The opening of this video seems to me to reflect a rather crude understanding of “intersectionality.” Kat Blaque of Everyday Feminism talks to Riley Jay Dennis, also of Everyday Feminism, on the subject.
I stopped at 52 seconds and didn’t watch any more, so I don’t know what else they said, but the first 52 seconds are…underbaked.
Kat Blaque: In what ways do you [inaudible] yourself intersectional?
Riley Jay Dennis: I’m trans and non-binary, and a woman, an atheist, and polyamorous.
Kat Blaque: Wow, nice!
It’s as if it’s a contest – how many boxes can you tick? But that was never the point, was it? It was never supposed to be a competition, surely. Imagine:
Person 1: In what ways do you see yourself as intersectional?
Person 2: I’m poor and disabled, an undocumented immigrant, a high school dropout, and a woman.
Would person 1 say “Wow, nice!”? No, so why did Kat Blaque say it to Riley Jay Dennis? Why does she seem to see it as a win to have a lot of points?
I don’t know.
https://youtu.be/a8I9lzjzcCY
Comments
19 responses to “Let her count the ways”
I think I’m missing something: How can someone identify as both “non-binary” and “a woman”?
Someone can’t. It’s a contradiction. However in the comments on that video, a lot of people insist that someone can. It’s an astonishing parade of bullshit, with people making up “facts” as they type but asserting them as confidently as if they’d been common knowledge forever.
BUT – if someone does identify as both “non-binary” and “a woman” – the result is more competition points, and more people saying “Wow, nice!” Stupid boring humdrum women barely get one point, but non-binary trans women – that’s at least three, and probably more like 300.
Still not understanding what “non-binary” means, apart from “more interesting than you.”
One cool comment over on that video:
“Celiala shut your ugly ass up. “how progressive” this bitch just straight up insulted trans women on a TRANS WOMAN’S VIDEO. i have no respect for cis women like that. y’all can take your musty ass pussies somewhere else!”
Another cool (that is, incomprehensible) comment:
“Some nonbinary genders are feminine or actually female and some nonbinary people are nonbinary because they have more than one gender. Being nonbinary puts you under the Trans umbrella. A nonbinary Trans woman would be someone who’s assigned male at birth but who is a nonbinary woman. I can understand how it’s confusing as gender is very fluid and complicated.”
Sorry. One more:
“It’s so amazing to see someone on YT who is like me!! I’m agender, trans, and polyamorous!”
agender and trans? Wow, what does that mean? If you’re agender, then what are you transitioning to? Or from?
We have finally become totally enmeshed in Humpty Dumpty land.
A little Googling around suggests it means something like: leaning a bit towards “man” or “woman”, but on the whole feeling neutral enough to not want to get stuck withall the baggage that usually comes with the label. Which is fair enough, as a feeling about one’s own life. I mean, I’m not crazy about all the stupid shit that attaches to the “man” label, and I think have managed to shrug a good deal of it off as an adult. I’m just not clear on the benefit of having a label for every shade on the how-I-feel-about-my-anatomy-and-the-conventional-social-expectations-that-come-with-it spectrum.
A strange thing: I just ran across the phrase “self identifying binary targets” in a message on a robotics group mailing list. It made me laugh.
Isn’t everyone (that is, every single person) an assortment of socially constructed “male/masculine” and “female/feminine” traits?
I like dogs more than cats (“male”), don’t care about football (“female”), have no interest in fashion (“male”), and have a bad sense of direction (“female”).
Am I non-binary, or just a person? Does “non-binary” have to make reference to more important (but still arbitrary) gender signifiers?
Skipping over the problems everyone has already mentioned, in what way does that list demonstrate intersectionality? If I were to answer the question, I’d talk about the intersection of privilege and oppression in terms of my own identity: on the one hand, I’m a lesbian with several chronic illnesses (mental and physical), a domestic violence survivor, and a recovering alcoholic; on the other, I’m white with a graduate-level education, a salaried job that pays well, and stable family who have been able to provide huge amounts of financial and emotional support over the years. As far as I’m aware, that juxtaposition is the whole point of “intersectionality,” that there are different axes of oppression that don’t result in clear distinctions between “oppressed” and “oppressor.” Just because I may be the subject of discrimination for some reasons doesn’t mean I don’t have privilege in others, and vice versa.
I guess maybe the Oppression Olympics are more fun.
Hmmm. I have noted a tendency for people to downplay the advantages in their lives. of course, some people have literally no advantages in their lives. Very few of them, I suspect, are even on the internet let-alone blogging about social justice issues….
@ 11 ZugTheMegasaurus
You speak truly. May your wisdom be recognized by those who (erroneously) call themselves “gender critical”.
Silentbob #13, are you suggesting that anyone who calls themselves gender critical is erroneous in doing so?
So, once again, when these people are talking about the “binary”, they are implicitly making a claim about what’s going on inside other people’s heads. The premise is that there are “male” vs. “female” ways of thinking or feeling – so there’s your “binary” – and that this is in fact the only thing that makes someone a “man”, or a “woman”, or “binary” in the first place. By those criteria I don’t know of any “men”/”women”/”binary” people. But the people who go on about how special they are for falling outside the “binary” are the same people who insist that there is such a binary in the first place, and that it applies to everyone except themselves. The whole thing is basically one large strawman.
Yeah, Silentbob, I’m critical of trans activists’ notions of “gender” and the epistemology they use to justify it. You explain how it’s erroneous of me to call myself gender critical.
I’ll wait (but I won’t be holding my breath.)
Talk about taking a self-centered inventory of one’s intersectional adornments and assets.
A bit like listening to ‘Farmer Brown’ as he goes down his inventory of farm animals in the barn.
“I’ve got two pigs in lipstick, 16 transgendered hens who identify as cocks ( gender is a barnyard construct ), 5 intersectional grouse and a real cute binary milk cow”!
“NIIICE”!
I’d say that this gets the very notion of ‘intersectionality’ so wrong it’s painful. A person isn’t intersectional. Their beliefs, how they approach can (and I’d argue, should) be–they can be anti-racist, pro-women’s liberation, pro-gay rights, pro-economic justice and pro-trans rights, and being intersectional about those means watching out for places where you’re in danger of throwing one group under the bus in favor of another. (In short, Ophelia’s columns on this issue are really calls on trans activists to be MORE intersectional, thinking about how their actions and words affect women who are not trans.) It absolutely should not be about which boxes a particular individual can check off–or, if it is, it should be about the intersections of privilege, not the intersections of oppression. (I’m straight, white, middle-class cis male–I live at the intersection of Privilege Way, Privilege Avenue and Privilege Court, which is why I have to be particularly careful–folks like me can do a lot of damage without meaning to.)
I learned a new one today in yet another extension of the original LGBT acronym. LGBTQQ2S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning and two-spirit) people.
Two-spirit people? Gin and vodka, maybe?