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December 08, 2009
14 notes

It’s A Fight for Our Lives

Sometimes, it seems like anti-race/sex/class-ism movements are in a large race to the bottom, that black people are fighting for position among hispanic populations, that white men think that women and minorities are against them, that men and women treat others as objects in which the darker side of our personalities can be projected, and transwomen/transmen are vigorously attacked by cisgendered people, be it feminists or anti-feminists. Everyone’s calling foul and not opening up to each other.

But I’m not that one. I’m not going to erase someone else’s experience and what that means for them, just as much, I’ll be dead before someone simply erases mine. My experience isn’t necessarily the typical black experience, or the typical lower-middle/middle class experience, or the typical gender experience. Not much about me is considered mainstream. But I know a lot of people connect to the mainstream, which I respect and am open to.

I know one thing, though: I’ll be damned if I let stand in my spheres of influence, the erasure, violence, and willful intolerance, that comes from being close-minded and ignorant about the interconnectedness of the basics of the human condition. We’re all fighting against the darker forces of fear and complacency that are fed to us everyday. To care isn’t easy, but when you do, and seek to understand, even if you don’t agree, everything becomes easier.

Tags: gender race privilege fear ciscentrism sexism racism

Quote
November 24, 2009
"Ultimately, the definition of male privilege that non-trans woman feminists are working off of is hopelessly ciscentric. Does it make any sense to say that trans women ‘have’ male privilege because we didn’t experience certain aspects of sexism that cis women experience, or did not experience it as intensely, without also saying that cis women ‘have’ male privilege because they don’t experience certain aspects of sexism that we do, or not as intensely? If we benefit from sexism against cis women, then cis women benefit from sexism against us. Cissexual women’s privilege compared to transsexual women isn’t just about being cissexual in a vacuum—their cissexuality also mellows misogyny directed at them. The only way to realistically argue that post-transition trans women have male privilege is to silence our own herstories and hold cissexual lives as the true standard of reality—which is exactly what the accusation of male privilege is intended to do."

— Beyond Inclusion « Taking Up Too Much Space

Tags: transgender cissexism mpriviledge fpriviledge ciscentrism