#Identity politics

[odinsblog]

“I had a Zionist grandmother who grew up, she grew up in Poland, she was supposed to go to Israel to study. Her father had paid for her for the first year of tuition. And then in 1939, when she was in her last year of high school, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland.

She ended up for a couple of years in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland, which was how she ended up in Moscow. And by the time Germany occupied all of Poland. So then she spent the rest of her life living in Moscow.

And 45 years after the end of the war, dreaming of being able to go to Israel, but not being able to because she was now stuck in the Soviet Union. And so I think I was very infected by, infected in a non-derogatory sense, by my grandmother's dream of Israel. And I had my own dream of Israel growing up as a, as a Jewish kid who was bullied and beaten up and teased.

I just wanted to live in a country that, that was majority Jewish. I could not understand why my parents would want to go to the United States and live in another country where Jews are in the minority. My parents on the other hand just didn't want to be Jewish.

Like their only experience of being Jewish was being systematically discriminated against. They were both born during the Second World War, so they were second generation, utterly non-religious and separated from any Jewish tradition, except the tradition of being a targeted minority. So they just, they just wanted to go somewhere where they wouldn't be Jewish.

And so when I was 15, a year after we moved to the United States, I actually went to Israel planning to stay there and didn't. For a variety of reasons, but one of them was being confronted with, with what I found at the age of 15, a shockingly racist society.

So the first time I went to Israel was when I was 15, it was 1982. And then there was like an 18, 17 or 18 year gap.

And I started traveling to Israel regularly from 1999, 2000. And the first time I went back was to actually complete the research on the book about my grandmother's. So it's been a good 25 years that I've been coming back.

And I think Israel has undergone a lot of changes in that time. But no, I don't think that like the kind of Ashkenazi Sephardic racism that shocked me in 1982 has found subtler expressions. But politics of settlement have only been exacerbated.

And I still find them extremely painful to observe, especially because some of my beloved relatives are settlers.

I did visit them this last time I was in Israel, because I really wanted to see what it looked like for them.

I was compelled to go visit them because of a Facebook post that my cousin made. And just to give you an idea, I really hold these people very, very dear. But for years, I would go to Israel, Palestine and not tell them that I was there, because I kind of couldn't face them.

So it's been a number of years since I last saw them, a number of years since I went to that settlement. But my cousin had posted something on Facebook. It was a picture of her son playing the violin.

And she wrote, in one of the houses where they stayed in Gaza, there was a violin. He played for his soldiers and then put the violin back. And I found that post-heart-rending and eye-opening, the picture of him playing the violin was not from Gaza.

It was from earlier, but he had apparently told her about playing the violin in Gaza. And obviously she was worried about her son serving in Gaza and so she's posting about it. And she wants to assert that he is a good boy.

But also, entirely missing from that post and from her world view is that somebody lived in that house in Gaza. That violin belonged to somebody. Like, it was such an extraordinary example of the blindness that we were talking about a little bit earlier that I wanted to go visit them and kind of engage with that blindness more.

And I got a really good dose of blindness to the point where, and we had this incredible moment when we went walking around the settlement after Shabbat lunch. And we sort of got to this hilltop where there's a swing and there's a little free library.

And we're looking out on a Palestinian village. And I said, what are we looking at, to my cousin? And she was trying to get her bearings.

And she said, where are we looking? And she named another settlement, which was kind of, which was not on our line of sight. It was like this literal example of looking at an actual Palestinian village that she drives past every day.

And before the village was sealed off after October 7th, she used to get gas there. And she knows it exists. But somehow she, also it also doesn't enter her geography.

It is nameless.”

—Masha Gessen, the descendant of Holocaust survivors, discusses the dehumanization of Palestinians (part 2 of 3)

[boreal-sea]

Identities were meant to help us find communities with people who shared our struggles. This is good! In a group, you have power! You can get things done! Your voice is louder!

But these days, people are using identities to build walls, to cut people off, and to isolate themselves. And that, my friends, is not helpful. That is not coalition building. That is not community building.

Identities are all good and well until you're incapable of seeing how you could ever possibly have something in common with someone else who isn't part of the identical niche box you've built for yourself and the two other people whose identities perfectly match yours.

Identities are great until you have, for example, radfems incapable of seeing how a poor woman and a poor man might have any similar experiences under late-stage capitalism.

