Trannie legal aid, part one.

Dean Spade is the 26-year-old transgender attorney and activist who founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in 2002. This is the first of a two-part interview.

Tell me about Sylvia Rivera Law Project.

Sylvia Rivera Law Project is an organization that provides free legal services to low-income trans, intersex and gender-variant people. We also do policy work, organizing and impact litigation regarding issues that affect that population, as well as a lot of public-education work, including work about making the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) movement accountable to low-income communities and to trans communities who have traditionally been excluded from the agenda of that movement.

How did you get involved with this work?

Partly because I spent some of my childhood on welfare and in foster care. After leaving home at 16, I found out about queer stuff and got really excited and wanted to learn more. I went to work for mainstream LGBT organizations. It was the mid-90s, during welfare-reform time, and none of those organizations was doing anything or taking a stance on welfare and immigration reform. Most of which I knew, from personal experience, would have completely changed my life. My mom was a foreign-born person and was not a U.S. citizen. We wouldn't have gotten the welfare benefits that entitled us to survive and stay together as a family as long as we had if policies were the way they are today. I worked with these groups where that was not considered a queer agenda item. It just felt really fucked up. I saw the mainstream gay movement backing conservative politicians because they'd voted good on something gay. It just didn't feel like what my politics were about on any level.

Why did you create the Sylvia Rivera Law Project?

Fundamentally, it's the perspective that the movement for gender self-determination?a movement against gender-identity discrimination?is institutionalizing right now, gaining a louder voice, and it is vital that that movement centralize issues of racial and economic justice. We're seeing advances in the antidiscrimination law in many jurisdictions around the country; we're seeing some small amount of funding going to trans organizations. People say we're 30 or 40 years behind the LGB movement, and there are some choices to make now about whom the movement is for. I see the temptation to follow the path of the LGB movement: to prioritize upper-class people and centralize issues like employment discrimination, issues that reflect the lives of people with extensive financial resources, while ignoring ones like prisons and jails; to create an agenda that ignores the priorities of a homeless or poor trans population.

Also, the LGBT-rights movement tends to be about symbolic victories. A good example is hate crimes laws, or Lawrence, the recent sodomy decision. How many queers are in jail for sodomy? And conversely, how many are in jail because of the drug war? Is that considered a "queer" issue by the mainstream movement? Decriminalizing identity is really important; it's just that so often, there is an underlying thrust of assimilationism, complete with the attractive model plaintiff.

In certain circles, doing direct service is considered reformist. If you want to be radical, God forbid you work within the system.

Which is funny, considering the Black Panthers served breakfast. The Young Lords took over lead-paint testing trucks. There's a huge history of severely oppressed communities realizing that it's hard to raise your political voice if you don't have anywhere to sleep or anything to eat. SRLP is committed to providing people with some basic services. Trans people are total strangers to the law: In most of the arenas where we experience terrible violence and discrimination?at the hands of cops, in prisons and jails, homeless shelters, foster care etc., there are no policies at all about us, or the policies that do exist judge us by our ability to access expensive medical procedures that are neither affordable nor desirable to our diverse and disproportionately poor community. It's crucial to understand the problems people deal with day to day, to give them help on those problems and to help them access a political voice.

We help people change their names, fight homeless shelters that won't let them dress in their clothing, work with people who aren't allowed to use the bathroom or locker room in their schools, people who are dropping out or being expelled from high school for being trans. We're also doing a lot of bigger policy stuff around demedicalization?meaning: moving toward an understanding of gender that is about how we self-identify, not what medical stamps of approval we have been able to get. The reality is, given the persistent discrimination we face, most trans people are going to be low-income for most of our lives. Basing our gender recognition on surgery is completely unrealistic, and it doesn't reflect the range of what's right for trans people.