gender self-determination

all quotes from dean spade's essay, "compliance is gendered: struggling for gender self-determination in a hostile economy" from transgender rights

"public relief systems have also operated through moralistic understandings of sexuality and family structure to force recipients into compliance with sexist and heterosexist notions of womanhood and motherhood."

"day-to-day surveillance of low-income people and the rigid and punitive rule systems used in social services create a highly regulated context for the gender expression, sexuality, and family structure of low-income women who often rely on these systems to get out of economically dependent relationships with men."

"almost all of the institutions and programs that exist to control and exploit poor people and people of color in the united states are sex segregated."

"property ownership itself has been a raced and gendered right throughout u.s. history, and an individual's race, gender, and sexuality have operated as forms of property themselves.  similarly, interventions that would appear to seek to remedy the exploitative and damaging outcomes of our economic system have often been structured to control gendered behavior and expression and incentivize misogynist and heterosexist family norms."

"marriage incentives and requirements that mothers disclose the paternity of their children are only the most explicit examples of how the moral performance on which [welfare] benefit receipt is conditional is fundamentally a requirement that poor women rigidly obey conservative notions of gender role and family structure."

"these morality-based understandings of poverty play out in the day-to-day operation of social services programs that emphasize surveillance and gender regulation of poor people."

"access to homeless and domestic violence shelters is mediated through punitive processes where those looking for assistance are treated as morally and intellectually deficient and subjected to humiliating violations of privacy as an integral part of the disincentification of receiving services.  navigating benefits systems, shelter systems, essential medical services, and entanglement with the criminal justice system that is now a central aspect of low-income existence in order to survive is increasingly tied to the ability of each person to meet highly gendered and raced behavioral and expression requirements."

"gender segregation remains a central organizing strategy of systems of social control."

"almost everyone who comes to the sylvia rivera law project for services is facing serious consequences of failing to fit within a rigid binary gender structure in multiple systems and institutions: welfare, adult or juvenile justice, public education, voluntary or mandated drug treatment, homeless services, and mental and physical health care.  'compliance' is a central issue that my clients face in these systems.  they are unable to 'comply' or 'rehabilitate' because to do either means to match stereotypes associated with their birth genders."

"access to gender-related medical intervention is usually conditioned on successful performance of rigidly defined and harshly enforced understandings of binary gender, because many gender-transgressive people may not wish to undergo medical intervention, and because medical care of all kinds, but particularly gender-related medical care, remains extremely inaccessible to most low-income gender-transgressive people."

"while nondiscrimination policies may provide remedies in some important contexts, they do not address the broader problem that prevents gender self-determination and creates daily dangerous and deadly situations for poor, gender-transgressive people: the existence of legal gender classification."

"we need to expand resources for trainings and build political alliances so that domestic violence shelter providers and activists, homeless shelter providers and activists, welfare rights activists, the prison abolition movement, and others whose work is intimately tied to the fates of poor, gender-transgressive people come to understand gender self-determination and the elimination of sex segregation as a core component of the equality and justice their work seeks."

"sexual and gender liberation will never be meaningful if it is contingent on economic privilege, racial privilege, or genital status."