How I became a Feminist: Anna edition
I never really gave much thought to Social Justice issues. I thought of Feminists, when I thought of them at all, as humorless and needlessly angry. I made mental excuses for myself: “Sure, I laughed at that sexist joke, but that’s only because I know he didn’t really mean it. And besides, all the girls in the room laughed at it!” I knew that inequality existed, sure. I noticed it all the time. But what could I do? I was just one person, after all. How would me not laughing at sexist humor do anything to stop sexism in the broader culture?
That’s right. I was Privilege Denying Dude.*
That started to change when I discovered Ani Difranco. Her music described, viscerally, what it meant to be marginalized for being a woman. I empathized with a lot of what she was saying, for reasons I didn’t really understand at the time. (I was still repressing the dissonant thoughts that would later lead to revelations about my own gender identity) I could, in fact, probably write an entire post about the profound effects Ani’s music has had on my life. (In or Out made me realize I was not heterosexual)
The problem was that, while I was starting to gain empathy, I was still quite hypocritically participating in sexism. I compartmentalized the dawning realization that sexism still exists, and continued to opt in to sexist culture, especially as it intersects geek culture. Which it does. A lot.
In the process of coming to terms with being transgender, I stumbled onto the writings of Kinsey Hope. She said a lot of things about gender that resonated with my experience, and this helped me admit a lot of things I had been denying for years. She also said a lot of things about activism, on trans issues and other topics, that was very new to me. At the time, I didn’t think about the activist ideas too much, as I was still very busy sorting out the gender stuff in my own life.
However, as I began coming out to others about being trans, I started to face a lot of misconceptions, ignorance, and outright hostility. Now, for the first time in my life, I was being attacked by the Kyriarchy Machine. And suddenly, activism made a lot more sense. Ani made a lot more sense, and that sense of empathy, so weak before, turned into a sense of identity. I began to debate, to defend my identity and my right to exist.
And with this revelation, the fact that other groups also face oppression, and that this oppression likely hurts and angers them the same way trans oppression was hurting and angering me, changed from an abstract, intellectual fact to a very visceral, emotional one. So, I began to learn about, and speak out against, oppression in general, whether or not it was directly related to trans or women’s rights. And in doing this, I started to appreciate how all oppression is interconnected.
It is sad, really, that it took my gaining personal experience with oppression to realize Social Justice is worth fighting for. That is something I am ashamed to admit, because honestly, the validity of Social Justice ought to be self-evident. That’s the way privilege works, though; when you have privilege, it is invisible. The fact that you don’t realize the privilege is there makes it easy to dismiss the claims of marginalized groups. That doesn’t make my own privilege denial any better. It doesn’t excuse it. But it does make for a very illustrative example of privilege in action.
So, that’s how I became an activist for Social Justice. I personally didn’t identify with the term Feminist for a long time - while I wholeheartedly agree with the stated goals of Feminism, the history of exclusion and hostility towards trans people by Feminists made me wary of the term. However, the anti-trans poison injected into the Feminist movement by second-wave writers is slowly being cleansed from the movement, and the gender abolitionism of the third-wave is being transformed to include a broader understanding of gender that separates prescriptive social norms from innate understanding of self. In other words, Feminism is getting better, and so I (somewhat hesitantly) call myself a Feminist.
- Anna
* Not really ‘dude’, of course, but I hadn’t come to terms with that yet, either
