A Roadmap for Change: Federal Policy Recommendations for Addressing the Criminilization of LGBT People and People Living with HIV

Each year in the United States, thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, Two Spirit, queer, questioning and gender non-conforming (LGBT) people and people living with HIV come in contact with the criminal justice system and fall victim to similar miscarriages of justice.According to a recent national study, a startling 73% of all LGBT people and PLWH surveyed have had face-to-face contact with police during the past five years.1 Five percent of these respondents also report having spent time in jail or prison, a rate that is markedly higher than the nearly 3% of the U.S. adult population whoare under some form of correctional supervision (jail, prison, probation, or parole) at any point in time.In fact, LGBT people and PLWH, especially Native and LGBT people and PLWH of color, aresignificantly overrepresented in all aspects of the penal system, from policing, to adjudication,to incarceration. Yet their experiences are often overlooked, and little headway has been madein dismantling the cycles of criminalization that perpetuate poor life outcomes and push already vulnerable populations to the margins of society.The disproportionate rate of LGBT people and PLWH in the criminal system can best be understoodin the larger context of widespread and continuing discrimination in employment, education, socialservices, health care, and responses to violence

Be Professional!

In 2010, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender published a series of letters between Adrienne Davis and Bob Chang entitled, Making Up Is Hard to Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation in the Law School Classroom, along with three response pieces by Adele Morrison, Darren Rosenblum and Dean Spade. Be Professional! is written in letter form like Making Up Is Hard to Do and discusses Spade\u27s experience becoming and being a trans law professor, as well as broader questions about activism, academia, professionalism and the neo-liberal academy

Laws as Tactics

This article will look at how trans scholarship and activism have taken up disciplinary critiques of gender, often influenced by Butler, and suggest that further development of critical trans perspectives focused on sites of regularization is needed, for which Butler\u27s work on governmentality can be useful. To start, it describes some of the key concepts from Butler\u27s work that have been taken up in trans politics and briefly reviews the distinctions Foucault offers between sovereignty, discipline and biopolitics. The article then examines some of the ways that trans politics has critiqued disciplinary norms, looking at resistance to the medicalization of trans identity and the response to anti-trans feminism. Next, it looks at areas where the operation of racialized-gendered normalization at the population level is being examined and might be further troubled by trans scholars and activists. Here the article looks at critiques of identity surveillance practices that use gender as a category of identity verification and critiques of certain trans law reform projects. Using Butler\u27s work, the article raises questions about the role of law reform in resistance to various sites of gender regularization and suggests areas of further inquiry that might be taken up by scholars and activists engaging a critical trans politics rooted in a skepticism about law reform projects

Laws as Tactics

This symposium invites us to consider the impact of Judith Butler’s work on legal scholarship in the area of gender and sexuality. I am interested in reflecting particularly on trans politics and law for two reasons. First, because Butler’s work has had such a significant impact on the emergence of the current iteration of trans politics of the 1990s and 2000s. Second, because I believe there is a great deal more that Butler’s work can offer to significant questions facing trans resistance formations as the field of trans legal rights advocacy institutionalizes and as trans legal scholarship engages and responds to that institutionalization. In particular, I am interested in how Butler’s work has provided analytical models for considering the role that norms and normalization play in both disciplinary and biopolitical modes of governance relating to gender. This analysis is essential to understanding the limitations of certain legal rights frameworks for addressing harms created by racialized and gendered systems of meaning and control

Documenting Gender

This Article provides an analysis of gender reclassification policies- policies which determine when an administrative agency will change an individual\u27s gender marker on its records-in three contexts: policies related to gender markers on identification documents, policies related to placement in sex-segregated facilities, and policies related to the state provision of health care that is prohibited based on the gender on record for the person seeking coverage. The Article looks at the significant variation in these policies across agencies to demonstrate the instability of gender as a category of identity verification and to ask whether the assumed usefulness of gender tracking in the variety of state programs reviewed is well-founded. It also places these concerns in the context of the War on Terror, which has included many policy initiatives aimed at standardizing recordkeeping and surveillance practices nationally. By exposing the consequences of such national standardization in the specific instance of the gender reclassification rule matrix, the Article raises questions about the nature of the War on Terror as a state-building project, classification as an equality issue, the limitation of privacy and accuracy-based critiques of the War on Terror, and the role of surveillance in population-level state caretaking projects

Trans Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape

These edited Keynote remarks from the Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review Symposium on transgender law address how questions of law reform strategy relate to critical understandings of neoliberalism. The paper addresses questions of administrative governance, identity documentation, the relationship between law and social movements, and questions of economic and racial justice as applied to transgender politics

A Storm at Dusk

pages 100-10