Normal Life Summary

In Dean Spade’s book Normal Life, healthcare justice and systemic issues regarding gendered treatment and access to healthcare are discussed in depth, with a focus specifically on the effects of injustice and inaccessibility to transgender and intersex individuals. Normal Life was extremely personal in terms of the subject matter, which made it difficult to read through; however, I found myself nodding along as he outlined and went into detail on the various mechanisms surrounding the discrimination of people like me. The actions being made currently by neoliberal social and political movements are not enough to achieve the goals that trans political activists strive for, nor do they make much progress in doing so. However, they are much more …show more content…
Both the Gay Liberation Movement and ACT UP focused on issues affecting all manners of LGBT people, yet they pushed for mainstream acceptance via legal means, which meant that they had to push out the less “acceptable” looking members -- the queer and trans people of color -- in order to further their movement in the mainstream. In one instance of this, transgender issues were left out of a civil rights bill during the 1980s by the Gay Activists Alliance, an organization active in the Gay Liberation Movement, for being “too extreme” (Bronski par 5). In short, they were fighting for progress, but the so-called “progress” was really only progress for cisgender, white gay men. White, wealthy, able-bodied cisgender queer people are part of the LGBT community, yes, but they are the minority in comparison to the vast number of queer and trans people of …show more content…
While focused on policy issues, it prioritized white cisgender gay men and left out other populations who were affected by AIDS, namely sex workers, trans women, and people of color. As a result, AIDS and HIV still disproportionately affect those groups of people versus white cisgender gay men. According to the Center for Disease Control, “56% of black/African American transgender women had positive HIV test results” and [a]mong the 3.3 million HIV testing events reported to CDC in 2013, the highest percentages of newly identified HIV-positive persons were among transgender persons” (HIV par 3). Because ACT UP and other AIDS crisis organizations focused primarily on white cisgender gay men, queer and trans people of color’s access to health care is incredibly limited and almost non-existent, contributing to the still disproportionately high rates of HIV and AIDS within those