Sylvia Rivera Law Project Sylvia Rivera Law Project ...

Dean Spade is the 26-year-old transgender attorney and activist who founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, an organization that provides free legal services to low-income transgender people. This is the second of a two-part interview.

Who was Sylvia Rivera?

Sylvia was a civil rights pioneer and veteran of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, and a perpetual pain in the ass to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement in that she campaigned tirelessly for the movement to be accountable to low-income people, to people of color. She died in 2002, and naming the organization after her both honors her memory and reflects our intentions.

What sorts of projects is SRLP working on?

We've been engaged in a year-and-a-half-long struggle with the Dept. of Health over birth certificates. It's really hard to get jobs or go to school if you don't have something that says your name and has a picture of you in the gender you actually present. New York City has one of the worst birth-certificate policies in the country. The city will only change your birth-certificate gender if you've had vaginoplasty or phalloplasty, and they'll only change it from an "M" or "F" to a blank?it looks like you've got this weird doctored birth certificate. For a variety of reasons, most trans people don't engage in phalloplasty or vaginoplasty.

We're also working on homeless-shelter access, because New York City, in contrast to San Francisco and Boston, still only places people in homeless shelters according to birth gender, not according to gender identity. That makes shelters really dangerous for trans people, who will then just not go to the shelter. Among other things, we're creating a pilot program with New Providence Women's Shelter and Project Renewal that would allow trans women into their shelters. We'll be able to demonstrate to the city that the world doesn't end when you let trans people into gender-appropriate shelters.

Do any NYC laws address gender-identity discrimination?

As of the spring of 2002, gender-identity discrimination is explicitly illegal under New York City human rights law. As part of that, the Commission on Human Rights is supposed to propagate compliance guidelines, which will help potential discriminators understand what the law means. They're supposed to deal with sticky issues like bathrooms and showers. I'm part of the drafting committee, and the guidelines we've created state that it's discrimination to force any person to use a facility that does not comport with their gender identity. Forcing a trans woman to use a men's bathroom or men's shower is discrimination. Asking someone for proof of their gender?show me your genitals, etc.?is a form of harassment.

The commissioner has brought the process to a complete stop. She's refused to meet with us since March. Clearly she's having some version of the all-too-common panic: "Oh my god, there's going to be a person with a penis in the girl's bathroom with my daughter." It's the red herring of this movement. If we had a policy that was genital-surgery based, which is what she probably has in mind as a conservative alternative, most trans people would not be able to use bathrooms and sex-segregated facilities safely, because the fraction who can afford genital surgery is incredibly small.

We're trying to demedicalize, to move toward the notion of self-identity as the most significant marker of gender. That's what mental health professionals tend to understand, and what trans people understand, but it's not what policymakers understand. We're fighting against common misperceptions that trans people are sexual predators, and that our genitals are the most important signifiers of who we are.

Tell me about Toilet Training, the video SRLP recently made.

Tara Mateik, the director, and I created a video of stories from a variety of trans folks and people who have problems with bathrooms. There are discussions about intersectional oppressions: disability, racism and homelessness?things that too rarely appear in trans film work. We designed Toilet Training as a cultural tool for activists to use in their communities.

The idea for the video came during the 2002 World Economic Forum protests in New York City. Police followed me into the men's room at Grand Central, arrested me illegally and physically dragged me out of the station. I was held for 23 hours. After that, I got emails from people all over the world about their horrible bathroom experiences. Those experiences reflect the fact that sex-segregated facilities are a huge problem for people who transgress gender norms. Even when you have good law, it's very unclear whether anyone will enforce it. It's an especially significant issue for low-income people, who spend a lot of time in sex-segregated facilities like shelters or group homes. But this is an area in which the law alone is not the answer; it's too slow and too much in the hands of individual judges and decision-makers. There has to be a cultural shift.