Tag: Allies

  • Be sure not to CODDLE VIOLENT OPPRESSORS

    A strange conversation, or constellation of conversations, on Twitter this morning.

    It started with a piece Alice Dreger wrote yesterday, How to Be An Ally to Cis-Women. She tweeted a link to it. Later she retweeted and commented on a reaction to her piece.

    Alice Dreger ‏@AliceDreger 7h7 hours ago
    Alice Dreger retweeted Zoé S.
    I commit “structural violence” by asking we be allowed to talk/joke/write/sing about the bodies we were born with.

    Zoé S. ‏@ztsamudzi
    I’m so aghast at @AliceDreger’s list. But at this point, she and others are far too invested in structural violence to believe otherwise.

    Too invested in structural violence? What can Zoé S mean by that? I wondered, so I looked at the whole long string of tweets about Alice Dreger’s piece. It’s full of that kind of thing.

    Like this one:

    Zoé S. ‏@ztsamudzi 7 hours ago
    Trans women don’t need to be an ally to us cis women because it isn’t incumbent upon them to CODDLE VIOLENT OPPRESSORS.

    What VIOLENT OPPRESSORS? Why is Zoé S claiming that cis women are VIOLENT OPPRESSORS? What can she possibly mean by saying that?

    Why are so many people, including cis women, so enraged at cis women? Why are they claiming we are VIOLENT OPPRESSORS?

    And this:

    Zoé S. ‏@ztsamudzi 7 hours ago

    Fellow cis women, be lucky that “TERF” is all you’re being called: violent patriarchal transmisogynistic abusive gatekeeper comes to mind.

    And this:

    Zoé S. ‏@ztsamudzi 7 hours ago

    I don’t have any well-reasoned thing to say anymore. Just shut up with this violent understanding of sex & gender, leave trans women alone.

    What is a “violent understanding of sex & gender”?

    And this:

    Zoé S. ‏@ztsamudzi 7 hours ago

    We cis women owe our trans sisters OUR support because we are directly responsible for the state & interpersonal structures abusing them.

    How? How are we directly responsible for that?

    Maybe the answer is depressingly simple – we’re not, but it’s easy to rage and shout at cis women on Twitter while it’s much more difficult to do anything about state & interpersonal structures.

    It’s easy, yes, but is it productive and useful? No, it’s not. It creates hostility where there doesn’t need to be any. Trans people need much better allies than this.

  • You say tomato I say mascarpone

    Marc David Barnhill suggests that “intersectionality” is relevant to this issue, and I replied that in a way that’s another way of talking about mattering and the mattering map.

    Some intersections are relatively trivial. Some places on the mattering map are very small, or picked out in frivolous colors. It’s possible to be very passionate about Star Trek or Shakespeare or hip hop or Emmylou Harris while still being perfectly willing to make alliances with people who hate the cultural products you love and love the ones you hate. It’s not just possible, it’s easy. Lots of categories are like that. They may be important for friendships, but they’re not important for alliances.

    But when the issue is about equality – it’s different. People aren’t differentially treated according to whether or not they like Breaking Bad or Project Runway or the golf channel. (Broadly speaking. There are issues about culture as class marker, but not the way there were when every gentleman knew his Homer and he didn’t mean Homer Simpson.) People are differentially treated according to what sex and race and sexual orientation and class they are, among other things. That fact makes it much harder to forge alliances with people who want to treat others with contempt and people who dislike being treated that way. (That’s an over-simple schematic. People can dislike being treated with contempt while still wanting to treat others with contempt.)

    So that’s why there are deep rifts.