Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
SPADE 1AC

The debate community does not exist as a free-floating zone liberated from the broader political spheres of the United States. The frameworks we learn about and embrace, the frameworks we defend we take with us out into the world. We have encountered the frameworks on race, the frameworks on cap, the frameworks on policy making, and our literature bases reflect those encounters. But debate has not had an encounter with critical transgender politics, and so the space of reflection is lacking and that encounter must happen before any traditional engagement can occur. Trusting that the law is truthful about itself is the strategy that the contemporary LGBT movement has embraced and adopted into a strategy of nonprofit organizing and resistance. 

The nonprofit forms that now define the LGBT movement have become tools of destructive ideologies that transform these spaces into extensions of state and ideological violence and sever them from the communities they intend to represent.
Spade, Dean, 2011,practicing lawyer, trans activist, and creator of the Sylvia Rivera law project, Normal Life: Administrative violence, Critical Trans politics, and the Limits of the Law
Overall, the most well-funded lesbian and gay rights organizations provide stark examples
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maintaining a racialized-gendered maldistribution of life chances while pursuing their ’good work’

These ideologies are at the deepest foundations our country and continue to inform how life chances are distributed within the country along lines such as race and gender
Spade, Dean, 2011,practicing lawyer, trans activist, and creator of the Sylvia Rivera law project, Normal Life: Administrative violence, Critical Trans politics, and the Limits of the Law
The myth of legal equality in the United States is supported by the narrative that
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reshape the language and frameworks, but policies and programs used to manage and
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distribute resources across the population are still mobilized by race and gender, and continue to distribute security and vulnerability across the population through those vectors.

The law itself functions to support these ideologies, making itself appear as a neutral territory which can protect those targeted by these ideologies while cloaking and protecting the everyday violence of these systems. One’s entrance into these systems is predicated on being reduced to a comprehensible subject defined by only one vector of identity
Spade, Dean, 2011, practicing lawyer, trans activist, and creator of the Sylvia Rivera law project, Normal Life: Administrative violence, Critical Trans politics, and the Limits of the Law

Discrimination law’s reliance on the perpetrator perspective also creates the false impression that the previously
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"deserving workers" that anti-discrimination law advocates rally to protect.

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This ability to Name people and identities gives the law the ability to target bodies with violence which it deploys against trans people under the guise of producing safety.
Spade, Dean, 2011,practicing lawyer, trans activist, and creator of the Sylvia Rivera law project, Normal Life: Administrative violence, Critical Trans politics, and the Limits of the Law
 Since the criminal punishment system itself is a significant source of racialized-gendered
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not only fail to eradicate transphobia but also strengthen system that perpetuate it.

Transphobic corporeal violence orders all violence. This ideological violence happens because of the naming of those who are incarcerated into the legal order. The transphobic violence that this system creates rests at the bottom of the corporeal and ideological violence produced by the state and is used to pattern the violence against all minorities and targeted bodies
Spade, Dean, 2011,practicing lawyer, trans activist, and creator of the Sylvia Rivera law project, Normal Life: Administrative violence, Critical Trans politics, and the Limits of the Law
 Foucault  suggested that as these norms become internalized, self-regulation would come
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indigenous languages or engaging in indigenous cultural practices and forced them to conform to
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European gender norms, using European American ways of being. Examples like these are
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time, measure productivity, and come to identify and understand human life.

Any uncritical participation  in the framework of this legal system closes off our ability to imagine and create a better world, re-entrenching the destructive logics at play
Spade, Dean, 2011,practicing lawyer, trans activist, and creator of the Sylvia Rivera law project, Normal Life: Administrative violence, Critical Trans politics, and the Limits of the Law
 We must stop believing that what the law says about itself is true and
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take for our interventions, and how to strategize the change we need.

How should we approach the law then? For trans politics, we should see the law as a method of population control, one that categorizes and subsequently targets entire groups of bodies in order to distribute life chances unevenly
Spade, Dean, 2011,practicing lawyer, trans activist, and creator of the Sylvia Rivera law project, Normal Life: Administrative violence, Critical Trans politics, and the Limits of the Law
 Control that operates through population-level interventions is particularly significant to trans politics
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about marginalized groups exposes how various moments of administrative categorization have lethal consequences.

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Rejecting law reform efforts in favor of understanding the law as a site of population control allows our struggles to intervene in such a way as to create meaningful change for those populations targeted by these systems without ceding to them the illusion of their ’neutrality’, ’fairness’, or ’equality’
Spade, Dean, 2011,practicing lawyer, trans activist, and creator of the Sylvia Rivera law project, Normal Life: Administrative violence, Critical Trans politics, and the Limits of the Law
Understanding discipline and population management is essential to discerning the causes of the kind of
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"the undeserving" and then addressing only the issues of the favored sector

In creating a critical trans politics, we can move away from divisive ’single issue politics’ and engage in a politics of transformation that fundamentally changes how we approach issues of liberation and equality without re-creating
Spade, Dean, 2011,practicing lawyer, trans activist, and creator of the Sylvia Rivera law project, Normal Life: Administrative violence, Critical Trans politics, and the Limits of the Law
This kind of contextualization moves us away from what critics have called the "single issue politics" that has produced much lauded but illusory "success"  in lesbian and gay politics. Further, this analysis
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illuminates neoliberal "victories" for what they truly are: betrayals of those most
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trans people or that legal systems create obstacles for the most enfranchised trans people

This critical trans politic’s perspective of the law as a tactic of population control allows us to question the neoliberal cooption of well-meaning movements and create strategies of resistance that challenge and expose the murderous structures that create conditions of life
Spade, Dean, 2011,practicing lawyer, trans activist, and creator of the Sylvia Rivera law project, Normal Life: Administrative violence, Critical Trans politics, and the Limits of the Law
As I argue in the chapters that follow, examining the operation of legal systems
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that impact marginalized populations in ways that give us new inroads to intervention.

A methodology of critical transgender politics allows us to reach a world that sees the end of racialized, classist, gendered, colonialist systems of oppression by fostering community building projects that embrace difference as long as these struggles are central to the project and not left on the wayside
Spade, Dean, 2011,practicing lawyer, trans activist, and creator of the Sylvia Rivera law project, Normal Life: Administrative violence, Critical Trans politics, and the Limits of the Law
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As trans activism emerges and institutionalizes, there is often an assumption that following the
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work every day- they can’t be something we come back for later.