Day: September 24, 2018

lenyberry:

fierceawakening:

thatonemushroom:

fierceawakening:

thatonemushroom:

fierceawakening:

So there’s been a lot of discussion on my dashboard lately about TERFs And how their rhetoric works, and it made me think of something I remember from college years ago.

I don’t know if these people were specifically TERFs or not, As I don’t recall them talking specifically about trans women, but I do remember a presentation given by two older feminists who supposedly were famous thinkers. I don’t remember who they were, but I do remember something interesting about the rhetoric that I think would be familiar to anyone who is critical of radical feminism.

They began their presentation by explaining why they feel feminism is necessary. And what they said was that they believe the patriarchy is the root of all other oppressions. They said that studies have been done (I’m not sure what the studies are or how reliable they are) that showed that cross culturally, everywhere on the planet, you would find male humans oppressing female humans. They credited this to average size and strength differences, which made it easy for men anywhere on the planet to assert social and sexual dominance over women.

They spoke about how much this bothered them, and how in their estimation every group of feminists has had to wrestle and sit with the idea that this happened all over the planet, universally, and women were not able to fight for their rights until society became more about thinking than fighting.

it really did feel creepy to hear. But I remember sitting there listening to them and thinking about whether this was true. And it seemed to me that if the root of oppression was the physically strong dominating the physically weak, it would seem to me that ableism would be prior. Because males need females to reproduce (absent sufficiently awesome Science) but deformed or sickly kids? We can just leave those to die.

And I didn’t know the word back then, but I think this was my first encounter with the idea of intersectionality. The idea that some people were so focused on the specific oppression they experienced and knew about that they would actually openly assert that every other form of oppression was just some kind of strange derivative of theirs.

I didn’t know the words I know now, but I remember thinking something wasn’t quite right. And everyone else in the room just kind of seemed in awe of this truth that they just learned that had made them all somber and sad. And I was just sitting there like “does this work?“

I don’t know. And like I said, I’m honestly not sure what they might’ve thought of trans women either. But it does make me very suspicious of people who claim that the world works one way at bottom, and that one way happens to hurt them most of all.

Some of the woke wocs among my former associates said the same sort of thing about racism, especially anti-blackness.

Everyone seems to want oppression to have started with them. Idk.

(Still seems to me like it would have to be ableism but I’m probably doing the same thing…)

You’re not building a grand liberation movement out of it, tho

No, I’m just wondering which vulnerabilities mean humans notice first.

There’s definitely A Coherent Argument to be made for it being ableism that’s more of a “root” thing. 

If sexism occurs because women are, on average, physically smaller and weaker than men

If racism almost always includes judgments upon various races’ capacity for intelligence or other skills

what else is that but an ability-based root to oppressions?

(i’m not saying that this argument is definitely The One True Thing, but, it at least makes some sense, and I can’t think of something else that seems MORE likely)

Very relevant post from a friend: There is ableism somewhere at the heart of your oppression, no matter what your oppression might be.

Not suggesting that it’s the same type of root thing at all; I’m pretty skeptical that there could be any single Base Oppression. (Which is definitely not what sie is trying to suggest, either.) But, so many other forms of oppression really do seem ro rely heavily on ableist ideas/assumptions to make value judgments.