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Intersectional feminism doesn’t claim that you have perfect lives. It only claims that oppression stacks.
🕑 Added 2024-05-27 08:44:30 +0000 UTCI spent my early childhood eating the scraps my mother earned by fixing appliances in our apartment block. Life was tough for women in the Seventies. They couldn’t simply decide to become engineers or scientists. They had to make do with a tenth of the job market, earning a pittance because women’s work didn’t pay much. In those days, we couldn’t even have credit cards.
Still, my mother worked five times as hard as her colleagues to become an engineer. She then began our second life as upper-middle-class citizens. This bought me the privilege of an education—something that affected my income for the rest of my life. Unlike my mom, I could study whatever I pleased because society had shed some of its oppression of women. I had privileges my mother didn't.
The poverty of my childhood didn’t follow me for the rest of my life the way it does Black and Brown folk in countries like the USA. The system is rigged against them for a lifetime. Still, it was rigged against me in other ways. Rape culture has been ever-present since I was old enough to have a period. The trauma kept me underwater for 20 years.
Cis men get raped, too. Those survivors go through the same level of trauma I did during my first assault. Privilege isn’t a ticket out of suffering. It’s just a ticket out of some forms of systemic suffering. Cis white men experience trauma. They experience poverty. They experience great suffering because privilege is not a synonym for 'happy' and 'rich'. It just gives you fewer hurdles.
Take me as an example. Nobody is keeping me out of the military for being trans. I’ve never feared getting beaten up on the street for being straight. Nobody has refused me entrance to a park for being white. Those three privileges give me better odds than many.
Systemic oppression is intersectional. Some of us get five points of privilege, and some get 20. I have cis and white privilege. I don't have able-bodied male privilege. I might one day experience some of the suffering that Black American men do, but the system isn’t rigged to give me a lifetime of it.
If a police officer shot me for pulling a phone out of my pocket, it would be rational to assume it was a one-time deal. For Black US citizens, though, it’s a perpetual, cloying terror. I have a privilege they don’t have. I just don’t have every kind of privilege.
My mother’s negligence bought me a lifetime of uncontrolled epilepsy, so the moment I started my career, my health gave way. The system didn’t do that to me. She did. There were no laws pushing epilepsy onto white women. If I could get control of my health, the world wouldn't keep pushing me back into the mire so, for me, epilepsy wasn't systemic oppression.
Was it oppressive? Absolutely.
Was it systemic oppression? No.
Did it earn me a new kind of systemic oppression? Yes.
When feminists speak of privilege, a crowd of cis white men usually descend to tell us they, too, have suffered. Intersectional feminism doesn’t claim that you have perfect lives. It only claims that oppression stacks. Some demographics have a pile as high as the Empire State Building, and they endure it every day of their lives.
Why does this matter?
Because when we speak of oppression, we’re looking for societal change. We’re trying to work out which demographics are enduring which forms of oppression. We can’t buy you a perfect life. We can only focus on demographics that have copped the most systemic oppression. Think of it as a triage system: We work on those who have the highest stacks. We’re not saying your life has been free of suffering. We’re saying there are more desperate needs among other demographics.
