Welcome to another episode of the Shit Cis People Say Alphabet! Today:
I is for “identity politics”
Like last week’s post, this one isn’t just a thing that cis people use against trans people – it’s a pretty common thing used by the privileged against members of any marginalized group whenever we try to speak about our experiences. We’re accused of engaging in ‘identity politics’, which is apparently a bad thing? It’s not always called ‘identity politics’ either, although the term has gained a lot of traction since marginalized groups of all stripes are being scapegoated as the reason Trump was elected in the US.
Cis people and those privileged along other axes are making accusations of ‘identity politics’ whenever they accuse someone of playing the ‘trans card’ (or the ‘race card’, the ‘woman card’, or whatever it happens to be on that day), as if pointing out that we are marginalized is the real problem here. Since this has been such a hot topic recently, I’m actually not going to write my own full take-down of this one – I’m just going to give y’all some suggested reading on the topic. Links are not specifically focused on identity politics as a trans issue, but they are relevant nonetheless:
Thank God for Identity Politics | Ijeoma Oluo, The Establishment
Don’t Stop Arguing, Complaining, and Fighting for ‘Identity Politics’ | Tasneem Raja, NPR
‘Don’t play identity politics!’ The primal scream of the straight white male | Hadley Freeman
And, as I am often heard to say, thank gods for Ijeoma Oluo.
Easy way to shame people into not speaking up about injustice, unfortunately -_-.