Dean Spade facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Dean Spade
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Spade in 2015
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| Born | 1977 (age 46–47) |
| Education | Columbia University (BA) University of California, Los Angeles (JD) |
| Occupation | Lawyer, activist, author |
| Employer | Seattle University School of Law |
| Known for | Transgender activism |
Dean Spade (born 1977) is an American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law.
Background
In 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective in New York City that provides free legal services to people who are low-income and/or people of color. Spade was a staff attorney at SRLP from 2002 to 2006. Spade was also involved with the campaign in 2009 to stop Seattle from building a new jail.
The Advocate named Spade one of their "Forty Under 40" in May 2010. Utne Reader named Spade and Tyrone Boucher on their list of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World" in 2009, for their collaborative project Enough: The Personal Politics of Resisting Capitalism.
Spade was the 2009-2010 Haywood Burns Chair at CUNY Law School, the Williams Institute Law Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law School and Harvard Law School, and was selected to give the 2009-2010 James A. Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School. He received a Jesse Dukeminier Award for the article "Documenting Gender". His first book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, was released in January 2012 from South End Press and nominated for a 2011 Lambda Literary Award in the category of Transgender Nonfiction.
Personal life
Spade grew up in rural Virginia, the child of a single mother who was sometimes on welfare. At the age of 9, he joined his mother and sister in cleaning houses and offices to make money. Two years later, he started cleaning by himself and moved on to painting summer rentals for additional income. At the age of 14, his mother died of lung cancer. Following her death, he lived with two sets of foster parents.
Spade graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and women's studies, and then graduated from the UCLA School of Law in 2001.
Spade is Jewish, and has worked closely with the Seattle chapter of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA).
