Top 35 Dean Spade Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Let’s be gentle with ourselves and each other and fierce as we fight oppression.”

— Dean Spade

2. “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

3. “My work is heavily influenced by critiques that many critical intellectual traditions, especially Critical Race Theory, have made of reform projects focused on legal equality.”

— Dean Spade

4. “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

5. “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

6. “Law reforms in the US, ostensibly enacted to prohibit racism, have proven ineffective because they focus on bad intentions of individuals and fail to comprehend population-level conditions.”

— Dean Spade

7. “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

8. “Power is not a matter of one dominant individual or institutions, but instead manifests in interconnected, contradictory sites where regimes of knowledge and practice circulate and take hold. This way of understanding the dispersion of power helps us realize that power is not simply about certain individuals being targeted for death or exclusion by a ruler, but instead about the creation of norms that distribute vulnerability and security.”

— Dean Spade

9. “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

10. “We have seen the most well-funded gay and lesbian rights organizations valorize the US military in their work seeking inclusion in military service.”

— 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. “Choosing an agenda that supports the apparatuses of racial violence always pays better.”

— Dean Spade

13. “Legal doctrine requiring a showing of evidence of racist intent and a narrow chain of causation has made it very difficult to prove in court that a person or group is experiencing racism because the standards are too narrow and too focused on individual intentions.”

— Dean Spade

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “We should interact with legal reform tactically, knowing that it will not meet our ultimate goals but asking whether there are ways that engaging with particular reforms might benefit our work and help reduce certain harms or dangers.”

— Dean Spade

19. “We should understand that in the context of the US, where our legal system is based in settler colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy, changing laws will never sufficiently change the conditions of harm and violence our movements seek to transform.”

— Dean Spade

20. “Legal reform has significant dangers: changing only the window-dressing of harmful systems but leaving the violence of the systems in tact, failing to provide actual relief for those facing the worst conditions, and legitimizing or expanding systems of harm.”

— Dean Spade

21. “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

22. “I am not arguing that we should never use legal reform as a tactic. Instead, I argue that it should not be a goal.”

— Dean Spade

23. “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

24. “In addition to encouraging us to participate in narratives of “deservingness” that cast large parts of our constituencies as “undeserving,” legal reform strategies encourage us to valorize harmful systems that our movements should be seeking to dismantle.”

— Dean Spade

25. “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

26. “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

27. “Mutual aid projects let us practice meeting our own and each other’s needs, based in shared commitments to dignity, care, and justice. They let us practice coordinating our actions together with the belief that all of us matter and that we should all get to participate in the solutions to our problems. They let us realize that we know best how to address the crises we face.”

— Dean Spade

28. “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

29. “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

30. “When we feel bad, we often automatically decide that either we are bad or another person is bad. Both of these moves cause damage and distort the truth, which is that we are all navigating difficult conditions the best we can, and we all have a lot to learn and unlearn.”

— Dean Spade

31. “Paternalism is also visible in programs within welfare and criminal punishment systems that force criminalized people and people seeking welfare benefits to take parenting classes, budgeting classes, and anger management seminars. The idea that those giving aid need to “fix” people who are in need is based on the notion that people’s poverty and marginalization is not a systemic problem but is caused by their own personal shortcomings. This also implies that those who provide aid are superior.”

— Dean Spade

32. “Rich people’s control of nonprofit funding keeps nonprofits from doing work that is threatening to the status quo, or from admitting the limits of their strategies.”

— Dean Spade

33. “Because most people in our society have a tangled, painful relationship with money that includes feelings and behaviours of secrecy, shame, and desperation, a lot of otherwise awesome people will misbehave when money is around or get suspicious of others’ behaviour.”

— Dean Spade

34. “The only thing that keeps those in power in that position is the illusion of our powerlessness. A moment of freedom and connection can undo a lifetime of social conditioning and scatter seeds in a thousand directions.”

— Dean Spade

35. “I need trusted friends who I can talk to about what is going on, who I can ask for honest feedback about my behaviour, and who can help support me and soothe me when I feel afraid of doing something in a new way.”

— Dean Spade

36. “Perfectionism sometimes appears as a fear of saying anything that is politically off-base and being judged, so that people don’t share their opinions; or are wildly defensive if someone questions something they said; or quickly attack or exclude anyone who doesn’t use the same jargon as them or is still learning something they already know about.”

— Dean Spade

37. “Elite solutions to poverty are always about managing poor people and never about redistributing wealth.”

— Dean Spade

38. “The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life – and the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory – is demobilizing to our movements, hides the root causes of injustice, and keeps us passive and complicit.”

— Dean Spade

39. “The charity model we live with today has origins in christian European practices of the wealthy giving alms to the poor to buy their own way into heaven.”

— Dean Spade