[metalheadsforblacklivesmatter]

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRW6ns6v/

-fae

[lilithism1848]

[neuropoppins]

ND without the T - IT'S NOT OUR IDEOLOGY!

[intersexfairy]

with how we're all aware of how toxic masculinity leads men/boys to harass, assault, and abuse other men/boys, you'd think the fact they can be harmed by patriarchy and misogyny wouldn't be a controversial statment. *especially* marginalized men. but alas, many people have taken the "identity" in identity politics so literally, they just end up ignoring and reinforcing the harmful things they claim to be against.

also if you think the pain of the men harmed by toxic masculinity isn't a big deal because they're men... that is. that is literally you believing in toxic masculinity. like i thought we all knew part of toxic masculinity is that men shouldn't feel pain, they shouldn't cry, they can't ask for help or be truly hurt, etc. etc. and if they do any of these things, then they're not real men and not only deserve to be emasculated, but deserve to suffer. you just switched it to they are real men so they deserve to suffer.

and even though again, this is extra harmful for marginalized men, i shouldn't have to say that for you to care. if you only give support to people harmed by these systems when you think deserve it, you're always going to end up propping these systems up at some point. maybe you should stop that.

also. to any man reading this who feels like their pain doesn't matter: it does. you deserve to exist in a world where you're safe to be yourself and feel emotions, and get genuine protection and support. we all need to exist in that world. none of us deserve this hell.

[decolonize-the-everything]

WW3 will be white supremacists vs everyone else.

Not a singular Western country in support of Israel is innocent of colonization, war crimes, treaty violations, or having white supremacists in politics.

Each one of them has been ignoring protests and strikes in their own countries for human rights and protections. Human rights and protections that have thus far been denied btw. Meanwhile they give themselves raises and protections against protesters and so called "terrorists." They inflate military budgets while their people grow more agitated and they don't care.

Not a single one of them have a thriving, happy people.

Historically they've been awful for Black, indigenous, and immigrant populations despite many of their countries being founded on immigration. And even in modern times all of them currently have trials going on to combat state violence such as genocide, rights violations, or police brutality.

None of them have ever been paragons of human rights. None of them represent the world's moral compass least of all Germany.

So why and how is it that you can look at the USA and German support of Israel and your thought is "finally!" instead of seeing a red flag.

White supremacists are teaming up in a Big way.

And this time they're letting white Jewish people count as white which seems to have short-circuited ur brains so let me remind y'all that Nazis hate Jewish people but not every white suprmacist is a Nazi. And white supremacists have a long history of providing white Jewish people with conditional white privileges

White supremacists exploiting white Jewish people for their vote or political support is nothing new and continues to be no surprise.

We can look at Trump's attempt to do exactly that as recently as 2019. We know he isn't an ally of any Jewish person anywhere and yet here he is trying to get right-wingers hyped up with virtue signaling.

The same article addressed how this right wing rhetoric and trying to incite it among Republicans is itself antisemitic and careless.

The past 24 hours have cemented President Donald Trump's reputation as America's "racist in chief." After tweeting a hateful diatribe about how four Democratic congresswomen of color should "go back" to where they came from, the President attempted to justify his racism with accusations that these members of Congress are anti-Israel. On Monday morning, he tweeted that these lawmakers "have made Israel feel abandoned by the U.S." and cited South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who called them all "anti-America" and "anti-Semitic."

[...]And despite his feigning concern about anti-Semitism, nearly three-quarters of Jews feel less secure than they did two years ago and the majority of Jews attribute their rising insecurity to Trump's policies. More specifically, many are concerned about Trump encouraging right-wing extremism and Republicans tolerating white nationalism within their ranks. In fact, according to a March Gallup poll, more than 70% of Jews continue to disapprove of Trump and only 16% now identify as Republicans.

....then Biden supported a fucking genocide in the name of trying to establish a safe place for Jewish people. When we all know his interest is actually oil in the middle east.

There is no fucking way either of them or the USA cares about any Jewish people or had their best interest in mind.

So that entire argument aside....

We can't keep letting white supremacists play these identity politic games and turning us on each other so we're keeping each other oppressed instead of helping each other be free.

Right now there are white queer people in my asks calling me (an Ojibwe) a Russian psyop for not wanting to vote blue.

That's the shit I'm talking about.

At the end of the day I don't want anyone except white supremacy and white supremacists to be decimated. I want a liberated and free people all over the globe.

