ohhitumblr:

ankerwycke:

That’s not what privilege is. Privilege is a phenomenon created from the arrangement of power structures (social, political, economic, and/or cultural) so as to protect certain defined classes of people from a hardship suffered by other, usually disadvantaged classes of people.

That a ciswoman can usually make use of a larger bathroom than a transwoman (since gender-neutral bathrooms tend to be single-stall and fewer in number than their gendered counterparts), or, mutatis mutandis, a cisman a transman, is a form of privilege.

Not all forms of privilege are equivalently evil (in kind or degree), and it comes in many shapes, sizes, and hues. In fact, most forms of privilege consist in accretions of smaller, subtler privileges that are harder to identify and flush. (Hence, perhaps, the Magical Persistence of Sexism in the Workplace, among other things.)

Men are the leading perpetrators of sexism, followed by certain classes of women. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that, in my view.

Can you give an example of a cissexist thing you think is misattributed?

I disagree— I think it’s actually very harmful to blame sexism on women. Especially since that sexism is a result of internalized misogyny, which exists as a result of the oppression of the female sex class by the male sex class. So if we go around shouting “OMG SEXISM” at women, we get to ignore the real root of the problem— men.

And if we work with the definition of privilege as outlined in your reply— protection from hardship suffered by other classes of people— this hardship suffered by the trans community is the result of not conforming to assigned gender roles. Gender roles are a function of the patriarchy used to uphold the oppression of women. Women are a not privileged class in this system.

The misattribution I see the most frequently (at least on tumblr) is the framing of abortion/reproductive health rights as a women’s issue. @vialisa explains this here very concisely, so I will refer you to her post.

As to that misattribution: totally agreed that we can talk about abortion as a “women’s issue” completely validly, because the class of “women” is real and the principal target of the evangelical and Catholic hierarchies driving most of the anti-reproductive rights and pro-state legislation of bedroom behavior rearguard actions in this country.

I also think that there are also many times and places where it would be creditable for movement members to acknowledge the “women’s reproductive health” issue as a member of a deserving class of interrelated issues that underpin much of the privilege structures in modern society, some of which are trans issues.

When one movement member castigates another for not checking cis-privilege, rather than mentions it constructively, s/he does the other a disservice. There are many ways to think about most things, and we all make mistakes or omissions, sometimes calculated to a particular rhetorical end, sometimes not.

But I’d rather not venture into territory that allows one’s major ideological concern (which, for you, is feminism) to implictly monopolize legitimacy over multifaceted issues. And people can reasonably disagree as to the exact proportions in play. The important thing is to recognize the similarities and pursue the differences in accordance with the fora in which they’re to be presented and the goals they’re to accomplish. Is this fair, you think?