wealth divide and worsening our our domestic wealth divide right where my mom my mom always said that rich are just getting richer in the poor getting poorer but that that what she was capturing was really true right that we see things like the loss of union jobs the moving offshore of a lot of manufacturing into places where people are also extremely exploited under like really suppressed abilities to have labor laws in their own country as we see you know increasing environmental harm from those industries we saw all these pieces coming together that are making our world more dangerous for us making a few people a lot of money and making most people a lot more desperate at the same time in the United States we've seen consistent cuts to any kind of governmental support for poor people we've already always been one of the worst countries in terms of this compared to all the other rich countries I have some theories about how that relates to being a settler colonial country based in slavery but the you know fundamentally we've always had a really crappy inadequate way of supporting any kind of people facing you know severe poverty and that's even gotten worse especially in the last 20 years where we've really seen cuts to those benefits where you absolutely cannot get by on anything like the support that's available and you just see cut after cut after cut which puts more people into more desperate situations and the same time we've had all of this kind of you know we're being told we're more equal than ever we're seeing our actual lives get a lot harder and people more desperate and then we see the drastic growth of the prison and immigration enforcement systems during this period right so we've we now live in you know the United States the most imprisoning country in the world we have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners that system is intensely targeted towards indigenous people people with disabilities people of color right very intensely and we've seen our immigration imprisonment system quadruple since 2001 right and you know I think a lot of us are following start seeing the ways in which administration after administration including fully including the Obama administration which you know I was the most deporting president of all time each administration is growing that immigration enforcement system drastically and so we're just seeing more and more people in our lives locked up in different ways under surveillance in different ways losing family members who are being disappeared into these systems in different ways and all the ways that further impoverished is impoverished is our our communities and and makes us vulnerable and all this is happening amidst really huge intense wars right like the war in Iraq which I think has been declared over like several times but it's clearly still happening and still you know making a lot of money for particular private war profiteer corporations and you know draining the coffers of the US government and putting you know just killing so many people those numbers aren't even reported by our media it's like no one cares how long these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq go on and all of it so many other fronts where the US military is doing its harm sorry about this really bad news slide but the reason it's so important for me to kind of really frame this bad news is because what I want us to think about is why is how we can understand why law and policy frameworks that we've been told will resolve issues for people like trans people who are vulnerable and struggling don't work and what is actually going on under the watch of this kind of supposed legal equality we've all been granted in the last half century so LGBT law in the United States has really focused on a set of reforms that are pretty limited that are familiar to you anti-discrimination laws hate crime laws military service inclusion and marriage these have been kind of the menu of what we've been told gay rights or LGBT rights are or should be over the last 40 years and these reforms are just you know following this pattern I'm talking about deeply deeply inadequate and I'd really fail to change the material conditions that LGBT people are facing that I was talking about the beginning the trans people are facing that vulnerable people are facing you know these these these reforms tend to just do what they actually tend to do more for making the government look good than for making people's lives change right like something like anti-discrimination laws they say we are we now protect you nobody can you know fire you for being gay or nobody can fire you for being person of color or whatever they say that racism is illegal or homophobia is illegal but they're actually virtually unenforceable right like we could talk about the law of this in more detail if you want to but there's all these ways in which it's almost impossible to prove that anyone has not hired you or has fired you for this reason people don't tend to win in court and especially people who are in low wage in the low wage sector it's almost impossible to prove why you didn't get a job when you walked in and applied for it you know and yet you know that like you know often right they don't want people like who look like me working here they don't in that kind of thing but there's a there's it's it's just like unless they write you a letter that's like dear Dean we don't want trans people like you working here at Abercrombie and so you won't be working on our floor you know like they don't write that letter usually and actually I've actually had cases where they do write a letter like that or something like that and they still lose we can talk about that it's really really really really really hard to win those kind of cases in court in part because anti-discrimination law misunderstands actually how harm works right it imagines this like evil terrible racist or transphobe who's like sitting there being like you can't come in here you can't work here and he has these bad thoughts in their head and the rest of us are all fine and good when in reality things like racism transphobia homophobia distribute all of our life chances unevenly right so if you are a person of color in the United States you're more likely to be breathing toxic air drinking toxic water you know working in a more dangerous job having less access to health care all these things that are going to end your life earlier that aren't about like some bad dude who wrote you a letter and said you're not allowed to work here because you're whatever right like that fantasy about anti-discrimination is really like the fantasy that is about these two bad into this bad individual in the victim and the law will catch them and make it right and that's not actually how