Is that what you want too?

Then we have got to start focusing on the big picture. You are not my enemy and I am not yours. Our enemies are the same and they are unified.

We should be too.

International solidarity against white supremacy for the first time, for forever.

[liberalsarecool]

To limit assault rifles would limit white male supremacy. Conservatives want as much white power as possible, thus, more guns.

Everything else is a misdirection/distraction.

[alwaysbewoke]

[odinsblog]

“I'm observing such a huge gap between different social groups that I didn't even realize were different. I, you know, most of my friends are in the media. A lot of my journalist friends are just much better informed.

A lot of them have had experience reporting in Israel, Palestine, and are quite critical of both Israel and the antisemitism narrative. Then, like, my wife is a lawyer, and her circle is a little bit different, right? It's not dominated by media people, like people in the law or in other professions seem to be broadly much more kind of taken by the sense of profound insecurity and shift in the American Jewish experience.

I think we sort of see different things, for example, when we watch the hearings in Congress on antisemitism on campus.

The university presidents, of which there have now been two hearings, one with three presidents, one with the president of Colombia, and there will be many, many more. And what I see is a right-wing campaign against higher education that is weaponizing antisemitism as an idea, right? Not antisemitism as a practice.

And what they see is, with the possible exception of the president of Colombia, is people who represent institutions or lead institutions that they feel an affinity with, often institutions that they graduated from, who are not standing up for them. Which I find that viewing of those hearings somewhat shocking because people seem to be turning off their critical faculties. But people, intelligent, educated, politically astute people don't turn off their critical faculties unless they're scared.

So I think the underlying fear is real. But just because it's real, it doesn't mean it's justified.

I think a factual account of what we're seeing on campuses now is that this generation of Americans is far more critical of Israel than their parents' generation. And this is true of both Jews and non-Jews. I think that they look at information available to them and they see a 57-year brutal illegal occupation.

And they don't understand how it's possible that their parents and the politicians that their parents support and the politicians who come and give commencement addresses and all that other stuff that I can say about politicians, how it is possible that these people support that state? I think that is an entirely understandable view. It also reflects a huge generation gap.

I think some of those young people are assholes, and some of them are antisemites. I think it's a small minority of the protesters, and it is not actually part of the critique. The protesters' demands, the protesters' organizing beliefs are not in any way or shape antisemitic.

And then there are Jewish students who were brought up Zionist, who were brought up to identify strongly with the state of Israel, who are, I think, a little bit like my cousin in the settlements again. They see these protests, and even probably the participation of their fellow Jewish students in these protests, as threatening their core identity, as threatening their ties to their families, as threatening everything that they were taught for the first 18 years of their lives is true. And of course they feel rattled, of course they feel unsettled, of course they feel threatened.

Like, wouldn't you, if you felt that everything you had believed in was being turned on its head, and if you, by apparently reasonable people? And so you have a couple of options. One is to look at what the protestors are saying, to engage with the facts, to engage with the critique of everything you've ever believed.

There was a terrific, George Curran's podcast a couple of weeks ago with three Columbia students, one of whom sort of narrated that kind of trajectory, getting to university and finding this stuff out and having their mind blown. That's a very difficult path, and it's a very difficult path, especially if you are, say, a first year student in 23, 24.

And then there's the easier path of staying integrated in your community, in your beliefs, and saying this is antisemitic.

Because unfortunately the things that the protestors are talking about are so horrible that you can't say, okay, let's agree to disagree, that you can't hold both of these things in your mind at the same time.

You can't continue to hold your family's uncritical, long-standing support of Israel, and an understanding of what is happening in Gaza and the occupation that has preceded the war in Gaza.

So yeah, of course they feel rattled. That doesn't mean that they're being surrounded by antisemitism.”

—Masha Gessen, the descendant of Holocaust survivors, discusses campus protests (part 3 of 3)

[animentality]

[hussyknee]

If anyone has a problem with saying "rest in power" to the white man that self-immolated himself and yelled "Free Palestine" till he burned to death then I want you to block me right the fuck now. You are so morally bankrupt and brainwashed by western neoliberal identity politics that you aren't worth spitting on. There's nobody resting in more power than that kid.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Colin Wright

Published: May 3, 2023

The transgender movement has left many intelligent Americans confused about sex. Asked to define the word “woman” during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings last year, Ketanji Brown Jackson demurred, saying “I’m not a biologist.” I am a biologist, and I’m here to help.

