If Your Feminism Isn’t Intersectional, We Don’t Want It.

While feminism has been around in one way or another for decades, it has recently come to the forefront of social consciousness, especially since the rise of the #MeToo movement on social media in 2017. While it is great that feminism has gained traction in mainstream media and is forcing people to have a conversation about its importance, the popular brand of feminism that is white, middle class, cisgendered and able-bodied, aka white feminism, does more harm than good for the entire movement.


According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, feminism is “the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes.” While it seems easy to boil it down to equality between men and women on paper, the reality is that it just isn’t that black and white. Women of colour, gay women, trans women and differently abled women all face drastically different hurdles and challenges in their fight for equality. Intersectionality seeks to include all women into the conversation, not just those who fit into the white female cookie cutter.


The idea that feminism has always been for all women is inaccurate. For example, women were given the right to vote in the USA in 1920, however, that privilege really only extended to white women. Native American women could not vote until 1924, Asian women till 1952 and black women until 1964. In fact, Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton, prominent figures of the suffrage movement, even demanded that women be allowed to vote before the blacks.


The inequality between the different races still exist today. While it’s well known that women in general earn less than men, women of colour in particular have it worse. In 2017, according to the US Bureau of Statistics, white women earned 81.9% when compared to the earnings of a white man. However, black women earned only 67.7% and Hispanic women 62.1% in comparison. Only Asian women earned more than white women.


Another group of women that are excluded from white feminism is transgender women. Some feminists are so threatened by them that they are critical of the notion that “trans women are women”. Called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), they believe that gender is a social class system that oppresses women due to biology rather than femininity. If this was true, violence against trans women would not exist, yet they face the highest risk - 4.3 times the risk of the general population of women, to be exact.


According to the Human Rights Campaign, since 2013 at least 128 transgender people were killed in the US - at least 110 were people of colour, and 9 out of 10 were trans women. For such a small subset of people, these numbers are staggering. Yet, white feminists don’t yell and shout and create hashtags on social media for these victims. Instead, they don their pink pussy hats (which in itself excludes trans and non-binary women as well as women of colour) and march the streets protesting for rights that benefit them while excluding everyone else.


White feminists need to understand that their narrow view of the world and limited experience in other forms of oppression such as racism, ableism, classism, homophobia and transphobia means that they cannot and do not speak for all women. Unless they stand up for all women, they should not use the guise of feminism to further their own agenda at the expense of others. If their feminism isn’t intersectional and doesn’t take into account the compounding nature of oppression, they can take it and shove it up their pink pussy hats.




https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10572435/Intersectional-feminism.-What-the-hell-is-it-And-why-you-should-care.html


https://www.freep.com/story/news/2018/01/10/pink-pussyhats-feminists-hats-womens-march/1013630001/


https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/how-racism-nearly-derailed-womens-right-to-vote.html


https://qz.com/quartzy/1265902/why-im-giving-up-on-intersectional-feminism/


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/opinion/sunday/suffrage-movement-racism-black-women.html


https://www.hrc.org/blog/new-report-details-epidemic-of-violence-against-transgender-people


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics


https://iwpr.org/publications/gender-wage-gap-2017-race-ethnicity/


https://www.businessinsider.com/when-women-got-the-right-to-vote-american-voting-rights-timeline-2018-10


https://www.hrc.org/blog/gender-based-violence-lesbian-and-trans-women-face-the-highest-risk-but-get