what we might call oppression or subjection works and so that's part of why it doesn't work and why it's unprovable in so many ways hate crime laws those are laws that like enhance the penalty if you attack or hurt somebody because or kill them because of their identity so those laws basically are just about they're not about preventing our deaths at all there may be about having somebody else go to prison for longer which like in no way frees the people who are facing harm and actually like all other laws added to the criminal system ends up targeting people of color people with disabilities poor people that's exactly how every law that gets added to the criminal arsenal does it just empowers the prosecutor and that's what we're caught prosecution is pointed so that's been a really ineffective piece I have to talk briefly at least military inclusion because talk about something that doesn't do much for the community impacted but makes the institution look good right it's like you see all these images of like gay service members kissing in their uniforms are like a proud trans soldier who just wants to serve and the story becomes you know about how this is our freedom is our liberation is our dignity when in reality serving the US military is a really horrible messed up job right doing some of the US military is is the biggest source of violence in the world and it's also the biggest polluter in the world right and working there is terrible right the rates of sexual violence towards people in the US military are astronomical and people who serve in the US military are abandoned as veterans right we know all this the benefits are terrible and rates of suicide are incredibly high and people are really traumatized by what they're being forced to do there's so many ways in which this is a terrible job that I don't people in my community to have to do you know I don't want anyone who's trans to have to try to get that job to survive that's not a real choice you know so there's the whole but the kind of the story where we place military service as this proud wonderful thing and then we put trans people are gay people and as the kind of poster children for it actually just makes them US military look like a site of liberation and inclusion which it is absolutely nothing you know of that sort so that's a really complicated moment we're seeing right now because like Trump doesn't want people trans people to serve in the military and it's like well neither do I and I you know Trump's reasons are whatever they are but the idea that therefore that means the like liberatory position is to want us to trans people to be in the US military is that's like really off that our politics are off and this is part of what I want to talk about more broadly today is how do we think about a resistant trans politics or a queer politics that also like includes reality right and is like and cares about like you know imperialism and cares about racism right and is trying to build like a vision of liberation that we actually could get excited about marriage that we could go into marriage I'll come back to it this slide is taking too long okay so basic pitfalls or reforms this is like the summary of this that I want you all to grab right we don't want reforms that provide no material relief so reforms that are just like you know we're going to this is a really good example I spent a lot of time in my life trying to work on what's happening for queer and trans people inside US prisons and one of the things people will say you know we'll be trying to think about how to like change things for people in prisons like you know primarily get them out and also like deal with like things like inadequate nutrition and I quit health care things like that and people will be like well how about if the prison created an anti discrimination policy like you know that's like a that's like a has no material relief like that's just like slapping a rainbow flag on like on a tank or on a prison right like it's just it's just the idea putting something just just like a fake idea on the outside right that kind of law and policy reform is really common so that's one of our biggest concerns about reforms we always want to be concerned whenever we're fighting for justice and somebody offers us a form back and it's just like they're going to change the wording you know about the same thing that's going to keep eating your community alive right so that's like that's the only we always want to be concerned about another one is relief that only reaches the least marginalized there's a really big history of this inside the whole realm we might call civil rights but you also see this debate happening right now around immigration reform one of the things that tends to happen is that people will propose reforms that are for the least marginalized of the group of people facing harm they'll just try it's some people call it creaming creaming you know because like skimming the cream off the top of the milk maybe you guys have never had non modernized dairy products it's possible but you know anyway so you know the idea that that it's like who's the who's the people inside the marginalized group who actually have the most access we'll like we'll make sure a few of them get to go to college or a few of them get to immigrate or a few of them get to get the jobs you know that kind of thing so that's one thing we can always be concerned about is like is that this reform that's only reaching the least marginalized of the affected group that's like another common pitfall a third pitfall is what I was talking about with the military and all these things where you get just a change in the window dressing just to change on the cover right you get the legitimization of the harmful systems and sometimes it's expansion so the literature you know you so it's like oh yeah the police are wonderful they they have a hate crimes law they're here they're here to protect lgbt people it's like that's not what the police are here to do they're here to target and destroy communities of color that's what they've been here for since they were invented you know or the military is this great place that's that's here to you know they're gonna invade Afghanistan to save the women of Afghanistan that was like the rationale that Barbara Bush lectured us all on in two thousand something you know and that that idea that that that the police or the military whatever it is that is the these sort of apparatuses of violence that our that our movements have targeted and exposed that those things actually are like legitimate because then they take on our names this happens a lot you know I work at a law school and we have the prosecutor's office is always the law school promoting itself right and as a site of justice and one of