You don’t have to have read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, not even the Cliff’s Notes version of it to see the fallacy of claiming all women are of the same class.
Or that all women are equally oppressed.
The same error in thinking that identity or any one trait makes all people with that trait part of a common group, is the error that causes the failure of identity based politics.
A woman who grew up in the lower working class or poverty class is often more oppressed by her class than she is by glass ceilings and gender barriers.
A woman of color who grew up in that same lower working class or poverty class is oppressed by both racism and class.
It is completely impossible to measure an individual’s privilege or oppression using just one metric.
A Bill Cosby may have to deal with racism in his life but he has far more privilege and far less oppression than does a black male baby born in the ghetto to an unwed welfare mother, who fell out of the educational process at fifteen. Yes racism impacts both their lives but money buys a fuck of a lot of privilege and has a way of lessening oppression.
Indeed being a person of color can be the most privileged and least oppressed thing one can be as long as that color is the color called money.
Yes there is sexism and sex based oppression but one would have to be a sophist or completely oblivious to class privilege to make the claim that Ann Romney or Phyllis Schlafly, who live the lives of those privileged with both money and clout are of the same class as the women of the lower working classes or poverty classes.
Yet this is exactly what one RadFem Twit tries to do: the fallacy of cis privilege, again
Now I know this is an old posting and perhaps this person has had a mea culpa moment when the fallacy of her logic might have dawned upon her, but this graphic was touted by the extremely privileged Cathy Brennan, who defends the Pay Day Loan Sharking Industry from regulations that would prevent it from ripping off people of the working poor and poverty classes. See: https://docs.google.com/file/d/1WmVchByxY-d1ppkv0rMm5fMk1WhjogGKaTZX2_-dJjcXZtsw1ffXUcJucLz4/edit?pli=1
Wow Gee…
Now one may make arguments that male privilege is a tricky thing and that TS to Female people have it or at least had it; that TG women had it and might by some sort of twisted logic keep it. But that alleged privilege is a tricky thing and is often dependent upon no one knowing a person is trans rather than cis-sex/gender.
I have a hard time seeing the obvious transkid, who is bullied from the cradle and has their education destroyed thus facing a lifetime of economic hardship as having much privilege, male or otherwise.
Discrimination and violent attacks upon obvious TS/TG people once they have come out tends to make the idea of TS/TG women having some sort of blanket male privilege seem questionable.
One of the problems from the 1970s was that two of the best know transsexuals did have privilege and transitioned from positions that were hard or impossible for women to attain in those days. Actually more hard than impossible. Yet both these people still became “trannies” once they came out, even if they were able to continue in their professions, the most important thing about Jan Morris and Renee Richards became their being transsexual.
One could reasonably make the argument that simply being an out gay male damages male privilege, especially if one is seen as a feminine gay male.
Cis-gender/cis-sex privilege is one of those major perks that people refuse to recognize. It’s sort of like white skin privilege, recognizing it in yourself takes you out of contention in the most victimized Olympics.
But I’ve read Marx and a number of other left wing thinkers and I’m not much of a believer in the politics of identity.
There is one element of privilege that no one wants to talk about because talking about it fucks with the proposition that someone, who went to elite private schools and then to one of the Ivy League or other major Universities and is now a partner in a major law firm defending Wall Street Bankers, is somehow oppressed.
I propose there are more reliable metrics to measure privilege with than race, sex, sexuality or even the whole trans/cis metric.
Your net annual income, the schools you went to, the zip code you were raised in, and your parent’s net worth is a far more accurate means of determining where one is on the privilege/oppression scale than any of those other factors.
Here’s how it works: If you went to private schools you don’t get to claim you are oppressed by those who went to underfunded public schools that are falling apart.
If you went to an Ivy League or other top notch University you don’t get to complain about how oppressed you are by the barista, who is working her way through school and will owe student loans for the rest of her life.
If you are a partner in a law firm that represents some of the scummiest elements of the financial industry, businesses that enrich the one percent, you don’t get to complain about how fucking oppressed you are by a transsexual or transgender person lobbying to pass laws that let them hold a job and be treated with the respect and dignity of not being forced to pee in a special rest room.
Now, you may call me a Commie for bring up the real metric of oppression/privilege here in America and in other countries but the fact is the rich are the oppressors and the poor are oppressed.
Money=Privilege
Wealthy women have more power than poor men.
The same is true for the other classifications based on physical traits.
Poor people are the oppressed, the rich are the oppressor.
Women are not a monolithic class. Some women have far more power and privilege than other people in this country/world.
It is unbecoming for those people to whine about how the under classes are oppressing them by demanding equal rights and protections.
Women Born Transsexual 