As a marginalized person, I think a lot of idpol is fucking toxic as hell, like I think getting into the minutia of identity and identification is unhelpful in discussing the material reality of oppressed groups as classes within the working class. We’re not oppressed because of some intrinsic truth about us, but because of where we’ve been placed within the system and I find most idpol really essentializing and exhausting.

You Know I Saw Someone Commenting on This Meme

as applied to the left and they were like “because normal means white cisgendered hetero blah blah blah” and like… fucking no? Because the American left is a fucking toxic place to be for marginalized people. Normal means being constructive rather than ripping everything apart. Normal means being kind instead of rampantly abusive. Normal means caring more about how you treat people than determining the minutia of exactly which segment of the LGBTQ community is allowed to identify with the word “femme”. This is not the way to build a movement. This is not the way to build community. Denying the huge overlap between the history of lesbians and bi woman and MLM and just like… fucking stop it.

Smug moral superiority and ripping each other apart because you hurt isn’t constructive and is never going to be constructive. Dissecting the minutia of how we speak isn’t changing material conditions and honestly, I’m so tired.

Fuck it.

If You Are A Leftist

Liberals and others are going to attack you, not just from points of view they know you find abhorrent, but from within.

Especially in the US. COINTELPRO was and remains intensely effective. If you are a leftist, do you really think capitalism isn’t clever enough to figure out that attacking head-on isn’t the way to destroy our organizations?

They know what issues we worry about. They know to accuse us of misogyny, homophobia, racism, transphobia, ableism, even liberalism because they know that that’s shit that can actually divide us, that those accusations will actually stick and matter within our communities. Tarring effective organizers with those labels works, because those labels are actually things we abhor and accusations of those kinds are very difficult to refute.

Which is not to say that those issues or accusations should be ignored, just that the guilt on accusation and the “no one is redeemable” purity politics I see happening a lot are not a way to win.