the ways they like to do that is by saying that like the process the role of prosecution is to save women that's like a really strong talking point of like policing and prosecution systems is that they exist to stop gender violence when in reality of course the police are a huge site of gender violence right the police are major perpetrators of gender violence prisons are and jails are places where people experience high high levels of sexual violence and assault and policing and imprisonment have not been shown to actually deter or prevent gender violence they don't gender violence is super common in all of our lives people most likely to harm us or people we know like people in our families our partners our co-workers and policing and prison it just like has failed to in any way disrupt that but it has adding a bunch of laws that criminalize gender violence has actually just been more in the arsenal for adding a lot more communities of color into the prison system right so it's really complicated to really face like that things that are that we've been told are good and will help us like aren't working right and actually our our PR our good PR for those systems I mean when you look at shows like all the law and order shows that always portray like these evil criminals who need to be caught by these brilliant police and then prosecuted by these brilliant you know prosecutors like all of that is you know propaganda for a system that actually has nothing to do with keeping the most dangerous people in prison and this and everybody outside safe right in reality the most dangerous people in the United States are bankers police soldiers politicians those people are people who make decisions that are like shortening all of our lives those are people who decide to not invest in good evacuation routes those are people who decide to defund the firefighting you know those are people who decide that this amount of pollution is fine even that's going to produce terminal cancers and a huge set of people in a particular community right like anyway you got the other piece of it is when it not doesn't just it doesn't just you know legitimize a harmful system but it actually expands it right like that's like hate crime laws are an example of that so it not only it doesn't not only does it make the police are good they protect LGBT people but also it gives the prosecutor like more punishing power people way for longer right so that's really dangerous right or anything that you know we see this debate sometimes about a really good example of this is the the movement against domestic violence in the United States at it you know as it turned more into having like a wing of it that became very visible and strong that really collaborated with the criminal justice system and where especially kind of like a lot of white leaders in that movement helped it turn towards being really focused on increasing criminal penalties they passed laws for mandatory arrests where if the cops are called for DV to someone's house they have to arrest somebody and this idea makes sense if you really trust the police so it made a lot more sense to white women than it made to women of color and to just women and immigrant women and so then the police would come and they often arrest both people or they often arrest whoever's browner or they arrest whoever's disabled or they arrest whoever's queer or transor or all those things right all the normal things they see as dangerous suspicious all that all through all their racist transphobic ableist lenses that are very common right that we are well documented and so there's been now decades of these mandatory rest laws and finally even the most mainstream domestic violence agencies and organizations are saying you know what mandatory rest laws don't work they actually don't work they didn't make women safer from domestic violence they just increased policing and and escalated situations the cops show up and they escalate right and the family in general is probably in more chaos and more danger often than it was before the cops randomly tried to arrest everybody or anybody that they you know assessed right then and so we're seeing this kind of this this long history of the ways in which these reforms that expand harmful systems you know decades in we're like wow that really didn't keep people safer and then there's lots that I think are not sufficiently have not been sufficiently assessed but mandatory rest is one of the one of the ones where we can see actually finally there's some more awareness about that and lastly another pitfall of reform we always want to look for is is reforms that divide people into deserving and undeserving right so the idea that you know there's good immigrants and bad immigrants we want to find relief for the immigrants who go to college but not relief for any immigrant who's ever had contact with the policing and prison system right fundamentally that's already gonna sort people out in a bunch of really problematic ways it's gonna sort people out around class who happened to have more access to college and who didn't it could sort people out around skin tone or likely or if you live in a more police neighborhood all things that might lead you to more likely contact with the police right because we know that policing isn't as I said related to dangerousness is not related to your behavior right white people do more drugs than black people but black people go to prison more for drugs than white people right it's a policing and danger policing and behavior have nothing to do with each other so if we ever attach deserving this to criminal having a criminal record we're already you know we're making a recipe for creating an undeserving this category that's very racialized class often has to do with disability and so you see that heavily in the in my in the migrant justice question right you see right now that framing of who's a good immigrant who's a bad immigrant like very strongly and you see people in that movement really brilliantly trying to push back on that maybe you guys have followed like this long term not one more deportation campaign not campaign was a response to the idea of creating reforms that would only let a small number of people immigrate who were considered deserving and not one more deportation campaign was like no nobody should be deported right and so they really reframe the debate but that's even within social movements right we get these major debates about kind of what are good reforms what are good tactics and it in so many of our movements we see this with deserving or undeserving so you see this to like during you know you guys have been following all this drama about trans people using bathrooms and the bathroom bills all around the country and then you see these memes