#identity politics

[lilithism1848]

[metalheadsforblacklivesmatter]

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

-fae

[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.

[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.

[animentality]

[odinsblog]

🗣️ Pay very close attention!

Please forget, for a moment, that many people live in the intersection of simultaneously being Black + LGBTQ + refugee + Asian. Instead, I am asking you to look at how the Republican culture wars are pitting one identity against the other.

DeSantis has banned any mention of Gay and Trans people, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Critical Race Theory, and much more… but now he is mandating Asian American history.

Florida and other Republican controlled legislators around the country are whitewashing and erasing Black history from school history textbooks, while also making Asian history a requirement. ⁉️

Please be just a little bit curious.

You must ask yourself, why?

WHY would an abjectly racist politician ban one culture’s history, but require another’s?

DeSantis is playing Asian people, the “model minority,” against—in his eyes—all of the “less desirable” minorities: Black people, Lgbtq+ people, etc. etc. etc. It’s a classic divide and conquer strategy.

Please see his ploy for what it is. We are all stronger together. Republicans know this. It’s why they’re working so hard to drive wedges between us.

Don’t fall for the okie doke.

[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.

[alwaysbewoke]

for the people who missed it the first time

[lilithism1848]

[amorphousgenderlesscryptid]

“Most young queer people have yet to deal with structural oppression like housing and employment discrimination, but chances are, they have dealt with invalidation and shame on a personal level. Invalidation and shame starts early in life and it’s easier to spot than the structural stuff, so it forms many young people’s conception of what discrimination is…This also reflects in the endless churning of the discourse machine. Constant infighting about issues that seem simple on paper, or in posts. The same arguments happen over and over – ‘Are asexuals part of the community?’ ‘Who gets to call themselves a lesbian?’ No progress is ever made, no consensus ever reached. Spending time in offline communities, especially among people who came out years or decades before you, you realize these issues are much more nuanced than you thought – well, that, or you realize they don’t matter at all. With lived experience comes the lesson that life is frequently complicated and tough to pin down.”

- Lily Alexandre, "Millions of Dead Genders: A MOGAI Retrospective"

[decolonize-the-left]

Time to learn about more people and things that influenced my politics~

The Combahee River Collective.

They were a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization active in Boston, Massachusetts from 1974 to 1980.

"The Collective argued that both the white feminist movement and the Civil Rights Movement were not addressing their particular needs as Black women and more specifically as Black lesbians.

Racism was present in the mainstream feminist movement, while Delaney and Manditch-Prottas argue that much of the Civil Rights Movement had a sexist and homophobic reputation."

The Collective is perhaps best known for developing the Combahee River Collective Statement, a key document in the history of contemporary Black feminism and the development of the concepts of identity politics as used among political organizers and social theorists, and for introducing the concept of interlocking systems of oppression, including but not limited to gender, race, and homophobia, a fundamental concept of intersectionality. Gerald Izenberg credits the 1977 Combahee statement with the first usage of the phrase "identity politics".

Source

Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith were the primary authors of the Combahee River Collective Statement in 1977. [...]They sought to destroy what they felt were the related evils of capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy while rejecting the belief in lesbian separatism. Finally their statement acknowledged the difficulties black women faced in their grassroots organizing efforts due to their multiple oppressions.

In “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood,” Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion: We exists as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle—because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world. [2] Wallace is pessimistic but realistic in her assessment of Black feminists’ position, particularly in her allusion to the nearly classic isolation most of us face. We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.

[queerism1969]

[fernstream]

"By 1980 we felt as feminists that it was important to look at our specific oppressions and articulate them. But our attempts to recognise different oppressions very quickly developed into a hierarchy of oppression. We moved away from looking at the complexity of women's lives to a points-count system, where the oppressions were added up. She with the greatest or most oppression was right - about whatever topic was being discussed. It happened first in London. A friend wrote to me about a meeting she had attended where one discussion was settled when a woman said 'Speaking as an Irish woman I think X'. Her opponent in this discussion had replied 'speaking as an incest survivor, I think Y* Naturally, Y was the course of action decided upon. My friend commented, 'The sad thing is that the Irish woman is also an incest survivor, but she is not ready to acknowledge that in public - if she had, she would have won the argument.? The points-count system developed further after a conference on Child Sexual Abuse in 1985. Numbers were limited, the conference was full, and some (white) women were turned away. Then a group of black women arrived and insisted white women leave so they could participate. From then on places were left at conferences for black or other additionally oppressed women. The reservation of places later extended to social events. [...] Then there was the other side of the coin. At the Lesbian Summer School in 1988, I disagreed with a black woman and a white woman in a debate on pornography. A socialist-feminist journal reporting on the conference mentioned me by name, and accused me of racism as I had argued with a black woman and an Irish woman. This was what was liable to happen if a woman did not at once concede she was wrong, and the woman with more oppression was right. This pressure resulted in a great deal of silencing. How then to articulate your views in this climate? Clearly, you had to have an identity to speak from. You had to be able to say 'Speaking as a ..? to even enter a debate. What had been part of your oppression became your identity. [...] The effect of Identity Politics has been to stifle debate. Debate still goes on in academia -- there the name of the game is debate. For these of us outside, debate has more or less ceased. Identity Politics finished off most of our newsletters. Identity Politics inhibited discussion at conferences until many of us ceased going to them, and finally no one was willing to organize any. Without debate the [Women's Liberation Movement] cannot function."

-- Sandra McNeill, "Identity Politics," in All the Rage: Reasserting Radical Lesbian Feminism, 1996

[philosophicalconservatism]

"Of one man in especial, beyond anyone else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or anti-religious prejudice. "

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) U.S. President.

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

It do be like that.