Guest post: When did solidarity become a dirty word amongst progressives?
Originally a comment by tiggerthewing on It’s been a long day.
Honestly, talk about privilege – if the worst thing happening in your life is someone calling you female-bodied on Facebook, you have less to worry about than 99% (at least) of humanity.
One of the ludicrous things that I’ve in read comments by people in the so-called ‘trans activism’ group is the objection to calling a woman a ‘vagina-haver’ on the grounds that trans women don’t all have vaginas, and suggest ‘female bodied’ as being inclusive; followed by others saying that ‘female-bodied’ is ‘transphobic’ and we should say ‘uterus-havers’.
If the in-group can’t agree on terminology, why the hell are they coming here and ranting at the rest of us?
I’m female-bodied; it’s what makes me trans. Female refers to sex. When I had reproductive sex in the past, it was my body that got pregnant. It’s the body of a man in the sense that it belongs to me, but it isn’t a male body (biological sex category).
I’m not a uterus-haver (or the even more ludicrous term I read today, ‘uterine person’) because mine was removed decades ago. Lots of women have had their wombs removed; that doesn’t stop society at large treating them as if they still have them. And that is where gender comes in – it’s the way people are treated and expected to behave, based on perceived biological sex.
It is imperative that we band together to dismantle that particular set of boxes, because if we don’t no amount of foot-stamping and goal-post-moving with regard to how feminists are to be allowed to refer to one another will make the damnedest bit of difference to how the rest of the world treats non-conformists. Except that they might be laughing uncontrollably at the same time as beating people up for perceived failure to live up to gender norms.
Solidarity – since when did that become a dirty word amongst progressives? Probably at the same time ‘woman’ did, and amongst the same people. Fifth columnists.
Fist raised.
I stand with Tigger the Wing.
It astonishes me that this even needs to be said, and astonishes me even moreso that I nodded along with it saying “yep, yep, yep” as if it were news to me, when I know that it’s not, because the discussion has been so totally hamstrung by demands for thought conformance. THIS is why we need to be able to talk about these things.
*Blush*
Thanks, people.
Had I known that my spontaneous rant was going to become a guest post, I might have checked it for typos, word order inversions and grammatical errors first. Oops.
Fantastic post!! Thank you tiggerthewing!
ALways be prepared for the possibility that a spontaneous rant may become a guest post. You never know when the scythe will strike.
Just read this for the fourth time. It’s still gold.
Every time I read this again it makes even more sense.
Solidarity implies reciprocality, and that’s a very hard thing for narcissists to manage.
Put another way: if your main goal is to recognize the specialness of every snowflake, your snowballs ain’t gonna do shit when you throw them at the oppressor.
Ophelia is unpredictable that way, tiggerthewing. If you make sense in her comment threads, she may just take your comment and highlight it. She’s very rude that way, taking sensible comments and musing upon them, or underscoring them to allow others to muse upon them as well. It’s a very rude, very outdated and potentially windbag-like way of thinking.
Also, too, “/snark” for anyone who isn’t in on the joke.
MrFancyPants, in one way I love it – my sister thinks I’m famous – but I’m still recovering from a Catholic upbringing, if you know what I mean, and have to fight the urge to scuttle under a rock when the spotlight falls on me.
Chris Clarke, that was perfect. It prompted this thought…
The internet is a paradise for narcissists – they can self-promote to their hearts’ content, and the louder/more prolific they are, the nearer the top of the pile they get. Whilst the vast majority of people are being shouted down, spoken over and ignored.
The social justice movement was started to address various genuine real-world oppressions, but has been taken over by people collecting them competitively online like merit badges. “Look at MEEEEEE! I’m oppressed in so many more ways than you!” Of course, seeing as they are amongst the most privileged and pampered people on the planet, they have to invent ways in which they are more oppressed than their peers and what better way to do it than by claiming that they are the victims of violence where none exists?
“Uterine persons” — makes it sound like we’re just walking wombs.
It occurs to me that terms like “uterus-haver” and so on fit nicely with right wing politicians who silence female politicians for talking about reproductive rights for using “vulgarity” on the legislature floor. Words like vagina and uterus are banned from some state legislatures.
So… can’t talk about women or females in terms of reproduction, on one hand, and can’t talk about the biology in specific terms on the other. Basically, just stop talking about women’s rights, unless we are talking about trans women, of course… they’re so much cooler than the women who lack the mot essential part of a human being.
Tiggerthewing, I’ve been musing on whether there’s a connection between the people involved in this being of the age cohort known as “the selfie generation” and the fact that they seem to think gender identity– which is basically about your individual image in the public eye– is so much more important than issues of structural sexism.
Fascinating hypothesis, Samantha – and I bet that there would be a sociology PhD in studying that.
Plus bollox to the notion that we are going to be prevented from talking about women’s issues, however much they might try to censor our language.
Thank you, tiggerthewing! Well worth re-reading.
Most excellent. The Oppression Olympics has had me seriously contemplating walking away from any secular activism outside of the medical/scientific realm.
Kudos to Chris Clarke for the snowflake analogy; it’s perfect.
I remember noticing back in University that organizations ostensibly for good causes could, over time, lose all nuance and be taken over by the bandwagon-jumper types. Because when you’re running a mostly volunteer organization, it tends to depend on the time and enthusiasm of its members; and people who don’t take the time to think about how complex the issues actually might be often have more of both. Heuristics let you make snap decisions. Shame those decisions are often likely to be wrong as more data comes in…
This is all not helped by the shoutier members usually getting more press because they make ‘a better story’, either.