go around and have a picture of like a really passing white trans person like let's say a white trans man it would be like he should get to use the men's bathroom right like because he looks right right but but the main people who get harassed and bullied and beaten and sometimes killed in bathrooms are trans people who are low income or homeless or people of color who people don't think look feminine or masculine enough so kind of creating this idea of who's the the good trans person that you wouldn't mind having in the bathroom doesn't actually help with the vulnerable people right but this kind of deserving undeserving problem is a really common one and it comes from living in a society full of hierarchies where then we get this idea that we should have an advocacy strategy where we're like no we promise we're good please be nice to us give us rights and then we define good just the way the society has been which is whiteness able bodiedness normativity class stuff whatever all that stuff that we all the stuff we already think sounds good you know instead of criticizing like wait why is that why are those people like why are some people disposable and other people's lives matter like no right so these kind of pitfalls of reforms are really big ones that we have to keep our eyes on as activists trying to think about how to like change make change that's meaningful right and for me as somebody trying to do work around building justice for trans people these reforms are like like let's not just step into these same holes again you know like let's not just make reforms that don't work right but of course I'm in debates with people inside my own movement about whether or not things that they want to do like advocate really hardcore for trans military inclusion is falling into the pitfalls right so that those debates matter and it matters to me to be trying to build a politics based in like real solidarity and like really a strong commitment to like anti-perilism anti-racism etc so it's just some examples of the pitfalls of reforms maybe you guys have seen these horrible stickers that are all over Seattle the police created this sticker that's like businesses are supposed to put in their windows hey look this is a safe place if something happens to you we'll call the cops right so this is a police PR campaign that uses a symbol from the LGBT movement the rainbow flag to spread propaganda for the Seattle police right this is you follow me with this kind of thing like how this works right this is a comic that I think captures this as well right this the idea that oh the women can be active duty or active combat or whatever it's called now this is so amazing like oh the US military is this wonderful site of gender justice this does this matter to the people who are the targets of the US military and also is this really real for women inside the US military who experience such immense rates of sexual violence and after the Orlando massacre the NYPD put out this rainbow cop car right you should all just be like I hope inside your it's killing you to see this right right I mean the NYPD is is is such a massive force of racialized homophobic and transphobic violence so the idea that they would be that they get to kind of like use our rainbow to make their their their policing efforts look just or you know liberal inclusive or something okay so we're living through this time in trans politics that we could call mainstreaming where we're seeing you know Caitlyn's a really good image for this right we're seeing new forms of visibility right that and conditional acceptance right an idea of deployment of deserving figures Caitlyn she's so pretty trans people are okay you know whatever right she's a Republican yeah like this kind of like you know lifting up of images of trans people that don't represent at all who most people are or what most people's lives are like and what they're facing and that produce an idea of kind of deserving this or what the qualities of deserving this would be which would be like if you can be the perfect image of white femininity then maybe you might be tolerably accepted what comes with this is also a set of recuperative reform proposals like the ones I've been talking about even when your proposals succeed the harm and violence against their communities stays the same or worsens right so as we've seen these legal equality reforms have changed over the last 50 years in the United States and yet actual violence against communities of color has worsened right the actual more people in the United States think they're not racist but more people of color than ever are locked up in cages so you know we gotta like some how it connects and then often you also get backlashes right so we've seen a lot of backlashes that are right recently with trans stuff so the questions that you know I think are vital for trans activists but we could apply this to other movements to ask always related to my pitfalls concerns does it provide actual material relief does it leave out an especially marginalized part of that affected group so this this reform will help people as long as they're documented this reform will help people if long as they don't have any history of criminal activity you know like that's like those are classic reform dilemmas people cutting people out so if it's doing that there's no chance it's actually building your power of freedom doesn't legitimize or expand a system that we're trying to dismantle so does it try to make the military look good or the cops look good or whatever some corporation and doesn't mobilize the most affected for ongoing struggle so it doesn't just matter what we're fighting for it also matters how we fight for it right like did the fight itself bring people together to build their leadership and build their like actual power right so that maybe it's like a incremental fight but it's building us to the next fight in the next fight in the next fight right we can talk more about that I'm going to skip a little bit this guy I just have too much going on for our time you know I have what these slides are that I'm skipping are different I'm interested in what are their criteria other thinkers and activists are using to think about how to decide whether something is actually liberatory or not and I and I'll we can come back to other ones if you want to do in Q&A but you know Audre Lorde asked this question that is so powerful to me in what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those I call my people so that question for me right is like it's so fundamental it's like am I asking for acceptance for a set of deserving trans people conditioned on leaving another set of trans people behind are making them more endangered right or with any group of people I'm part of right is anything