Dean Spade Quotes

#1. Making my work more visual is something I am increasingly excited about. I am hopeful that it will broaden access to some of the ideas being engaged in activist and scholarly communities of which I am part.

Dean Spade

#2. More conservative advocacy work often encourages portrayals of trans people as people who deserve rights. Deservingness, of course, corresponds to national racial, gender and ability norms.

Dean Spade

#3. We must experiment, fail, and try again, but beginning with a critique of legal reform and a commitment to center the most vulnerable moves us away from some of the most common, obvious pitfalls of neoliberal social movement strategies.

Dean Spade

#4. Jealousy sees things always with magnifying glasses which make little things large, of dwarfs giants, of suspicions truths.

Miguel De Cervantes

#5. I see the concepts spatially in my mind. I see the boxes and corrals and grids into which administrative systems require people, things and information to be fit in order to be legible, made to live, or in order to facilitate death and abandonment.

Dean Spade

#6. Hear this Robert Zimmerman, I wrote a song for you, about a strange young man called Dylan with a voice like sand and glue.

David Bowie

#7. In recent years I have become more interested in making the critical ideas that I love teaching and talking about available in more forms, because many people prefer to engage with ideas in films, infographics, comics and other forms that are not traditional books or articles.

Dean Spade

#8. Gender segregated shelters are inaccessible to many trans people, and trans women in particular are often forced to choose between going into a men's shelter where they face enormous danger, or remaining street homeless and facing the violence, harassment, arrest, and exposure risks of that.

Dean Spade

#9. I argue that legal equality has failed resistance movements aimed at transforming material conditions of violence, and that trans activists should take a decidedly different approach.

Dean Spade

#10. The point for me is to create relationships based on deeper and more real notions of trust. So that love becomes defined not by sexual exclusivity, but by actual respect, concern, commitment to act with kind intentions, accountability for our actions, and a desire for mutual growth.

Dean Spade

#11. I am interested in recent scholarly work examining the emergence of women's studies and ethnic studies departments and the development of the neoliberal university.

Dean Spade

#12. Let's be gentle with ourselves and each other and fierce as we fight oppression.

Dean Spade

#13. A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.

Hugo Black

#14. Many people who are drawn to work about racism and transphobia may be new to thinking deeply about colonialism and indigenous resistance in their North America.

Dean Spade

#15. I have deliberated carefully about which of the terms that are unfamiliar to many of my readers I wanted to take time to introduce and explain, and which terms I would not introduce, despite the fact that I find them useful in my other work, in teaching, or in other activist contexts.

Dean Spade

#16. Only an 'almost,' a 'nearly,' is possible.

Arnulf Rainer

#17. California club pop chirper Dev's debut is as stark as it is sweet. This is owed partly to the casually giddy lightness of her talk-singing - familiar from her slizzered 2010 cameo on Far East Movement's smash 'Like a G6,' and around-the way-girl frisky like 1980s Latin freestyle.

Chuck Eddy

#18. As trans advocacy has institutionalized and developed, the context of the undemocratic nature of US non-profits and the ways that white, wealthy individuals can intensely influence the directions of advocacy have increasingly come to the surface for trans activists.

Dean Spade

#19. I think the exploration and the search for who Jesus is, and that 2,000 years later we're still trying to figure out who He was, and did He really rise from the dead ... And I think for me, the answer is 'yes,' and that's why we're talking about Him today.

Erwin McManus

#20. I strive to find materials that will engage students, expand their capacities as critical readers and thinkers, and feel immediately relevant to their daily lives and future work in court and social service systems.

Dean Spade

#21. There was one point in high school actually when I was on the chess team, marching band, model United Nations and debate club all at the same time. And I would spend time with the computer club after school. And I had just quit pottery club, which I was in junior high, but I let that go.

Rainn Wilson

#22. Trans rights formation that mimics the models and strategies of the lesbian and gay rights framework is growing, and there are many significant strategy disagreements between those building that work and those doing racial and economic justice centered trans work.

Dean Spade

#23. The back door blew out from the limo, winging across the road at such a force that it ripped right through a Luxen in a police uniform. Like, one Luxen suddenly became two not-so-put-together Luxen.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#24. Choosing an agenda that supports the apparatuses of racial violence always pays better.

Dean Spade

#25. Life is a practice. When you 'fail,' you can immediately begin practicing again.

Bryant McGill

#26. I never had a real job either. I sort of fell out of school and ended up playing guitar.

Vivian Campbell

#27. Military inclusion has never been a central demand from trans populations, who consistently name criminalization, immigration enforcement, poverty and joblessness as top priorities.

Dean Spade

#28. Telling stories to make himself into something that he isn't. We all do it. We all tell stories to make ourselves look better.

Richard House

#29. You saw too late. Now you are as she is, bewteen two worlds, warmth bleeding into cold.

Elizabeth Lowell

#30. Trans activism in the US has most frequently been grassroots, centered on poverty and criminalization, and often oppositional to the exclusionary "mainstreaming" threads in gay and lesbian politics and feminist politics.

Dean Spade

#31. From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

Toni Morrison