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Title: Wrath Over Pride Author: Adrienne Onday Date: 2020/06/22 Language: en Topics: Queer, solidarity, Philippines Source: Retrieved on 2020-08-08 from https://friendshipanarchy.wordpress.com/2020/06/22/wrath-over-pride-a-call-out-post-to-radical-cis-het-men-and-their-inadequacy-in-gender-struggles/
I want to talk about gender issues in “progressive/radical/revolutionary
spaces” before Pride Month ends because it’s so important. I need to
call out cis (het) men* in radical/progressive spaces—especially the
anarchist, Marxist, or generally progressive men that I see around or
know.
(For those who might not know: cis is shorthand for “cisgendered,”
meaning your gender matches your assigned sex at birth, while het is
shorthand for “heterosexual” or straight. I put het in parentheses
because the behaviors I am calling out are not only present in
cisgendered heterosexual men but sometimes even cisgendered homosexual
or bisexual men; however it is often in cis het men that the behaviors
are observable. This specification is important because of the way cis
men are raised in a society that privileges their experiences and
realities while treating any other experiences and realities as wrong or
deviant or subhuman.)
I understand that when it comes to gender issues, cis (het) men in
radical spaces don’t want to talk about issues they do not have
expertise on or experience of. There’s value in not wanting to talk over
women and the LGBTQIA+. However, your silence is harming us, too. Your
silence is violence to us.
I have been talking about the need for more men to speak up when women
and the LGBTQIA+ get harassed or discriminated against for years.
Still—there has not been a single cis (het) man who stood vocally with
women and the LGBTQIA+ in my spaces. No “radical” cis (het) man has
called out misogyny or rape culture and connected these realities to how
our radical spaces are still arenas of struggle in the gender aspect. No
“radical” cis (het) man has talked about transphobia especially when it
comes out in the news cycle. No “radical” cis het man has even spoken up
in support of or in allyship with or anything about women and LGBTQIA+
rights and welfare especially during Pride. Not even a single word in
the sea of takes against police brutality—even when it’s so easy to
connect Pride and anti-cop stances because of fucking Stonewall.
“Radical” cis (het) men have not stepped up to the responsibility of
becoming more proactive allies and support in the gender struggle, nor
taken any sort of initiative to learn more, whether by asking those who
experience these realities or by doing some reading and Googling
themselves.
I’m fucking sick of it as a queer woman. “Radical” cis (het) men are so
fucking privileged to be able to keep silent and keep ignoring us and
our realities because they can afford to see themselves as anything but
their gender. They can choose to prioritize the label “activist” or
“organizer” or “socialist,” down to the names of the dead old men they
politically align with, but they will never see themselves as a “man,”
because they can ignore their being cis (het) men—because their being
cis (het) men, to them, has never shaped their political beliefs and
experiences. Their being cis (het) men is not part of their struggle and
therefore cannot be propagandized or worked on to them.
Meanwhile, women’s and the LGBTQIA+’s radicalism and politics will
always, always, always be deeply intertwined with their womanhood or
queerness. The reason we are radical is because the world is fucking
shit to us because we’re women and LGBTQIA+ on top of being poor or of
color or indigenous or disabled. The reason we get involved in politics
is because we ourselves want to get involved with dismantling the
oppression that comes the moment we are born women or identify as
LGBTQIA+.
The reason we as women and the LGBTQIA+ in radical spaces are radical is
because we know and understand that we cannot separate the different
parts of ourselves from each other—thus our politics has to take our
womanhood, queerness, poverty, color, indigineity, disability
together—because these are all different lines intersecting to make our
lives oppressed under a system that says being any of these traits alone
means you’re subhuman, and being any combination of these traits means
you go lower in the subhuman category.
We’re already directly oppressed on a daily basis whether we are in
political spaces or not. We not only get discriminated, talked over, or
silenced but harassed, abused, raped, assaulted, even murdered for being
women and/or LGBTQIA+. But the fact that we even have to deal with this
shit—with “radical” cis (het) men either being straight-up garbage to us
or thinking they’re good enough because they’re not garbage to us while
doing absolutely nothing to help correct shitty situations or dismantle
structures that are oppressive to us—in our very own political spaces is
exhausting.
This is especially true for anarchist and Marxist men, who I have
noticed can have the worst contradictions when it comes to their
professed radicalism.
Anarchist spaces here are male-dominated. It always hurts to see their
proclaimed commitment to “liberation and equality for all” and their
other commitment to fight with Marxists when they can’t even call out
fellow anarchist men who are shit to women and LGBTQIA+. Not one
anarchist man in my knowledge called out this guy named Sid when he
started spouting misogynist and homophobic garbage at me. It was only
another woman who offered me assistance in situations with him—never
mind that I reached out to other anarchist men who him.