is anything about what either forms I'm asking for going to further endanger or leave out another part of the group that I call my people because if we're not together as people we're definitely not actually building power we're building power for the systems of harm us not for us it's this trick it's a brilliant trick has been working on us for decades right okay I know I know that I'm really trying to keep to Doris's framework people out in four minutes so I just want to talk about some act like very concrete strategies and then we will we can go into details about these concrete strategies more during the Q&A if you can say so one key set of strategies is all the politicized survival work or what I also often call mutual aid work some people call like self-help work work that's about work that's about helping each other survive these conditions this is like a vital kind of work we have to do which is about like how do we provide housing healthcare education for each other how do we actually get what we need to survive right there's a lot of amazing work like this happening in our own region right work where people are supporting each other with the basics and a lot of this work is about supporting people who are in the most dangerous conditions so I'm thinking about like all the work that goes on around the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma although you know you can become a pen pal to a person who's imprisoned there you can go every weekend to protest outside you can connect to the families of people in prison there and support them all of that work that's about like helping people survive right now for any situations it's also about you know direct work for people for support for people with disabilities about accompaniment projects like projects where people go with each other to scary court hearings they have to do to welfare hearings there's like a project in Tennessee where people go with with other trans people to doctor's appointments like just anything that's about us not having to go through these brutal systems by ourselves you know it makes such a huge difference so politicized survival work is like a vital category I'd love to talk more about that to all of you the other another piece of the work is dismantling work which is all the work to stop this stuff from growing and to shrink it right so I maybe some of you have been involved in the campaign to stop the new youth jail from being built in King County I'm happy to tell you more about that campaign if you'd like to get involved there's an event happening this coming Sunday at Washington Hall 530 I would love to go to that event with you all the work that's about stopping new new ones from being built that's about tearing down the existing ones let's divert money away from policing and towards you know income support and childcare and all the things people actually need to be safe all the work to block deportations I'm sure some of you have been have followed the work people have done blocking the deportation buses leaving the detention center in Tacoma like literally stopping deportations one of my favorite examples of this ever was when a group called no one is illegal shut down the entire international terminal at the Vancouver Airport 2000 people showed up to stop the deportation of this guy Libar Singh in 2008 amazing story there's a really cool video of it on YouTube blocking public housing closures all these pieces that are about just literally like escalating tactics stopping pipelines right that obviously the efforts to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline which include both like the incredible gatherings and that kind of work at Standing Rock but also the sabotage of the pipeline that's gone on since that right all of that work is vital and the third piece of work in my one minute is the work that's building the world that we actually want and preparing for and dealing with the existing and coming disasters which I think are like more parents as than ever and that work includes things like we know the police we know that they often bring more danger when we call them or when someone calls them so we have to come up with systems that actually do work for making us safe how do we deal with conflict in our communities because we have a lot of conflict in our communities we hurt each other a lot most of us are connected to family violence or dating violence in some way we know this stuff is really in us in our communities so we need other methods of responding I could share with you a lot of really amazing models of that that are being worked on in our own region another example is just building more care and interdependency like how do we actually build real support systems for people with disabilities in our communities for people with kids like how do we actually build a world we'd want to live in instead of the one where people are just like abandoned you know what if you are taking care of your grandmother and they've closed the benefits for elder care elder day care and in Washington state like what do you do like we need actually to have our own systems because we can't count on government systems to do that doing deep political education through participation so people actually being involved in stuff I think this is really big I'd love to talk about this with you all during the Q&A like how we're being told that the only way to participate is by posting things online and how that really really is very it's a very good demobilizing strategy for us so to actually participate in political work which means like being part of something where people like do stuff together to stop things or to help each other like that we learn so much about the actual conditions we live in by doing that and then we're also more prepared to respond right when violence and disasters happening and doing all of this from a framework that is really central that I also would love to talk to you all more about which is a framework that says that nobody is disposable a framework that really suggests that nobody is a nobody like what if you really took that seriously you know like that is like a framework that is really hard to capture under the political conditions we live under we're constantly making each other into nobodies we're constantly trying to figure out who's important you know I always think about this with like Angela Davis comes to speak at your school and everybody wants to shake Angela Davis' hand but nobody wants to write a letter to a prisoner you know what I mean like how do we move to a framework where we actually think everybody matters like really matters like we have to all come along together and that really happens in my opinion through certain kinds of participation and it's 221 and so we'll have a break