Are sex categories in humans empirically real, immutable and binary, or are they mere “social constructs”? The question has public-policy implications related to sex-based legal protections and medicine, including whether males should be allowed in female sports, prisons and other spaces that have historically been segregated by sex for reasons of fairness and safety.

Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union frequently claims that the binary concept of sex is a recent invention “exclusively for the purposes of excluding trans people from legal protections.” Scottish politician Maggie Chapman asserted in December that her rejection of the “binary and immutable” nature of sex was her motivation for pursuing “comprehensive gender recognition for nonbinary people in Scotland.” (“Nonbinary” people are those who “identify” as neither male nor female.)

When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; females, ova, or large ones. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes. Sex is binary.

Intersex people, whose genitalia appear ambiguous or mixed, don’t undermine the sex binary. Many gender ideologues, however, falsely claim the existence of intersex conditions renders the categories “male” and “female” arbitrary and meaningless. In “Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex” (1998), the historian of science Alice Dreger writes: “Hermaphroditism causes a great deal of confusion, more than one might at first appreciate, because—as we will see again and again—the discovery of a ‘hermaphroditic’ body raises doubts not just about the particular body in question, but about all bodies. The questioned body forces us to ask what exactly it is—if anything—that makes the rest of us unquestionable.”

In reality, the existence of borderline cases no more raises questions about everyone else’s sex than the existence of dawn and dusk casts doubt on day and night. For the vast majority of people, their sex is obvious. And our society isn’t experiencing a sudden dramatic surge in people born with ambiguous genitalia. We are experiencing a surge in people who are unambiguously one sex claiming to “identify” as the opposite sex or as something other than male or female.

Gender ideology seeks to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional practice of classifying people as simply either male or female is grossly outdated and should be abandoned for a revolutionary concept of “gender identity.” This entails that males wouldn’t be barred from female sports, women’s prisons or any other space previously segregated according to our supposedly antiquated notions of “biological sex,” so long as they “identify” as female.

But “intersex” and “transgender” mean entirely different things. Intersex people have rare developmental conditions that result in apparent sex ambiguity. Most transgender people aren’t sexually ambiguous at all but merely “identify” as something other than their biological sex.

Once you’re conscious of this distinction, you will begin to notice gender ideologues attempting to steer discussions away from whether men who identify as women should be allowed to compete in female sports toward prominent intersex athletes like South African runner Caster Semenya. Why? Because so long as they’ve got you on your heels making difficult judgment calls on a slew of complex intersex conditions, they’ve succeeded in drawing your attention away from easy calls on unquestionably male athletes like 2022 NCAA Division I women’s swimming and diving champion Lia Thomas. They shift the focus to intersex to distract from transgender.

Acknowledging the existence of rare difficult cases doesn’t weaken the position or arguments against allowing males in female sports, prisons, restrooms and other female-only spaces. In fact, it’s a much stronger approach because it makes a crucial distinction that the ideologues are at pains to obscure.

Crafting policy to exclude males who identify as women, or “trans women,” from female sports, prisons and other female-only spaces isn’t complicated. Trans women are unambiguously male, so the chances that a doctor incorrectly recorded their sex at birth is zero. Any “transgender policy” designed to protect female spaces need only specify that participants must have been recorded (or “assigned,” in the current jargon) female at birth.

Crafting effective intersex policies is more complicated, but the problem of intersex athletes in female sports is less pressing than that of males in female sports, and there seem to be no current concerns arising from intersex people using female spaces. It should be up to individual organizations to decide which criteria or cut-offs should be used to keep female spaces safe and, in the context of sports, safe and fair. It is imperative, however, that such policies be rooted in properties of bodies, not “identity.” Identity alone is irrelevant to issues of fairness and safety.

Ideologues are wrong to insist that the biology of sex is so complex as to defy all categorization. They’re also wrong to represent the sex binary in an overly simplistic way. The biology of sex isn’t quite as simple as common sense, but common sense will get you a long way in understanding it.

[neuropoppins]

Fuck this shit. Let's split!

IT'S TIME FOR A SPLIT ✂️✂️✂️✂️✂️🌈 ND without the T Did you know LGB without the T? Do you know WHY?

[lilithism1848]