In fact, I don’t even know if there is any stance against misogyny,
sexism, homophobia and transphobia in anarchist spaces. I see some
well-connected anarchist groups (like those running Tagay Collective)
working with groups or people that have been called out for transphobia,
such as Deep Green Resistance, which the IWW itself has referenced a
stance against from the Institute of Anarchist Studies.
It makes me wonder what kind of liberation anarchist cis (het) men
really fight for when they can’t even take a stand against the
oppression others experience. Frankly, it’s not a liberation I want. I’d
rather die redefining liberation myself than work with such a narrow
definition that leaves me and other women and LGBTQIA+ as nothing but
footnotes or addendums instead of fundamental aspects of the struggle.
Meanwhile, there are too many instances of harassment, homophobia, and
even rape, that I have either personally experienced or heard from
survivors and friends of survivors from Marxist and other generally
progressive spaces. Survivors either get ostracized or have to adjust
themselves by lying low or distancing from their groups, communities or
organizations because abusers, harassers or rapists are “good and
effective speakers/community organizers/etc.”
This is all to say: “radical” cis (het) men—you are not doing enough, if
you are doing anything at all. To echo what my best friend, a nonbinary
anarchist themself, said: even if you’re not the problem, it does not
mean you are part of the solution.
Not being transphobic or misogynistic or a harasser does not let you off
the hook. That should be the norm in the first place. If you were truly
radical, you would step up and help dismantle this whole thing. The bare
minimum is to vocally express your withdrawal of or refusal to support
others who are misogynistic, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic and to
stand against them until they stop being misogynists, sexists,
homophobes, and or transphobes.
For the anarchist cis (het) men out there: don’t just support someone
because they’re fucking anarchist. Have some standards. If that
anarchist espouses values that are harmful to others, they’re HARMFUL.
Movements that make concessions with the things we are trying to fight
ultimately succumb and become (more like) the system we fight against.
We cannot and should not make concessions when human lives and dignities
are on the line, because this opens up more opportunities for increased
repression and oppression.
This is a reason why there are so few women and LGBTQIA+ anarchists in
your spaces and why we choose to create our own spaces ourselves—because
your values are shit and your spaces and talking points do not address
our needs. When we talk to you about our needs, virtually NOTHING
happens. For all the machismo you perform in fighting with Marxists, you
have ZERO ability to confront fellow anarchist men about shitty
behaviors. I know we must address these things more constructively, but
the caveat to that is you actually need to address these things first.
You can’t keep saying you’ll leave these matters up to the women and the
LGBTQIA+ because:
this. We’re already dealing with the shittiness of the system on our own
and in our everyday lives—don’t make us parent and take care of cis
(het) men especially when men who cause us harm are not entitled to any
of our emotional energy and risk of safety (And yes! You are literally
putting us at risk by letting us handle misogynistic, sexist,
homophobic, or transphobic men on our own!);
behavior and ideas will not be tolerated because you not saying anything
enables disgusting men to keep having disgusting behavior; and
How can you expect people who aren’t there to speak up? And how can you
expect your spaces to be radical and revolutionary when you don’t foster
the necessary radical values that allow genuine inclusivity and
plurality and democracy and liberation?
For all “radical” cis (het) men of any stripe, ideology or walk of life:
just because you call yourself a radical doesn’t mean you are, and just
because you call your space radical doesn’t mean it is. It is part of
your responsibility as radicals to call out misogynistic, sexist,
homophobic, or transphobic behavior when you know of it. How can you
know that injustice exists and not speak up against or about it? You
have to address the injustices of the system while fixing your own
backyard—otherwise you’re nothing but hypocrites who use your radicalism
to feed your ego.
“Radical” cis (het) men—you need to step the fuck up. Your silence is
literally harming us. If you were truly for liberation, you must also be
actively for our liberation as women and LGBTQIA+, because liberation is
not a monolith, assumed to be the same thing for everyone; it is nuanced
and attuned to the different needs and desires of different people.
We are only truly liberated if all of us—the poor, the people of color,
the indigenous, the disabled, the LGBTQIA+, the women—if every single
one of us is liberated from the oppressive realities we experience. You,
“radical” cis (het) men, are only as free as we are. Or, as Fannie Lou
Hamer more succinctly put it: nobody’s free until everbody’s free.
And this is a threat, to “radical” cis (het) men and their spaces: we
can create spaces of true liberation without you, but you cannot create
spaces of true liberation without us. The reason we demand you to step
up and take responsibility as cis (het) men is because we know the
dominant positions you have in radical spaces that we want to be better.
But if things will not change—if you will continue to perpetrate gender
violence or to be silent in the face of our oppression—we can, we will,
and we will continue to make spaces and entire worlds without you, and
you will be left with your patriarchal ideas of what freedom is without
ever knowing what liberation could be.